Rainy Days

Rainy days when we weren’t able to play football in the playground at dinner time were miserable days. In the lower school we’d have been herded off to the gym to suffer Mister Potts’s old time dances, but now we were growing up and things were dropping into place, and the idea of dancing with girls had greater appeal, we were left to twiddle our thumbs in the hall. As Alf Garnett often said: ‘Innit bloody marvellous.’

I didn’t mind loafing around in the hall. And I didn’t mind listening to the music the girls played on a record player near the stage. I didn’t even mind hearing Hugo Montenegro’s The Good the Bad and the Ugly three times in one hour. As a matter of fact I liked it, but I still wished I was outside playing football.

Paul, Clive and me helped ourselves to three chairs on the canteen side of the hall; the ones usually occupied by the prefects in assembly. Getting some homework out of the way might have been a sensible idea, but homework wasn't as popular as practicing our autographs for when we became famous footballers. That led to us talking about footballers’ injuries. Paul and I discussed that a lot. Real footballers got calf strains, thigh strains, groin strains and all kinds of things. Pulls, tweaks, niggles, everything. So why didn’t we? We played football all day long and not once did we get an injury that troubled us. It seemed we were deficient in some way. Any injury, as long as it wasn’t too serious, would be more than welcome. Just one measly injury, that’s all. Only then would we feel like real footballers.

On rainy days we had our PE lessons in the gym. Basketball was new to all and a blessing to me. My height gave me natural advantage and in a non-contact sport, my beanpole frame didn’t matter. I liked the game and enjoyed some success. My only problem was facing Richard Pascall in the tip off. Once Richard got his bulk under the ball, my only hope was to get my fingertips to it before I bounced off him.

We played volleyball too, swatting a basketball over a wooden beam that Mister Charlesworth lowered from the ceiling. The rallies were good and I dished up some deadly serves, though the joy of repeatedly smashing a basketball comes at a price, I learned later. The underside of my wrist didn’t half sting.

Another game we played was Pirates, a chase game that started out with a lone chaser in pursuit of the rest. With all the wall bars, beams, benches, ropes, mats and vaulting horses set out, the rules were simple. Don’t get tagged and don’t come into contact with the gym floor, or your time on the run was over and you had to join the chasers. We had a lot of fun scrambling over the apparatus, but as the game progressed and the chasing pack grew larger, getting away got harder. The last man on the run was declared the winner. Yet there were two winners on the day Brian Lack and Raymond Wright shot straight up the ropes and stayed there, taking the tails of the other ropes with them. Mister Charlesworth laughed at their ingenuity, but when Trevor Hickson joined them in a repeat of the trick in a later lesson, Mister Charlesworth called foul and put an end to it.

Rainy days weren’t days for walking home. Paul, John and I joined the mad scramble at the depot after school, firstly to get on the bus and secondly, to grab a seat downstairs and avoid sitting in the smog upstairs. Now that we were old and sensible we no longer looked to avoid paying, but old habits die hard and if the conductor’s cry of  ‘any more fares’ lacked any kind of threat or expectation, it was difficult not to turn an innocent gaze to the window.