The Go-Between by L.P. Hartley

 Cricket is more than a game, they say, or used to say; it is sn attitude of mind, a point of view.  I don't know about that.  You can think of it as a set of ritual movements, or as a ballet, a ballet in a green field, a ballet of summer, which you can enjoy without knowing what it's about or what it means.  At least that is how I should recommend other people to enjoy it -- ballets are not for me.  I like facts.  In those days I knew the facts about cricket and I can still repeat some of them parrot-wise.  It is like knowing the figures of a sum without being able to add them up.  At least, if I added them up, they wouldn't have made a game of cricket as I used to know it.

--L.P. Hartley, The Go-Between (copyright 1953, New York Review Books)

The Go-Between is a beautifully written book looking back to the summer of 1900 --nearing the end of the Victorian age and the beginning of the Edwardian -- as told by the twelve-year-old Leo Rosten as the much older Leo looks back at himself as a young boy.  spending the time with his school chum Marcus at Marcus's family's estate.  It evokes the peaceful summer of a boy of twelve having fun, at least until Marcus's older sister Marian convinces Leo to take messages to and from Ted, a local farmer.  Leo becomes gradually unhappy about being the messenger and gets suspicious about what's going on, especially once Marian is about to get engaged to Lord Trimingham and Ted attempts to tell Leo about "spooning." The one time the upper and lower classes get together in Brandham Hall, where Leo is staying, is an annual cricket match, where Leo catches a ball hit by Ted to win the game, after which everyone gathers around to sing.

Leo plays an unwitting role in Marian's mother discovering Ted and Marian together in the middle of a celebration of Leo's thirteenth birthday, a disaster for all concerned, as Leo has a nervous breakdown and has little memory of subsequent events, including Ted's suicide.  There is a moving epilogue as many years later Leo seeks out Marian, still living in the same town, who says there "was nothing mean or sordid in what we did, it was the fault of this hideous century we live in."

The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.

--Prologue to The Go-Between