WRITING
CHOOSING SIDES
It is the summer of 1956.
Sidlesham County Primary School is a Victorian brick building with steep gables and tall windows and is surrounded by iron railings and high privet hedges. There is a less forbidding single storey extension made of concrete and glass in metal frames — Sidlesham’s one weak gesture to modernism. Its unimaginative yet practical plan is of a long corridor with half a dozen classrooms on one side. Seen from the air it will be a pale finger pointing towards an unconsidered future. The sun beats through the blindless windows.
Beyond the melting tar of the playground, beyond the iron railings, and beyond the bend in the road a small tractor is cutting a crop of hay which is more rust-coloured sorrel than grass. The driver is wearing blue overalls and a greasy cloth cap turned back to front. This cannot be for streamlining but perhaps its peak keeps the sun from his bare neck. Even now, fifty years on, I can still hear the rattle of the reciprocating mower blades and taste the unique perfume of crushed grass and TVO. (Tractors’ Vapourising Oil — that essence which fuelled early tractors and which they puffed out as blue sweet-smelling smoke). Beyond the haymaking there is the Suez Crisis and, at eight years old, there is perhaps nothing between the two. Suez and its canal (in which roach and carp must swim for what is a canal without these?) may be just the other side of the thorn hedge with its wild roses, white and pink. It may be a bit further and hidden by the tall elms whose trunks edge the black ditch. Wherever it is it doesn’t concern me. Nor do I care to know of Gamal Abdel Nasser, nor why my mother refers to him as 'nasty Nasser'. What is of far greater concern to me is the knowledge that at playtime there will be football, a game at Sidlesham County Primary which does not respect the normal playing season.
The hand-bell will ring, desks will open, desks will close, Miss Wiltshire will mouth 'Quietly. Quiet!' as she always does, and as always no one will hear. The lids of the oak desks will drown even the sound of the tractor and mower, even when he’s close to the edge. The girls will go to make daisy chains or will tuck their thin cotton dresses into their knickers and do hand-stands against the sunny wall. Sweets and badges and hair slides will clatter to the hot asphalt. The boys will run to the playing field which is full of daisies and plantains and will throw vests and shirts to the ground where the goal posts should be. I am one of these. Unwilling but without the courage not to be one.
There would be two captains. Usually they were Michael Homer and Edward Sherrington. There was rarely a dispute over this, their ball control and goal scoring abilities being recognised by us all. Sometimes an upstart would attempt a sort of coup but it was rarely successful and, if so, it would be short-lived. (I have often mused that Edward Sherrington would go on to become Teddy Sheringham but as he would be playing for West Ham and the national side when in his mid fifties it seems unlikely). If not a proto Teddy Sheringham, Edward was Stanley Matthews and Sidlesham County Primary was Stoke City. His goal scoring was legendary. He would steal the ball from any player, even Terry Court who he had picked for his own team and he would belt the thing at the goal with such power and authority that no one, not even Michael Homer, would dare to suggest that it had missed the vests and shirts — as often it had, and by some yards. After the goal or not goal he would trudge back to the half-way line, an unsmiling hero of the war comics some of us read, apparently exhausted, until fitness resumed with his regaining the ball. This was his style.
The two captains would each play at centre forward, this, apart from goalie, being the only recognised position on the field. The rest of us were there to kick the ball as best we could towards the target goal. Homer and Sherrington would pick sides. If you were Terence Court you didn’t wait long. Terry would be a valuable member of any side — small but smart. At the end of the awful selection there would be only David Lever and me left. Sherrington would choose Lever, leaving me for Homer but, the final humiliation, he would say to Sherrington 'You can have him.'
The game was played in the universal schoolboy way. It was each boy for himself. As soon as he was on to the ball he would take a shot at goal, however distant the vests and shirts. The missed shot would be taken up by another player, usually one from the other side, and he would try his luck. Passing the ball from one player to another was a rare sophistication and was always made to one of the captains and usually by a boy looking to impress. But even at this young age such fawning would be unremembered. Goals, apart from Sherrington’s, were always disputed, 'handball' and 'play on' the constant cries and the ball was often in the privet hedge and nettles.
At this age I had three loves: Marian, drawing and nature study. (I was to discover later and with sadness that biology at the grammar school was not, as I had hoped, a more interesting form of nature study but merely chemistry with dead frogs. There was no poetry or romance and Gilbert White was nowhere to be found). On the football field, as in the classroom, I would dream of one or all of these — what would be my next drawing? what happened to the family of baby hedgehogs, their spines still soft? and when would Marian take my hand again and lead me to the privet hedge?
