The talk so far had been about the unrest in the Kikuyu community and the growing influence of the Mau Mau, especially among the young men of the tribe. Leon had spent much of the afternoon lost in thought, wondering whether his own Kikuyu workers would fall under their sway. Ronald Stannard had managed to make him think of something else.

Leon watched as Atkinson pawed the turf a couple of times, then started moving, gathering pace until he was sprinting as he approached the wicket.

‘I’d rather face a charging bull elephant,’ Leon muttered as Atkinson hurled the hard, red ball at Stannard, twenty-two yards away. The ball was travelling at almost ninety miles an hour as it hit the ground. It reared up off the sun-baked, heavily rolled pitch and sped like a missile towards the centre of Stannard’s face.

Harriet gasped and she raised her hand to her face in horror at the sheer hostility of Atkinson’s attack.

Stannard hit the ball when it was barely two feet from crashing into the bridge of his nose. A sharp crack echoed like a gunshot around the ground as he sent it hurtling across the emerald-green outfield until it collided with the boundary fence in front of the pavilion: four runs.

The spectators burst into wild applause. Those who were sitting jumped to their feet to register their admiration as the Kikuyu boy changing the metal numbers on the scoreboard moved Stannard’s score from forty-eight to fifty-two.

The captain of the Governor’s XI, Arthur Henderson, was the non-striking batsman. Amid the applause, he walked down the wicket to have a word with his team’s hero.

‘Damn well played, my boy,’ Henderson said.

‘Thank you, sir,’ Stannard replied respectfully, for his skipper was also the most senior member of staff on the team.

‘Now, we don’t want to make the local chaps look foolish. Not good for their morale, or their authority with the natives. I’d be grateful if you didn’t linger too long at the crease.’

Stannard understood what his captain was saying. He was being ordered to get out. He played three more venomous shots that were his own, unspoken way of telling Atkinson what he thought of him. Then he lobbed an easy catch back to the next bowler, the local vicar, who was so amazed that one of his slow, innocuous deliveries might have deceived the mighty batsman that he almost dropped it.

Henderson gave a nod of approval.

As Ronald Stannard left the field, raising his bat to acknowledge the applause, he thought of how proud his widowed mother would be when she read his letter describing the match. Here he was, a grammar-school boy, the son of a factory foreman and a sorter on the production line, being cheered from the pitch by the smartest men and women in Kenyan society. Even the native servants were cheering his performance, along with their masters and mistresses.