My Sporting Life

Or what I learnt from not playing any

Photo by Ralph (Ravi) Kayden on Unsplash

A few days ago I was riding my bike through a park, cycling past a playing field full of men doing soccer training. I heard cries of:

“Take it to the line!”

and

“Well licked, lads, well licked!”

I have no idea what these terms mean. The only one I understood was:

“Yeah? Well that’s just a matter of opinion, innit?”

These snippets of speech took me back to my childhood, and in particular to my secondary school….

My secondary school was a grammar school whose motto was With God on My Right. Leaving aside the arrogance which would place God on the school's right, rather than the other way round, it was in any case inaccurate, or at least incomplete. It should have read With God on the Right Wing, or With God as Centre-Forward. The school was, you see, obsessed with sport.

This came as a shock to both myself and my parents, since all of us had been avid sports-avoiders for as long as I could remember. We had been labouring under the misapprehension that grammar schools, unlike secondary moderns, were there to develop your mind. In fact, my one assumed that your mind had already been developed, and conducted its affairs on the understanding, that I was able to articulate only years later, that every battle had been won on some playing field or other.

Thus sport, and all its cousins, such as gymnastics and athletics, were deemed to be the be all and end all. You could be completely useless at everything academic, but if you had a good bowl, or could take a penalty, you were destined for great things as far as the school was concerned. Me? I was useless academically, which the school put down to laziness (unfairly, actually), and useless at sport, which was put down to sheer bloody-mindedness (again, not true: I’m still useless).

I loved sport. Not the activity itself, which I hated with a loathing I couldn't begin to describe without sounding unbalanced, but because of all the learning opportunities it gave me.

For example, every so often we would have to go on a cross-country run. This was about 5 miles long, and was circular. The teachers, not being complete idiots, always declined to accompany us. Instead, they would send us off and then wait for us to return, stop-watches at the ready.

One of the things they could never understand was how I always managed to be one of the first five or six pupils to return, bearing in mind my complete inaptitude for, and disinclination towards, anything which involved more than the minimal amount of physical activity.

My prowess at cross-country running would have been readily explained by a quick reconnoitre of the route, followed by the consultation of a bus map. Half-way round the course stood, oasis-like, a transport café. There you could have a steaming mug of tea and beans on toast, all for under two shillings (10p or approximately 15c) -- which left just enough pocket money for the bus fare to one stop short of the school.

Sprinting the last hundred yards or so was, I admit,  rather more effort than I would have preferred to exert, especially on a full stomach, but the gains in terms of the admiration of the teachers and the acrimony of my fellow pupils were well worth it.

There were other wheezes too, and looking back on this period with an erstwhile teacher’s eye, I’m astounded at how little attention was given to child care and protection.

For example, I wasn’t well enough to do PE one day, so my mother wrote a note for me to give to the teacher. She forgot to date it, and for some reason the teacher gave it back to me once he’d read it. Needless to say, I wheeled this note out every week for the rest of the year.

Nobody bothered to check why I always seemed to be unwell on a Wednesday.

The teacher still made me go out onto the field and watch, despite my pleading with him to let me read instead. Fortunately, I discovered a hole in the hedge surrounding the school playing field. When the ball went off in a particular direction I was able to sneak through the fence and escape. The teacher had let me take my bag out there “in case someone stole it”.

I didn’t go home straight away, because that would have aroused my parents’ suspicions. Instead, I took myself to a cafe opposite the school, to enjoy a cheese sandwich and a cup of tea.

As far as I know, the PE teacher never worked out that I’d gone AWOL, and nobody “outside” phoned the school to ask why there was one of their pupils having a late lunch or an early tea in a cafe during school hours.

I like to think that my misdemeanours couldn’t go undetected in this day and age, what with electronic registers and computerised records. However, nothing is foolproof. I recall one head of an education technology department in a government agency telling me that at his son’s school the technicians changed the filtering password every day to prevent kids looking at stuff they shouldn’t. His son usually cracked the password by the start of the morning break.

And I also recall a conversation between two teenage girls who were behind me in a queue at the post office:

“OK, I’ll message you on Facebook this evening with the details.”

“But I thought your dad had passworded it.”

“Oh, I cracked that six months ago, but he doesn’t know!”

There is hope yet for today’s youth!