Chapter Twenty Two - Play Up And Don't Play The Game.

I shared at least two values with the headmaster; neither of us took milk in our tea and we both loathed sport. How I came to like tea without milk seemed odd at the time. I admired the headmaster and his habit of taking tea without milk. One teatime whilst I was mismanaging a table as 'head' one boy decided to play up by putting vinegar in pupils tea, which we discovered soured the milk but left the tea intact. I decided the tea tasted better without milk and so learnt from my prankster. Alas no prankster could adapt sport to improve it. The headmaster loathed competitive sport partly because he was a Quaker and partly because he was short, portly, and uninterested in being fit. He was the first of many Quakers that I was to meet and be drawn towards one way or another. They seemed to more reflective than non-Quakers did. Often their company gave me a sense of respite and ease when I didn't realise how much I had gone without those things. But in the school there was no respite from sport.

The headmaster did not have to play sport when he disliked it. He was there to ensure that every boy in the school played sport whether they liked it or not, me included, as part of partaking of the 'spirit of the school'. As if playing sport 'civilised' us. However much sport we played coaching was a rarity. The worse at sport we were the more we found the lack of team spirit whilst the few who were naturally good at sport carried off all the praise.

In this school there were one good point and one bad point about school sport. The good point was that we were a school apart, we almost never competed with other schools. This did not make the praise for the few who were good easier on the rest of us, but it made the lack of coaching for the rest less toxic than it would otherwise have been. The bad news was that for our living on the site of where we were schooled it was hard for any of us to lose their sports kit. In Primary School the boys who 'accidentally' lost their kit most often were always the worst. They were always the most complained about by those who were good at sport and the sporty staff, but a lack of praise and help with have it's consequences. In this school there was no escape from sport and cross country running. We had to keep on trying however bad anyone was at it even when they injured themselves or other people.

Sport present me with an almost philosophical problem. It was competitive and I was anti-competitive. I did not even think that my present half-comfortable intermediate self was a competitive improvement on the previous selves I had been as a junior on the top floor and the different people I was, sequentially going backward, before that. Though I should have thought myself better for being a little thicker skinned. 'Growing up' and 'being competitive' seemed like part of the same process to me, I disliked both. They were both about becoming macho in a way that seemed utterly alien to how I felt. What Colin and Peter had got up to had long been stopped, not that it stopped them trying it on with others. They tried to entice the headmaster's fourteen year old daughter into being with just them alone, no supervision. They went down with the headmaster like a lead balloon. They were nearly expelled from the school for that. I was easily the least athletic and most clumsy boy in the school for my age. The very idea of being in competition with other boys mentally exhausted me. 

The staff seemingly had no logical explanation for how I tired and lost heart so easily. As far as they knew the sexual assault was long in the past, the name calling was all done. There saw no reason why I should perform so poorly in sport. If they had discussed how I had performed in primary school they might have discovered I was bad at sport there too. But as far as I knew they had not discussed me that way, not that I knew what the staff said about me in my case conference, in the staff room.

Whatever the sport I was pushed into playing, competitive cross country running, football, cricket, swimming, or rugby, I was a constant challenge to the teachers who ran it. They wanted everyone to put their best into it, improve with practice, and feel good about what they had done. Mostly the coaching was just like primary school, nonexistent, but the idea of physical dexterity giving us confidence was a strong one, it just did not work with me. Every week a teacher, or a captain chosen that week from the pupils by a teacher, was reduced to accepting me last onto their team. Even being among the last to be chosen seemed to be a ritual humiliation for me. Where to put me where I would cause least harm when football and cricket were played was a perpetual problem. I nearly always ended up in an unimportant defence position, one where when I fumbled then other boys could fill in and I would be seen to have tried. In one football match I was put in goal with a weak defence in front of me and the team lost 10 - 1.  I did walk off the pitch before the end of the game, but I was sorely tempted to. That match felt humiliating and pointless.

There were a few of us who almost competed with each other to be the last to be chosen for places on teams. The greater strength of the other boys and the counting/mathematics of accumulating goals always divided us against ourselves, even as we were forced to play when by our nature we seemingly could not win without a lot of help. If you needed help you were obviously useless. Would that there had been some sort of handicapped method of choosing team members where the aim was to have fun and be less competitive and gain a shared self esteem for playing rather than winning. But that would have been actually us all being coached, and just like primary school, team sports were a 'natural' means of selecting the most willing and best of all who were made to play. 

My single worst moment in sport was in the midst of the one rugby match played in the school. At aged seven I had chipped a bottom left corner off my left front tooth whilst tripping and falling in the back yard at my parents house. Not long before the rugby match at age thirteen a dentist had covered the chipped tooth with a plastic crown, a covering which I did not know had weakened the root of the tooth in the fitting of it. In the one rugby game we played I got trapped in a scrum which cleared, apart from me, as the ball which had been kicked with some force landed in the midst of the departing scrum. I was the last to be able to move and the ball came down heavily on my face which I could not even think to protect with my hands, because being at the bottom of the scrum had left unable to think for feeling trapped. The ball hit me over my mouth and the crown broke in half, square across the middle of the tooth. It was nearly a year before the dentist accepted that a false tooth on a plate that stayed on the roof of my mouth was the only practical solution.

