Upbury Manor: Cross Country
Now we were bigger and stronger we ran further round the Lines; the same course as in the first year with a bit added on. It made little difference to me, plodding along in the middle. It just meant the speed merchants were further ahead and the fatties trailed further behind.
Rugby
Playing for the school rugby team was no consolation for missing out on the football team. Though I enjoyed the camaraderie of away trips to Sheerness and Gravesend, I didn’t really like Rugby. A lack of speed, strength, ability and aggression didn’t help, but Rugby is a fifteen a side game and mine was a body to make up the numbers. I didn’t really understand the game either. When putting the ball in at line outs and scrums, if the ball wasn’t played dead centre it had to be retaken. So where was the advantage to the team in possession? And why couldn’t we put our smallest player in the line out and lift him up to catch the ball? Try as I might I couldn’t do a drop kick. I just couldn’t get the timing right. If nobody was watching I’d sometimes try a sly one in the warm up but I rarely got it right. More often than not, I kicked fresh air.
Rugby just wasn’t my game…
‘Well done, Lynch! Run! Run!’ Mister Charlesworth shouted when I intercepted a pass on a mud bath of a pitch at St. Georges. With a clear run to their posts from twenty five yards out, I set off at full gallop for my first try for the school team. Glory beckoned, but it wasn’t to be. In three strides I’d been flattened in the mire and dispossessed.
Shit!
It takes a poet to see golden brown, copper and bronze in the fallen leaves of autumn.
We Twydall boys were not poets. On a bright and breezy morning, Paul Parker, Clive Ward, John Greenland, Stanley Slaughter and I were strolling along Vicarage Road on our way to school when a leaf rustled by. Somebody stamped on it. When the next rustling leaf got the same treatment we all joined in, stamping on crispy, rustling leaves as schoolboys do. The jolly jape ended when Paul stamped on something golden brown yet far from crisp. Dog shit, no less. Soft and squishy, it spattered everyone’s trousers.
Urgh!
No comments:
Post a Comment