Good Sport: Ian Wilson recalls the personal indignities of PE
Baggy cotton shorts – in the school colours of black with a white stripe up the sides – billowed around our five year old legs, and white singlets flapped in the gusty winds of early autumn as we stood in a circle around our kindergarten teacher and embarrassedly chanted:
“Stand up straight like letter ‘I’ Hands at side and head held high – If you stand like letter ‘C’ Curly-wurly you will be.” Focusing perhaps rather more on instruction in posture and elocution (“Ian and Hugh, do speak clearly, stop gabbling.”) this was, nevertheless, my introduction to PE.
However, many of us were to remember with nostalgia piping Miss Deane’s gentle doggerel while her flailing arms conducted this awful choir. All too soon we had graduated to the intender tutelage of an ex-army PE instructor with a penchant for punishments. An excruciating example was that the last boy to get dressed after the lesson – and thus guilty of ‘being as slow as an old woman’ – had to leave ‘the gym’ wearing an enormous woman’s hat which the “Captain” had borrowed from the school’s costume wardrobe.
It was this business of getting clothes on after PE which forced me to confront the moral coward within myself. William was an unhappy, unattractive person – all too often his nose went unwiped and on two shameful occasions he had wet himself in the classroom; he endured snubbing rather than bullying, but it was tying a tie which was his undoing.
Along with slews of rules which the school implemented, was that we had to undo and retie our ties after PE, nothing as slovenly as simply stretching it into a loop which could be slipped over the head and then tightened. William could not make a tie-knot and suffered agonies and punishment. I felt sorry for him, but fear of rejection and torment from classmates held me back from doing the decent thing. One evening I asked my older sister who – quite possibly of finer moral fibre than myself, and equally possibly because she was wholly uninvolved – tolerated no timorous shillyshallying on my part: “You have to help him, there are no two ways about it.” The thought of what awaited me made the lesson into a penance and when the dreaded moment arrived, I was a martyr about to mount the scaffold. The simple humanitarian act was clumsily carried out on William, who was sitting in despairing helplessness scrunching his neck-gear in his big, boney fingers. He never thanked me, we never became friends – but two miracles did occur: I wasn’t blackballed and the next week he was able, at least on a certain level, to fasten the damn thing around his neck.
It was the clothing as much as the PE activities which surfaced when I set about ransacking people’s memories of school sports. Female friends recall the Airtex shirt and bloomers which were deemed de rigour kit for exercising the limbs, while a colleague told of the slightly curious practice, in an Irish convent, where the students performed gymnastics in their knickers, an oddity in a context where covering up and the stressing of modesty were carried to extremes.
With a gently ironic smile, an acquaintance recollects the imitation ‘classical’ loose, pastel green tunics which she wore when ‘Greek movements’ replaced the more conventional PE class. Her succinct comment on this state of affairs was that it always seemed to be the least likeable girls who put the most ‘expression’ into their swaying, gesturing and fluttering.
Another friend recalls, with a certain fondness, the wraparound skirt worn for sport, as it was generally felt to possess more potential charm than any other garment associated with PE. This same person makes no pains about the embarrassment mixed with tentative showing-off when under the gaze of the teenaged boys from the neighbouring institution who were gawking at the girls’ netball sessions through the hedge and playground railings. A Scottish ceramicist recollects, with a shudder, that in the weeks preceding Hogmanay, PE was replaced by Scottish Country Dancing in preparation for the New Year ceilidhs. Chris hated the necessary skipping motions and remembers not only the baleful warning (“Put some heart into your skipping, laddie, or you’ll get the belt”), but also the painful enactment of the threat.The leather-covered horse worn to a sheen by the thousands of hands propelling bodies – sometimes graceful and confident but more frequently awkward and desperate, the smell of plimsolls, the burn of the rope on the palms of one’s hands, folding your towel into a rat’s tail to flick bottoms painfully in the shower-room: these are just a few examples of the memories elicited.Another aspect of PE was the many excuses manufactured in order to evade this part of the school syllabus: the knees and ankles which caused such sudden pain, the migraines which unfortunately manifested themselves, the vaguely described and poorly feigned ‘problems’. A safer route was persuading or browbeating parents to ‘write a note’.