In football you cannot always contrive to be where the ball isn’t. At some point it will come so close that you are obliged to kick it and so once it was with me. My dreaming of my loves was suddenly and surprisingly challenged by this heavy and unwelcome leather sphere and in my haste to get rid of the thing I aimed it at the nearest goal. Of course, because fate and chance are skilled deceivers, that goal was made of the wrong vests and shirts and by some horrible twist the ball flew in, undisputedly plumb centre. No misjudgement in adult life has had the shaming effects of that accident and I longed and longed for the ringing of the hand-bell and hoped that the vests and shirts would be full of ants.
There is one knowledge that dilutes this shame.
Both Terry Court and Michael Homer had sent Valentine cards to Marian. I hadn’t. But she and I lived to the north of the school while they were from the south, so we caught the same bus and shared some secrets. One morning in a cloakroom of wet gabardine she whispered 'I’ll be under the hedge at playtime if it stops raining.' The first prayer of my life was for lack of rain and my first prayer was answered.
In those days we did not possess sex organs. She had a pisser and I had a cock. They were no more than badges of office. The one qualified you to be a farmer’s wife, an air stewardess or a nurse, the other a farmer, pilot or doctor. This simplistic classification of roles governed by those badges of office was accepted by us all, even though, right before us in the school there were both male and female teachers, the recognition of which should have challenged our theory. The pisser and the cock were nonetheless intriguing and, on that day under the hedge, thick with the perfume of privet, the cries from the football field were ignored. The great benefit of being a duff footballer was that no one would miss you when you weren’t there. No one would call my name as they would Terry Court’s. So, there on the old leaves, both damp and dry, her thick bottle-green knickers among the coarse nettle stems, she would hold my soft little cock in her innocent hand and I would examine her pale pisser, naked and new.
It was a sort of love, I suppose, and it got me out of football. But, more than that, it gave me a secret authority over the sporting boys and, even at that early age, I knew and cherished the power of secret knowledge. And now, long into another century when all sweet innocence is past, the remembered phrase 'You can have him' is as nothing when it is set against 'I’ll be under the hedge at playtime if it stops raining.'
It is the summer of 1956.
Sidlesham County Primary School is a Victorian brick building with steep gables and tall windows and is surrounded by iron railings and high privet hedges. There is a less forbidding single storey extension made of concrete and glass in metal frames — Sidlesham’s one weak gesture to modernism. Its unimaginative yet practical plan is of a long corridor with half a dozen classrooms on one side. Seen from the air it will be a pale finger pointing towards an unconsidered future. The sun beats through the blindless windows.
Beyond the melting tar of the playground, beyond the iron railings, and beyond the bend in the road a small tractor is cutting a crop of hay which is more rust-coloured sorrel than grass. The driver is wearing blue overalls and a greasy cloth cap turned back to front. This cannot be for streamlining but perhaps its peak keeps the sun from his bare neck. Even now, fifty years on, I can still hear the rattle of the reciprocating mower blades and taste the unique perfume of crushed grass and TVO. (Tractors’ Vapourising Oil — that essence which fuelled early tractors and which they puffed out as blue sweet-smelling smoke). Beyond the haymaking there is the Suez Crisis and, at eight years old, there is perhaps nothing between the two. Suez and its canal (in which roach and carp must swim for what is a canal without these?) may be just the other side of the thorn hedge with its wild roses, white and pink. It may be a bit further and hidden by the tall elms whose trunks edge the black ditch. Wherever it is it doesn’t concern me. Nor do I care to know of Gamal Abdel Nasser, nor why my mother refers to him as 'nasty Nasser'. What is of far greater concern to me is the knowledge that at playtime there will be football, a game at Sidlesham County Primary which does not respect the normal playing season.
The hand-bell will ring, desks will open, desks will close, Miss Wiltshire will mouth 'Quietly. Quiet!' as she always does, and as always no one will hear. The lids of the oak desks will drown even the sound of the tractor and mower, even when he’s close to the edge. The girls will go to make daisy chains or will tuck their thin cotton dresses into their knickers and do hand-stands against the sunny wall. Sweets and badges and hair slides will clatter to the hot asphalt. The boys will run to the playing field which is full of daisies and plantains and will throw vests and shirts to the ground where the goal posts should be. I am one of these. Unwilling but without the courage not to be one.
