They never had a chance to play cricket

Cricket is one of this sports mad country's games of national importance I suppose. Cricket is played at all levels right up to and including international. 

In the past few days two cricketers who were well known to anyone who listens to the cricket news have died - Rod Marsh and Shane Warne. There has also been a media fuss about their deaths. In this morning's paper there are no less than twenty-four pages devoted to Shane Warne and his life. There has been the offer of a state funeral for him. I didn't read the pages. I am not a cricket tragic - "tragic" being Downunder slang for "obsessive".

Marsh was older than I am - although not by that much. It was still perhaps too soon given that I know many people who are much older. Warne was younger, much younger. I feel for his three children. It is going to be really tough for them.  Your name? Oh you're Shane Warne's kid?  I know what that is like. As a kitten I was my grandfather's granddaughter and my father's daughter. I still get it occasionally. Will Warne's children feel compelled to be cricket tragics?

But all that pales into insignificance when I think of something else. I watched a clip of a father weeping over the body of his child - killed in a war that he had no say in at all. His father had no say either. His mother? We didn't find out where she was but if there were other children she had probably tried to take them to safety. Possibly she is the mother whose back view we see in one of those many photographs - crossing the road to the railway station with a young child on her right and a gun on her left shoulder.

I often think of the children in conflict zones. For too many years my work has involved working with people who are working with what we call "unaccompanied" children - children who have no adult taking responsibility for them. Some of these children who are often so traumatised they have simply stopped speaking. They won't make eye contact. They won't respond to questions. If you try to make physical contact they will break away. They will sit for hours fiddling with a pebble or a few grains of sand or the edge of a piece of clothing. They no longer know how to play.

It can take years and more patience than we want to acknowledge to get these children back to some semblance of what we consider to be "normal".  They don't play cricket.

It is easier to focus on the death of a cricketer most of us have never met than the horrors unfolding in other parts of the world. As Eliot puts it, "Humankind cannot bear very much reality."