However, there were schools of such laxity that friends could ‘swap’ PE for Art or Maths Higher, or simply ‘disappear’ by virtue of never signing-up for sports teams. There was the excuse proffered, successfully, when a pupil in Aden, by a now renowned eye-surgeon, who with assumed shamefacedness told the principal “I’m so bad at PE that I would bring disgrace on the good name of the school.”The two boys in my secondary school who excelled at PE were wildly different characters: one a solemn, religious proselytiser and earnest bodybuilder, the other a good-looking young Flashman – who gave off an aura of a life more dangerous and thrilling than our own. (He was also rumoured to have been the first in our class to have precociously tasted certain adult delights.) After this star duo came the great lumbering mass of us, and finally, those poor souls who were truly desolate, dreading the barked orders which required of them performances of strength and dexterity of which they knew themselves incapable.
“Stand up straight like letter ‘I’ Hands at side and head held high – If you stand like letter ‘C’ Curly-wurly you will be.” Focusing perhaps rather more on instruction in posture and elocution (“Ian and Hugh, do speak clearly, stop gabbling.”) this was, nevertheless, my introduction to PE.
However, many of us were to remember with nostalgia piping Miss Deane’s gentle doggerel while her flailing arms conducted this awful choir. All too soon we had graduated to the intender tutelage of an ex-army PE instructor with a penchant for punishments. An excruciating example was that the last boy to get dressed after the lesson – and thus guilty of ‘being as slow as an old woman’ – had to leave ‘the gym’ wearing an enormous woman’s hat which the “Captain” had borrowed from the school’s costume wardrobe.
It was this business of getting clothes on after PE which forced me to confront the moral coward within myself. William was an unhappy, unattractive person – all too often his nose went unwiped and on two shameful occasions he had wet himself in the classroom; he endured snubbing rather than bullying, but it was tying a tie which was his undoing.
Along with slews of rules which the school implemented, was that we had to undo and retie our ties after PE, nothing as slovenly as simply stretching it into a loop which could be slipped over the head and then tightened. William could not make a tie-knot and suffered agonies and punishment. I felt sorry for him, but fear of rejection and torment from classmates held me back from doing the decent thing. One evening I asked my older sister who – quite possibly of finer moral fibre than myself, and equally possibly because she was wholly uninvolved – tolerated no timorous shillyshallying on my part: “You have to help him, there are no two ways about it.” The thought of what awaited me made the lesson into a penance and when the dreaded moment arrived, I was a martyr about to mount the scaffold. The simple humanitarian act was clumsily carried out on William, who was sitting in despairing helplessness scrunching his neck-gear in his big, boney fingers. He never thanked me, we never became friends – but two miracles did occur: I wasn’t blackballed and the next week he was able, at least on a certain level, to fasten the damn thing around his neck.
It was the clothing as much as the PE activities which surfaced when I set about ransacking people’s memories of school sports. Female friends recall the Airtex shirt and bloomers which were deemed de rigour kit for exercising the limbs, while a colleague told of the slightly curious practice, in an Irish convent, where the students performed gymnastics in their knickers, an oddity in a context where covering up and the stressing of modesty were carried to extremes.
With a gently ironic smile, an acquaintance recollects the imitation ‘classical’ loose, pastel green tunics which she wore when ‘Greek movements’ replaced the more conventional PE class. Her succinct comment on this state of affairs was that it always seemed to be the least likeable girls who put the most ‘expression’ into their swaying, gesturing and fluttering.
