Football Crazy

Unlike my uncle Ernest who had played professional football in the 1930s and several other members of my family who could be found kicking a ball around the local park pitches as part of the Sunday League my own football skills left a lot to be desired. To tell the truth, an uncoordinated Gibbon on tranquillisers could have probably played the beautiful game better than I could. I loved football but put a ball anywhere near me and I immediately developed two left feet and a terminal loss of direction. Naturally this led to me being relegated to the side that included the asthmatics, the academics and the blind kid with the gimpy leg when it came to school games lessons and in a school that valued sporting prowess as much as and possibly more than academic achievement this was a bad thing indeed. Even though I was not too bad at cricket and could hurl javelins with the best of them my total inability to send a football in the right direction marked me as a useless loser in the eyes of certain masters.

One such master happened to be our games master who was an ex-paratrooper by the name of Jackson and who it was rumoured had been kicked out of the regiment for brutality. He loathed any sign of weakness and being useless at football was a sign of weakness in his book so he took it on himself to toughen us up by any means possible. This usually took the form of ten laps of the school field and an hour and a half of trying to kick a heavy leather ball that had been manufactured circa 1863 around the flooded bottom pitch that was rumoured to harbour a breeding colony of crocodiles and a couple of hippos in its swampy environs. By the end of the session most of us would be tottering around on leaden limbs and doing passable impersonations of a Glastonbury reveller on a particularly muddy day. Broken legs were not uncommon and the local ambulance service kept one of its vans permanently parked outside the gates that led to the fields. The lesson would normally be overseen by Jackson and the slightly effeminate maths teacher Mr Davies, to whom Jackson had been heard referring to in an unguarded moment in the PE masters staff cupboard as “That Welsh poof!”. That Mr Jackson himself had been relegated to teaching the uncoordinated and the sporting inept amongst us said a lot about what the head of PE thought of him as he was never let anywhere near the star pupils who could actually kick a ball. We hated the man with a vengeance but revenge was to be at hand albeit unintentionally.

The games lesson had begun normally enough with its lung bursting run around the periphery of the field that had left several of our group throwing up behind the pavilion and Neil whose bottle bottom glasses had steamed up getting severely lost and vanishing at a tangent behind the biology labs. Despite the losses Mr Jackson then produced the ‘Cannonball’ as we called it and those of us who were left were divided into two teams. For about an hour the game progressed without incident. Occasionally one of us even managed to coordinate our limbs for long enough to get a shot somewhere within fifty feet of a goal, which was lucky as both the goalies were asthmatic and any further exertion would have probably killed them. Then it happened. The ball suddenly landed at my feet and I heard Jackson’s bellow of “Run with it laddie!” from nearby. Mortal terror kicked in and I froze. I knew that if I tried to run with the ball I would inevitably end up on my arse in the mud, such was my lack of coordination in the vicinity of spherical objects on football pitches. I could hardly pick the ball up as we were not playing rugby that term. Thus I did the only thing possible and gave the sodden leather ball as mighty a kick as I could possibly manage.

True to form, the ball, instead of sailing gracefully up the field to where team mates stood waiting in hopeful expectation, or possibly waiting to see which of them the ball was headed for so that they could run away from it, shot off my boot at an angle and at high speed like a navigationally challenged Cruise missile. With a loud and sickening thump it thudded into Mr Jackson or more precisely an area slightly south of his waistline. The sound brought play to a halt not only on our pitch but the top pitch as well as even the head of PE winced. Only I was close enough to hear the strangled “Meep!” as Mr Jackson folded to his knees and curled into a foetal position in the soggiest, muddiest part of the pitch. His whistle slipped from his lips and tears rolled down his ashen cheeks as he lay there for several moments before rising unsteadily to his feet and as he staggered back to the changing rooms clutching his injured groin, Mr Davies was heard to add insult to injury with the polite enquiry of “So, do you need some liniment rubbing into that?”

Luckily the football term ended that week but we were treated to the sight of Mr Jackson wearing an uncharacteristically baggy pair of trousers and never once sitting down for several days afterwards and all those present at the time agreed that the ball could not have been better targeted than if George Best himself had kicked it.

Booze Club

Our Chemistry master, Mr Roberts, was an extremely trusting soul, perhaps a little too trusting of our sixth form chemistry group given that in the eighteen months he had been teaching us we had managed to almost gas the school, leave a large smoking crater in a demonstration bench after a thermite reaction went a bit wrong and nearly kill the headmaster as well. Perhaps these incidents had slipped his mind on the day he asked us to bring some alcohol in to the next weeks lesson for an experiment in distillation.

