220. Trying to win on school Sports Day
Rebranding the egg-and-spoon race, and my skirt fell off on the running track.
In which Rebecca mops up some sweaty memories of school Sports Days.
Dear Reader,
The scented air in May and June has always evoked exam time, the smell of warm cut grass taking me back to my hours of summer revision, and the pigeons in the garden reminding me of their relatives cooing in the sycamores outside the school exam hall. And with British schools breaking up for the summer holidays at the end of July, these sunny, breezy days early in the month even now smell, sound and feel to me like the run-up to Sports Day.
PE at junior school was pretty fun, at least to start with, because we’d play games rather than run races. At that stage of my education the school was co-ed, and boys and girls would have the same PE kit: a white aertex shirt which, in those pre-Lycra days, didn’t know how to stretch, uncomfortably stiff, white cotton shorts with an elasticated waist, and a pair of Dunlop greenflash plimsolls. Any deviation from the prescribed kit list was forbidden, and, at the start of the week at least, before our kit had had a chance to get dirty, in our bright whites we’d look identical.
Sports Day would be held on the last Wednesday of the summer term. We’d get changed into our kit, then walk two-by-two in a long line – the tiny four-year-olds in Form A right at the front and the growth-spurt tens and elevens in Form F at the back – all the way from school at the bottom of the High Street up to the grass playing field behind the church. This not-very-big patch of ground didn’t belong to the school, but to a local business which presumably charged it handsomely for the privilege of using their land, and it sloped alarmingly steeply from the gate at the top to the 100m track at the bottom. An oval 200m track – half uphill, half downhill, thanks to the field’s entirely inappropriate topography for its purpose – was marked untidily in white on the scrubby grass.
For Form A and Form B pupils, with an age range from four to six, races on Sports Day were brilliant. Not for us the unaccessorised circuits of the 200m track for the older kids, or the boring ‘just run in a straight line as fast as you can’ brief; no, we’d get to do exciting stuff on the way to the finish line.
🏃♀️➡️ The sack race
The sack race was great fun, although less so if it was a very hot day. Pulling on a hessian (burlap) sack over bare legs in normal temperatures is scratchy enough, but it’s even more uncomfortable in a July heatwave. In we’d climb regardless, making sure our feet weren’t caught up in the cloth.
1️⃣
Ready…
2️⃣
Steady…
3️⃣
GO!
Off we’d go, not running but jumping, propelling ourselves forwards with a lurch of the lower legs, a clenching of the tummy muscles and a bounce of the ankles. We’d hold on for dear life, bunching up the hessian in our fists around our waists in an effort to stop the sacks falling down and tripping us up.
Some of us would fall, and with loud encouragement from teachers and parents we’d shake ourselves down, pull the tops of our sacks back up to our waists and set off again twice as fast in order to catch the leaders.
🥚🥄 The egg-and-spoon race
I disliked the egg-and-spoon race because the name was wrong. On my first Sports Day we were told to get ready for it, and ran excitedly to the start line to look at the spoons we were going to use to convey our eggs to the other end of the track.
Miss D walked across the front of the line, stopping to deposit something from a brown paper bag in front of each pair of feet.
👧🏻 ‘That’s not an egg!’
🧑🏼 ‘That’s right! We use potatoes for the egg-and-spoon race. Eggs would break, wouldn’t they?’
👧🏻 ‘Not if we don’t drop them.’
🧑🏼 ‘Well, anyone dropping theirs won’t win, I’m afraid.’
I probably muttered something like ‘well, we all want to win, so we’re not going to drop them, so they might as well be eggs’, and got very upset that I was being made to run a potato-and-spoon race under false pretences.
Reader, I didn’t win that race because I didn’t try to.
On principle.
🦵🏻🦵🏻🦵🏻 The three-legged race
This one was a hoot. Pairs of pupils would be tied at the ankles: the child on the left of each pair would have their right ankle looped to the left ankle of the child on the right. I’m surprised that activities like these don’t feature in team-building exercises for grown-ups on those curious corporate away-days I hear about. Heck, maybe they do? 🤔
I didn’t really know the boy I’d been paired with. He’d been allocated as my partner simply because we were the same height, and to be honest I don’t recall ever talking to him again afterwards. I guess that tying our ankles together wasn’t enough of an ice-breaker.
