When I
was ten it appeared to me that there was a great deal of kudos to be gained from
having hypermobile joints. The girls
who crab-walked, turned cartwheels and did handstands at the drop of a hat were
reliably liked and admired by others and were often described as Double Jointed
in tones that indicated this was a state close to spiritual enlightenment. Of course I had little idea as to what such
enlightenment actually meant in everyday terms but I would have greatly enjoyed
just a smidgin of the admiration and acclaim that seemed to accompany body
flexibility. It was definitely a Girl
Thing because the boys gave most of their attention to football and fighting at
playtime and at the time it appeared that most other ten year old females were
able to perform advanced gymnastics at the drop of a hat. I now realise that this probably wasn’t accurate
at all and that even the ultra-flexible ones were simply attention seeking in
order to keep those of us who clearly lacked this facility in our place. Back then middle childhood was undoubtedly a minefield
and even at the time I couldn’t help wondering why the ability to read and
spell and put commas in the correct place couldn’t become more worthy but
during my time wending a path through the quagmire of primary school this was
never to be the case.
I was
always a reliably sedentary child and viewed most sporting activities with some
horror and this attitude did not change much as I grew into adulthood. There was no doubt whatsoever that my only
interest in the acquisition of enough athletic skill to manage a cartwheel was
for the obvious glory that accompanied it. However, the hankering after body flexibility
did not go away with the passage of time and was made more acute when my father
noticed my shortcomings and commented that Molly from number 31 was a Great
Little Gymnast and that I would need to practice hard to catch up with
her. I retorted much too quickly that I
had no wish whatsoever to catch up with her but he simply laughed and said he
didn’t believe me. If Molly had not
been my very best friend I might have begun to dislike her at that moment but fortunately
that did not happen. However, over the
next few weeks I was to pay a great deal more attention to the manner in which
she effortlessly executed her daily handstands against the end wall of Aunt
Elsie’s sweet shop in Tooley Street.
There was no doubt at all as to her prowess and little possibility of me
catching up.
It was
to be she who made me aware of the athletic horrors that lay ahead in the form
of the moderately well equipped gymnasium at Colyer Road Girls’ Secondary
Modern School which she was to enter a year before me. She was most impressed
with all that the school had to offer and at the end of her first week we sat
together on top of the Springhead Road railway bridge wall whilst she fully
acquainted me with a comprehensive list of its merits. The bridge was a favourite spot for
significant dialogue and we felt important once sat astride it with the added
excitement of the occasional passing beneath us of engines en route to
Dartford, Woolwich Arsenal and London Bridge.
Springhead Road was formerly called Leather Bottle Lane which somehow or
other we knew but we had no idea that York Road had formed part of Barrack
Field on the east side of the lane and were unaware of the larger history of
our surroundings. Troops had been
quartered in this area during the Napoleonic Wars precisely where St Joseph’s
Roman Catholic Primary School stood, and still stands, alongside the railway
and perhaps this is why the place felt somehow meaningful when there were
matters of importance to be debated. For
us, at the time, everything concerning the rites of passage into the Secondary
Modern School was noteworthy.
Molly
announced that the place was exactly like a boarding school except you didn’t
have to sleep there! I should point
out at this juncture that we had read a great many Enid Blyton school stories
but apart from that were woefully uninformed regarding boarding schools. I
volunteered that not sleeping there sadly made midnight feasts a virtual
impossibility but she thought they were not entirely necessary and in fact it
was much more important to have prefects and games captains and absolutely
essential to have a head girl. None of
these positions she pointed out were in evidence at St Botolph’s. She
became impatient when I started talking about the lack of organised games at
our primary school and that I thought that was one of the best things about it.
Although I admired those rosy faced
active girls who rushed around throwing and catching balls the thought of
joining in the so-called Fun horrified me.
Colyer Road Secondary Modern Molly
further explained, after a dramatic pause, did not actually have Lacrosse or
Tennis like Malory Towers but it did have Netball and Rounders which she now
concluded was far more sensible. And
what’s more all pupils were in Houses and wore associated coloured bands when
put into teams. She was in Keller House
and had a blue band – and had I heard of Helen Keller? I was silent and picked at the dropped
stitches in the red and blue jersey my mother had knitted and that I was
attempting to grow out of as fast as possible.
It was
at this stage that she began to tell me about the exciting gymnasium that was
called The Gym for short exactly the same as in First Term at Malory
Towers. There were extraordinary bits of
equipment there with names like The Horse and The Buck and all the students
were instructed to line up and hurtle towards them, the object being to fling
themselves onto or over them. Molly’s
eyes went misty in exactly the same way as they did when she discussed the
latest Doris Day musical – she said it was fantastic fun. It sounded alarming to me. I wanted to ask what happened if you
couldn’t quite manage the exercise but restrained myself. Instead I wondered if the classes were
compulsory or whether they could be treated more like a hobby. She gave me to what I later learned was a
withering glance.
Within
a short time of entering the school myself the following year I was to discover
remarkably rapidly that the part of the syllabus known by the acronym PE and
fitting into the timetable twice weekly was unsurprisingly as compulsory as
mathematics. The activities that shaped
each forty minute class were exactly as had been described and there was much
more besides including a range of balls and hoops with which to play a variety
of fast moving and unpleasant indoor games.
The PE
teacher was a slightly overweight young woman with red curly hair called Miss
Finch. She wore what I, and many of the
adults around me it later transpired, considered to be a rather indecent outfit
that appeared to have been originally designed for children under the age of three. As she accompanied us on our daily walk to
the senior school cafeteria each lunchtime we were able to witness how much
attention this mode of dress attracted from workmen cleaning windows, on
building sites or simply riding bikes.
One day we were shocked but delighted when a dustbin man advised her in
very loud tones that she was a dirty cow and to put some clothes on. Miss Finch stood a little straighter and
simply tossed her curls. Margaret
Snelling who was walking beside me said it just wasn’t practical for her to
keep changing in and out of the gym dress and that ought to be obvious. This slight dilemma of dress certainly made
the walks to and from school dinners more eventful than they might have been.
During
my two years at the school I was never able to overcome my abhorrence of PE, Netball
and Rounders and consequently Miss Finch and I were destined never to Get
On. In fact I very soon formed the
opinion that she went out of her way to embarrass and humiliate me. I had no aptitude whatsoever for anything
she tried to teach us and was not willing to make even the slightest effort so
I can hardly blame her. And although I
would not have admitted it at the time all the gym activities so dear to her
heart seemed inherently perilous to me and the entire sphere of physical
activity filled me with dread. Alongside
Mathematics there was no subject I feared and loathed more.
Considering this it was
surprising that many years later when dancing alongside others at Murray’s
Cabaret Club I had been able to learn the often intricate steps with moderate
ease. Even more astonishing and further
on in time as the mother of three young children I suddenly found to my
considerable surprise that I was able to crab walk. This greatly impressed my eight year old
daughter but oh what I would have given to have been able to perform this trick
when I had been around the same age! I’d
like to say that I was then able to effortlessly add handstands and cartwheels
to my adult repertoire but to be honest I wasn’t courageous enough to give them
a go!