I’m sure he only meant for us to bring a small amount of alcohol in to school but when the fateful day arrived it came with the sound of clinking bottles from various rucksacks and shoulder bags. Taking his request a bit too literally we had all raided our parents wine cellars, sideboards and cupboards under the stairs and had with us a selection of booze that could have kept George Best, Oliver Reed, Richard Burton and most of the tramps that gathered in the local park unconscious for about a week. Pete, our resident punk rocker had even lugged a gallon jug of 'Old Rats Arse' or some equally potent scrumpy in, presumably provided by one of his older mates whom he frequently got drunk with on the local green. Perhaps wisely, lest the boys toilet become more like a smoke filled pub than it usually was, other teachers insisted we left our experimental materials in the science lab so it was thus that the fume cupboard came to resemble a well stocked hostelry instead as the various bottles liberated from parents boozes stashes were stacked within. In theory only a small amount would be needed for the experiment, the teachers were already eyeing up the rest.

Our chemistry lesson was the last two periods of the day, in the afternoon and it started innocuously enough…as most disasters do. It started with us distilling the Sherry Simon had stolen from his mum to produce neat alcohol. From there it went downhill. Bored with setting it, whatever and whoever we could pour it over on fire we wondered what else we could do with the positive cornucopia of alcoholic delights arrayed on the bench before us.

As fate would have it, about halfway through the lesson Mr Roberts was called away to deal with a problem and being the trusting soul he was left us on our own. It was then that Mark decided to see what his grandmothers’ Sanatogen tonic wine tasted like and before long bottles were being passed around like a wine and cheese evening where the host had forgotten the Gouda. I had ‘borrowed’ two bottles of my fathers homemade Orange wine, this, most of the participants in that Bacchanalian excess swear to this day was our undoing. Calling it wine was a bit of an understatement. If his Elderberry 1978 was a cheeky little number, his Orange wine was like being slapped in the face with a large and very alcoholic cricket bat. In fact I firmly believe that my father was in talks with NASA as they wanted it to fuel their space shuttles. In terms of alcohol content only certain hard to find vodka and the methylated spirits the corner hardware shop sold ranked above it. Generous amounts were sloshed into some of the cleaner beakers that may or may not have been used in experiments involving poisons and knocked back leaving participants gasping at what was described as ‘a bit of pokey old tackle’ by another mate in later years. In fact, if prohibition had been in force my father could have expected a visit from Elliot Ness and the boys with a selection of axes and a warrant that would send him to Alcatraz for life.

Either the problem that Mr Roberts was dealing with was a serious one or he had completely forgotten that he was supposed to be teaching and had wandered off somewhere as by now he had been gone for almost an hour and the effects of our rapid alcohol consumption had kicked in as unlike current teenagers who spend their time hanging around in bus shelters with a bottle of Bucky and of course Pete, the most any of us had consumed was a small white wine, some of Auntie Mabels Port or a lemonade shandy made with the weakest beer our parents could find on Christmas day. Mark began to look green round the gills, Karen and Rachel were slumped against the cupboards at the back of the labs, Chris had wandered off down the corridor in a daze humming the Wombles theme tune and apparently “Looking for some ice!” and Andy was face down amidst a sea of beakers. As for me, I was attempting to convince Martin that mixing all the booze that was left into one super cocktail was probably a bad thing to do. Unfortunately I was having little success, mainly down to my own advanced state of inebriation. Grans Advocaat had never had this sort of effect on me but then again I had never sunk an entire bottle of it washed down with a gin chaser and a bucket of meths.

We might have managed to get away with it if nobody had spotted us weaving our way out of the school gates at home time and providing none of the teachers turned up. It wasn’t to be and for us it could only get worse as the headmaster, alerted to what was happening by Chris stumbling into his study demanding “Ishe cubes”, arrived just as Andy woke up and went “BLLLEEERCH!” into one of the sinks. The head took one look at the semi-conscious bodies slumped around the lab, Pete hugging the remains of his gallon of cider and Martins super-cocktail that was bubbling away lethally on the front bench and asked what was probably the stupidest question of his life…

”What on earth do you think you’re doing?”

Looking back, Martins slurred answer of “Biology experiment sir, Effects of alcohol on human metabolishm. Been a bit too succeshful!” as he slowly toppled from his stool may have been the wrong one but it was absolutely inspired at the time.

Hurrah for Saint George!

In a moment of patriotic fervour that nowadays would have a mob of the towns politically correct, sandal munching, lentil wearing brigade writing letters to the local council and picketing the school gates Mrs Smith, my 3rd year junior teacher decided that it would be a good idea to put on a play about St George and the dragon for our long suffering parents instead of the usual Easter pageant. If she had known the pain and anguish the change from the usual fluffy bunnies and chicks would cause she would have stuck to something safer like the life and times of Jack the Ripper, the battle of Thermopylae or maybe a recreation of the Normandy landings with real guns.

