Girls, angst, danger, death…

But first, let’s start with rugby, the game not the school. I played it for years at Lord Bill’s. Well you had to, it was compulsory, and Lord Bill’s didn’t do football – thank God. By the time I was thirteen I was a hardened, head down, ball under arm, ear ripping, mud covered, scrumming machine of a loose head prop - pushing, pushing, pushing, kicking, grunting, swearing… and growing up.

I was in the school under 15’s first team, we always won. Half the team (me included) played for the County. We could beat them all - Dragon’s, Abingdon, Rose Hill, Cowley – we were unstoppable, I was unstoppable.

We each had a nickname – Everest, Brick, Hammerhead, Brigadier, Gloria, Wings, Tonto, Boy Wonder, Bog Brush - they called me Tankman, the Tank, as I said - I was unstoppable. Compare these two pictures. There’s a year between them and most of the boys in the first picture are still around in the second. Just look at the changes a single year made to some of us, not least of all to my hair – 1971… what was I thinking of!

1971 was also the last year I played rugby in any serious sort of way because a number of things happened.

Happening 1. It was the year that I discovered that girls could be almost as much fun as running around in the mud and rain for eighty minutes dragging other boys to the ground getting kicked and punched whilst trying to catch a silly shape ball as I shoved my other hand into somebody else’s face.

Happening 2. I began to rebel. Not about anything in particular, just about things generally, and everything that had gone before had to be undone. By the end of the year I’d changed everything that I thought, did, said, and I’d developed a new look, way of acting, attitude to things and I was working really hard at trying to be a cynic.

Happening 3. It was that year that Bruiser ran into one of the posts with his head down and fractured his skull, Gloria and Wings both broke a leg after bad tackles in two different matches, and I ended up in hospital for six weeks after emerging from a particularly heavy scrum with a smashed collarbone which complicated, brushed my heart, and bruised it quite badly. As I lay flat in my hospital bed it dawned on me that rugby could be dangerous.

Happening 4. Lastly, team morale took a huge knock when one of the boys in the photos went to sleep one night and didn’t wake up the next morning. He played second row.

Girls, angst, danger, death – a heady and complicated cocktail to down – suddenly rugby didn’t seem quite so important any more.

I still played, but I didn’t train. I was dropped from the firsts, went down to the seconds, then the thirds and a year or so later I stopped playing rugby altogether.