The second worst time in sport was the weekly cross country run. I disliked running for the sake of it and always put in a poor time on the five mile route around the edge of the fields that the school forced us to do. One of the more sporty members of staff convinced the headmaster that the school should enter a local inter-schools cross country competition. They had not prepared for how collectively loathed cross country running was, even by those who got good times for their weekly runs. Nor had the staff accounted for how the boys who were best at running were also the most coherent at resisting the idea of representing the school, against other schools. Having announced the school entry officially the staff had to decide which two boys should run for the school. Kevin and I were chosen because every other boy refused and wanted any boy other than them to run. We no more knew how to refuse the staff than how to run competitively. Our inability to actively refuse to run was going to be to the detriment of the school. 

The reasoning for making Kevin and I run was that if we ran for the school then we would automatically develop a pride in the school and that would make us run better. The logic failed miserably. We tried valiantly to keep up with the other competitors, but two thirds of the way through this eight mile race the rest of the field were out of sight, one of us was last and the other second to last.  Uncoached, we had run our best and been run ragged. We gave up running and walked instead. We achieved a record worst time between us for any school in the history of that race. Our taking so long to pass the finishing line annoyed the staff member who had driven us in the school minibus to the event. When we returned to the school it as no good us saying 'Look we did not want to go in the first place'. we could no more resist being chosen to represent the school that we could run the way the school wanted.

There was a swimming pool by the school buildings, four metres wide ten metres long. It would have been a fine pool in which to learn to swim, to breathe slowly, with each stroke of my arms and push out of my legs. We were allowed in the pool in summer, when the staff could supervise us. But it was like it had been with Mother and gardening, no staff member could supervise the group and teach any one of is us anything at same time. Apart from which teaching any of us anything sufficient for it to stick might be seen as too rewarding an individual attention by other boys. The attention had to be collective when they were supervising us, there was never a medium point between individual and collective attention where we when learnt together we were also taught individually. But sport was like education, meant to divide and rule the pupils. No coaching/learning allowed.115/52

Not all sports were team based and competitive. Generally, when the school did team sports it tried to reduce the potential for narcissism in the boys, by being indifferent to it. But rarely did the teachers actively reverse the natural hierarchy of those who were best in sport, uncoached, always being team leaders and the first to be chosen. One teacher chose to be the exception. One winter term a teacher devised a circuit training regime in which we were all tested to the max and timed on different exercises, with old bests and new bests set by each of us. For his plan to be applied there had to be real coaching because a key part of the course was about closely measuring how fit we actually were. But even with coaching fit for a king the effort of having an old self who did so well, and a new self who strove and did better exhausted me.124/

The activities included use of a medicine ball, a hoop for skipping, normal skipping, sit ups, press ups, the horse to vault over. The course took more than a half term to complete. I crashed through quite a few of the exercises, not even achieving an old 'best'. Clearly my body and mind could not agree with each other as I approached the equipment and each went off in different directions. My efforts  could have been seen as comic, and by some boys they probably were, along with me being no threat to them. There was a grace to losing with humour in which I surely scored quite highly. I was happy to take part because the boys who did worst got the best out of it; they got the personal attention whilst the self preening self taught experts were stopped from preening themselves as readily as they usually did.

The sit-ups were memorable to me. The teacher held my feet, looked at me, and counted me towards my seventy five sit ups willing me to continue even though he could see I was in agony with the effort he asked of me. I got bad stitch two thirds of the way through. After much strain I reached seventy four sit ups and gave up. With a slow time the staff member put it down for my seventy five, for my sake more than the record of the school.138/

When the gym was cleared of equipment one of it's uses was as the room where the school had it's celebratory meals, twice a year. One for the opening of the school, the other meal at Christmas. At these meals one boy was chosen to speak to the whole assembly, the teachers, other staff other adults and the boys.  Some time after the coaching I was the one chosen to speak for all the boys, co-incidentally by the same teacher who coached me beyond near failure. I knew nothing about the process of writing a speech, so not only did he coach me in sport, he practically gave me a speech to speak and made me look up the references he had chosen in encyclopedias that the school which were rarely referred to. It was one side of yellow A4 of close typing long with a short introduction, a closing paragraph, and a long main text. It was mostly about human achievement, listing every major public mark of progress since World War Two.

After the introduction the list of achievements started with the climbing of Everest, followed by the running of the first sub-four minute mile and the navigation of never before crossed seas in primitive craft. Then there were references to the successful campaigns for greater racial equality, and efforts of the Russians and the Americans in the space race, carefully avoiding mentioning how both saw their efforts as part of the cold war. It was a speech that truly looked out beyond the parochial boundaries of the school, the county, and the small country that we were part of, particularly when to wind the speech up I began paraphrase one of the key inspirational quotation of the period, Martin Luther King's 'I have a dream' speech.  

I must have heard the speech many a time on radio and television, and have known how his voice began to tremor as he warmed to his theme of challenging inequality in high places, my voice remained slow, steady and slightly flat as I read (slightly paraphrased)

'I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, and every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight; "and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed and all flesh shall see it together. With this faith, we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope. With this faith, we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. With this faith, we will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to go to jail together, to stand up for freedom together, knowing that we will be free one day.' .

Then came the applause, and my moment of glory was over. I kept the text of speech for years afterwards. It was a rare momento of what had seemed like genuine acceptance when it was read out. 

I will not comment on the fact that I was a thirteen year old boy who could not naturally have understood the effort required in even half of what he spoke about. I was speaking to a small audience of men, women, and boys, who were naturally so parochially minded that we might as well have been talking about the lives of heroic aliens on other planets for all we could grasp of such achievements. These deeds were not within our means, but me being allowed to talk this way was as I would ever get to being allowed to sound like the headmaster. As the boy who tried, frequently failed, and always dreamed of being the success that he was never going to get to be, then maybe it was the right speech for me to make.  

Find Chapter 23 here

Find the introduction and chapter guide here.