There would be two captains. Usually they were Michael Homer and Edward Sherrington. There was rarely a dispute over this, their ball control and goal scoring abilities being recognised by us all. Sometimes an upstart would attempt a sort of coup but it was rarely successful and, if so, it would be short-lived. (I have often mused that Edward Sherrington would go on to become Teddy Sheringham but as he would be playing for West Ham and the national side when in his mid fifties it seems unlikely). If not a proto Teddy Sheringham, Edward was Stanley Matthews and Sidlesham County Primary was Stoke City. His goal scoring was legendary. He would steal the ball from any player, even Terry Court who he had picked for his own team and he would belt the thing at the goal with such power and authority that no one, not even Michael Homer, would dare to suggest that it had missed the vests and shirts — as often it had, and by some yards. After the goal or not goal he would trudge back to the half-way line, an unsmiling hero of the war comics some of us read, apparently exhausted, until fitness resumed with his regaining the ball. This was his style.
The two captains would each play at centre forward, this, apart from goalie, being the only recognised position on the field. The rest of us were there to kick the ball as best we could towards the target goal. Homer and Sherrington would pick sides. If you were Terence Court you didn’t wait long. Terry would be a valuable member of any side — small but smart. At the end of the awful selection there would be only David Lever and me left. Sherrington would choose Lever, leaving me for Homer but, the final humiliation, he would say to Sherrington 'You can have him.'
The game was played in the universal schoolboy way. It was each boy for himself. As soon as he was on to the ball he would take a shot at goal, however distant the vests and shirts. The missed shot would be taken up by another player, usually one from the other side, and he would try his luck. Passing the ball from one player to another was a rare sophistication and was always made to one of the captains and usually by a boy looking to impress. But even at this young age such fawning would be unremembered. Goals, apart from Sherrington’s, were always disputed, 'handball' and 'play on' the constant cries and the ball was often in the privet hedge and nettles.
At this age I had three loves: Marian, drawing and nature study. (I was to discover later and with sadness that biology at the grammar school was not, as I had hoped, a more interesting form of nature study but merely chemistry with dead frogs. There was no poetry or romance and Gilbert White was nowhere to be found). On the football field, as in the classroom, I would dream of one or all of these — what would be my next drawing? what happened to the family of baby hedgehogs, their spines still soft? and when would Marian take my hand again and lead me to the privet hedge?
In football you cannot always contrive to be where the ball isn’t. At some point it will come so close that you are obliged to kick it and so once it was with me. My dreaming of my loves was suddenly and surprisingly challenged by this heavy and unwelcome leather sphere and in my haste to get rid of the thing I aimed it at the nearest goal. Of course, because fate and chance are skilled deceivers, that goal was made of the wrong vests and shirts and by some horrible twist the ball flew in, undisputedly plumb centre. No misjudgement in adult life has had the shaming effects of that accident and I longed and longed for the ringing of the hand-bell and hoped that the vests and shirts would be full of ants.
There is one knowledge that dilutes this shame.
Both Terry Court and Michael Homer had sent Valentine cards to Marian. I hadn’t. But she and I lived to the north of the school while they were from the south, so we caught the same bus and shared some secrets. One morning in a cloakroom of wet gabardine she whispered 'I’ll be under the hedge at playtime if it stops raining.' The first prayer of my life was for lack of rain and my first prayer was answered.
In those days we did not possess sex organs. She had a pisser and I had a cock. They were no more than badges of office. The one qualified you to be a farmer’s wife, an air stewardess or a nurse, the other a farmer, pilot or doctor. This simplistic classification of roles governed by those badges of office was accepted by us all, even though, right before us in the school there were both male and female teachers, the recognition of which should have challenged our theory. The pisser and the cock were nonetheless intriguing and, on that day under the hedge, thick with the perfume of privet, the cries from the football field were ignored. The great benefit of being a duff footballer was that no one would miss you when you weren’t there. No one would call my name as they would Terry Court’s. So, there on the old leaves, both damp and dry, her thick bottle-green knickers among the coarse nettle stems, she would hold my soft little cock in her innocent hand and I would examine her pale pisser, naked and new.
It was a sort of love, I suppose, and it got me out of football. But, more than that, it gave me a secret authority over the sporting boys and, even at that early age, I knew and cherished the power of secret knowledge. And now, long into another century when all sweet innocence is past, the remembered phrase 'You can have him' is as nothing when it is set against 'I’ll be under the hedge at playtime if it stops raining.'