Another friend recalls, with a certain fondness, the wraparound skirt worn for sport, as it was generally felt to possess more potential charm than any other garment associated with PE. This same person makes no pains about the embarrassment mixed with tentative showing-off when under the gaze of the teenaged boys from the neighbouring institution who were gawking at the girls’ netball sessions through the hedge and playground railings. A Scottish ceramicist recollects, with a shudder, that in the weeks preceding Hogmanay, PE was replaced by Scottish Country Dancing in preparation for the New Year ceilidhs. Chris hated the necessary skipping motions and remembers not only the baleful warning (“Put some heart into your skipping, laddie, or you’ll get the belt”), but also the painful enactment of the threat.The leather-covered horse worn to a sheen by the thousands of hands propelling bodies – sometimes graceful and confident but more frequently awkward and desperate, the smell of plimsolls, the burn of the rope on the palms of one’s hands, folding your towel into a rat’s tail to flick bottoms painfully in the shower-room: these are just a few examples of the memories elicited.Another aspect of PE was the many excuses manufactured in order to evade this part of the school syllabus: the knees and ankles which caused such sudden pain, the migraines which unfortunately manifested themselves, the vaguely described and poorly feigned ‘problems’. A safer route was persuading or browbeating parents to ‘write a note’.
However, there were schools of such laxity that friends could ‘swap’ PE for Art or Maths Higher, or simply ‘disappear’ by virtue of never signing-up for sports teams. There was the excuse proffered, successfully, when a pupil in Aden, by a now renowned eye-surgeon, who with assumed shamefacedness told the principal “I’m so bad at PE that I would bring disgrace on the good name of the school.”The two boys in my secondary school who excelled at PE were wildly different characters: one a solemn, religious proselytiser and earnest bodybuilder, the other a good-looking young Flashman – who gave off an aura of a life more dangerous and thrilling than our own. (He was also rumoured to have been the first in our class to have precociously tasted certain adult delights.) After this star duo came the great lumbering mass of us, and finally, those poor souls who were truly desolate, dreading the barked orders which required of them performances of strength and dexterity of which they knew themselves incapable.
However, there was the excitement surrounding the arrival of summer when medicine balls, vaulting bucks and pommel horses were exchanged for the bliss of swimming. That those who shone on the parallel bars, springboard and balance benches were also the ablest performers in the unnaturally blue waters of the not very-large school pool, mattered so much less when out-of-doors, splashing in the summer sunshine.Many of those I questioned felt little enthusiasm towards PE, but enjoyed sport. Textile artist Michael Brennand-Wood loathed organised classes, but loved “competing against myself” while running long distances through the Lancashire countryside. I spent Double Latin on Friday afternoons gazing out of the window at the tennis courts where, in my fantasies, the brilliant drives which flowed off the cat-gut strings of my wooden racquet would soon be burning up the base-lines.
My Olympic Games television-viewing, this year – as in the past – will focus not on the drama of the men’s 100m final, nor on the diving events. It is the gymnasts, especially their feats of utterly unimaginable skill involving incredible balance on slender bars, or supporting oneself, motionless, on the rings, that keep me enthralled. This absorption, however, is accompanied by slightly rueful thoughts concerning my own far distant and distinctly mediocre achievements in the PE arena, and an unexpected, albeit grudging, acceptance of the loss of youth’s agility.
Text by Ian Wilson
Images courtesy of Alasdair Peebles collection of children's sportswear.
Good Sport: Ian Wilson recalls the personal indignities of PE was first published in was originally published in Selvedge issue 47: Sporting.
My Olympic Games television-viewing, this year – as in the past – will focus not on the drama of the men’s 100m final, nor on the diving events. It is the gymnasts, especially their feats of utterly unimaginable skill involving incredible balance on slender bars, or supporting oneself, motionless, on the rings, that keep me enthralled. This absorption, however, is accompanied by slightly rueful thoughts concerning my own far distant and distinctly mediocre achievements in the PE arena, and an unexpected, albeit grudging, acceptance of the loss of youth’s agility.
Text by Ian Wilson
Images courtesy of Alasdair Peebles collection of children's sportswear.
Good Sport: Ian Wilson recalls the personal indignities of PE was first published in was originally published in Selvedge issue 47: Sporting.