For most of us our acting careers consisted of the school nativity play or if you were really lucky a part in the summer pageant. I fell into the latter and as part of the school summer fair I got to be in the presentation about historical happenings. In it I was a sailor, not just any sailor, no, one who was to die of plague. Buying water from an itinerant water seller we succumbed to the black death in seconds, possibly the fastest succumbing ever and three of us spent the rest of the presentation lying on the tarmac of the playground wondering if this would get us our equity cards. Instead it got us a polite round of applause and a chance to skive off early and get the best of the pickings on the homemade cake and bric-a-brac stalls. However, Mrs Smith had grander designs and as part of our patriotic presentation I got to be the arse end of the dragon complete with diving flipper feet and that’s where I think it started to go wrong.

The dragon costume was fashioned from an old blackout curtain covered with tin foil scales and finished with a papier mache head made by the ‘special’ kids in the form that looked less like a dragon and more like the mutant offspring of a coupling between a penguin and a rhino. Myself, Dave and another kid called Mike made up the human part that made it move around in a vaguely dragon like way although it has yet to be proved that dragons shuffled around at about 1/10th of a mile per hour emitting the occasional half hearted "GRRR!" as they did so.

Okay, nothing too bad about that apart from the fact that Mike was form 3Bs champion farter. We were all convinced his mum must feed him nothing but baked beans and Brussels sprouts for every meal of the week. As soon as he got the slightest bit nervous or excited he would begin to break wind uncontrollably so as a result as soon as he was asked a question by the teacher almost every lesson would be disrupted by FAAAAAAAAARRRRPPP and moments later the kind of smell banned by several international treaties would waft across the classroom sending pupils rushing for the windows with watering eyes. As the back end of the dragon my head was to be uncomfortably close to the source of those emanations and all I could do was pray that his nerves would hold and he could control himself for the ten minutes we were to be on stage.

After weeks of practice and mercifully for me, no problems from Mikes rear quarters, the big day arrived, parents assembled in the school hall and as an extra special treat the inmates of the old folks home across the road were wheeled out and took place in the front row and so the play began. It all went quite well. The girls were suitably terrified by our first appearance, the choir sung their song about dragons and St George heroically set off on his quest riding his horse made from an old cardboard box painted in a horsey sort of brown with a hobby horse head poking from it and on meeting us lot in our dragon costume set about us with his sword somewhat enthusiastically and that’s when it went horribly, horribly pear shaped.

Whether it was the enthusiastic beating or just sheer excitement that our big moment had arrived the terror began…

“Have at thee!” yelled St George.

PHHHHHHHHHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPP replied the dragon closely followed by my anguished scream of “ARGH! Fucking Hell!” as Mike let rip with the ripest, juiciest fart he had ever let rip with and I tried to escape the noisome cloud in the confines of the blackout curtain. Unfortunately the fact I was wearing diving flippers meant that going anywhere fast was difficult and as it happened, fate stuck its fingers into the mix and one of the straps on my flippers broke. Coughing and gasping and fighting to get clear the inevitable happened, I tripped over the flipper and the momentum of my fall toppled us off the stage and into the elderly residents of the old folks home who had up to that point been enjoying themselves. We landed in an explosion of papier mache, chicken wire, tin foil, dentures, Zimmer frames and walking sticks, flattening at least six of the poor old folk. Parents stood aghast as the teachers rushed in to save the elderly guests from a hideous fate in the form of a blackout curtain that was emitting curious FARP, FARP, FARP noises and from which a hades-like stench arose whilst two of their pupils crawled away to be sick in the rubber plant that stood next to the stage. At least two of the pensioners had begun having flashbacks to the Somme and had started screaming “GAAAASSSS!” and a third was poking the curtain with her walking stick, which merely inflamed the situation as Mike, tangled in the material let fly with another fruity barrage. Parents, pensioners and teachers alike began to evacuate the hall holding handkerchiefs over their noses leaving Dave and I to drag Mike from the curtain before throwing up in the plant pot again.

The next day the school hall was placed out of bounds and the windows were left open. Nothing was ever mentioned about the play again but we did notice the headmaster carrying large baskets of fruit and several bottles of wine across to the old folks home a couple of days later. Oh and Mrs Smith mysteriously left the school at the end of the summer term never to return or be talked of again. Presumably haunted by the day she almost managed to do what ‘the hun’ had failed to do and finish off several WW1 veterans in an unprovoked attack with chemical weapons of mass destruction in the guise of a school play.