64 The Sporting Life

I loved PE. Most of it anyway. Just walking to the changing rooms with my duffle bag over my shoulder gave me a buzz, though we could never be certain what lay in store. Sometimes it’d be football, other times…

Rugby: I wasn’t keen on rugby. Oh I tried, and I even played for the school team, but my heart was never in it. In a sport that requires strength, speed and aggression it was decided that I, a gentle natured one-paced beanpole, would make a good prop. Getting crushed in the scrum every two minutes couldn’t be avoided. Elsewhere it was safety first. I’d attempt a half hearted tackle here and there but sticking my face anywhere near the knees and heels of someone running at full pelt was out of the question.

Cross country on the Great Lines: The first time exhilaration of running out onto Marlborough Road died a swift death on the track alongside the hospital wall. Slogging through churned mud on that rising incline soon had us blowing hard. Small mercy then, to reach firm ground on the beaten tracks across the landscape, where we took a sharp left downhill, followed by a sharp right for the trek across the lines. I wasn’t very good at cross country. Nor was I very bad. I’d be one of many kids strung out in the middle, somewhere between the athletes at the front and the fatties at the back.

I don’t know what purpose the big concrete lump near the memorial served in times past, but that was our marker. Once we’d circled it, we took the shortest route to the gate at the back of the school. Horses roamed freely on that part of The Lines. Docile, most of them, but we kept a close eye on them anyway, being ready to spurt past any shifty looking bastard that wasn’t grazing.

Gym: our early days in the gym began with measured introductions to various activities. Whole lessons were spent playing games with a medicine ball, which often meant chucking it as hard as possible at your mate’s gut. Other lessons were spent leaping over a vaulting horse, and watching the fatties doing their best to demolish it.

‘Please Sir, I’ve forgotten my kit,’ was no excuse. The unlucky pleader was made to do PE in a pair of these…

The keenest were always first changed and into the gym. Some of us would grab a basketball and start kicking it around – what a satisfying thwack those balls made when they hit the far wall. The rest would climb straight up the wall bars and perch like crows in the window recesses.

Enter Twydall’s Stanley Slaughter who had the bright idea, one day, to lift the locking bolt on one set of bars and swing them away from the wall. Not a problem in itself – the bars were hinged at the other end and designed to swing out and be re-locked in their alternative position at ninety degrees to the wall – but not when half a dozen frantic boys, ten feet off the ground, were scrambling to snatch the bars as they moved away.

‘Slaughter!’

For his folly Stan had the distinction of being the first A1/A2 boy to get his backside flattened by the notorious Stoolball bat.