👠👕👒 The dressing-up race
This one was by far the silliest. We’d all been asked to bring in some of our parents’ clothing: a pair of shoes, a shirt and a hat. These were stationed – in that order – at successive points along the track, with runners having to stop to don each item before they could move on to the next one. With the high heels that some kids had to wear – this was the very early 1980s, after all – I’m astonished that nobody broke an ankle. Or more than just an ankle, given than we had huge floppy hats covering our eyes for the last 25 metres.
Races became far less fun the older we got. Sports Day must have become boring by the time I’d reached Form E or F, because apart from knowing that I always tried to do the best I could in the difficult circumstances of being neither gifted nor interested in athletics, I remember nothing specific about the challenges we were expected to suffer endure perform.
I remember lunchtime, though. I’d take my lunchbox, as normal, with its standard daily contents and perhaps a couple of extra snacks in light of the high-energy occasion. Some kids had their parents there as spectators, and would join them for lunch.
A few of my classmates would head off to find their parents picnicking on blankets on a grass – or, in the case of one family at my last Sports Day of junior school, at a trestle table with a tablecloth and folding chairs, where dinner party-style food was being arranged on real plates and drinks poured into glasses.
‘That’s not a picnic!’ I humphed to my friend through a mouthful of cheese and pickle. It was fine, though: we were more than happy with our bog-standard sandwiches, and to not be subjected to such parental embarrassment.
At senior school, rather than the comfy co-ed-ness of the junior department, we’d been split into single-sex classes. The PE teacher for the girls’ school was a thoroughly nasty piece of work. She didn’t like teaching, liked children even less than that, and despaired of most of us for being ‘lazy’. It’s amazing how far a bit of encouragement and a few kind words might propel a child either academically or on the sports field, but no, Mrs Y was a stranger to any positivity whatsoever. Thanks to her I found PE lessons – in which, by the way, I learned nothing – almost as uncomfortable as the sports kit I was now being asked to wear.
Very quickly I longed for my stiff shorts of junior school. I’d arrived at senior school the year after the PE kit list had been updated, and the previous generation of girls had worn pull-on skirts in thick, mid-grey, stretchy polyester with a pair of knickers in the same fabric to be worn over their underwear. The grey skirts were very short, and the idea was that a girl’s own white knickers might show if they weren’t hidden by something exactly the same colour as the rest of the outfit. Those over-knickers were a useful step towards preserving modesty.
In my time, the grey skirt was out but its matching knickers remained. Our PE skirt was a wraparound maroon-coloured number pleated at the back, flat at the front, and held with a few centimetres of Velcro at a point half way around before being fastened with a catch running on a track a bit like a zip, but not. It’s hard to describe it, but trust me, that catch didn’t catch.
The potential saving grace of a short length of Velcro is entirely irrelevant, it seems, when one’s skirt catch fails halfway along the 100m track on a windy day and one’s whole skirt blows open and then off altogether.
I heard cheers from the boys’ parallel class, who’d been distracted from chucking javelins at each other, I’d learned later, by the sight of me running along the track clad, on my lower half, in only my grey PE knickers. I, on the other hand, had no idea until after I’d reached the finish line that my skirt and I had parted company after only 50 metres.
Rather than allowing me to ask one of the other girls to fetch it for me from halfway along the track, Mrs Y made me go and get it myself. Yes, in those hideous knickers, which didn’t even match the stupid garment they were supposed to be paired with.
🙄
When I was 13 or 14, our senior school Sports Day moved from the grass playing field to an athletic stadium a coach ride away in Brighton. Here were such luxuries as changing rooms, water fountains and vending machines, and the running track was an impressive 400m circuit made out of weird-looking stuff called tartan. Until then, the only tartan I’d ever heard of was this kind:
Turns out they meant this:
I tried to hide my disappointment, although this was clearly the potato-and-spoon race scandal all over again.
🙄
I don’t know if the powers-that-be had messed up their calculations for participant numbers, but I somehow found myself as one of only four runners in a 400m heat in which the first three finishers would qualify for the next round. I looked around at my competitors and was dismayed to realise that although two were avid runners keen to progress, the remaining girl was someone whom I was aware shared my low opinion of sport in general and of Sports Day in particular. I didn’t want to not try, but I really needed to come last.
The 400m distance was beyond anything I’d ever tried before, so the chances were fairly good that my lungs would blow up or I’d break a leg or something well before I reached the finish line. In full confidence that some such medical emergency would save me from the more alarming risk of having to run again in the next round, I set off.
The other girl won. No, not the heat, silly, but our two-girl race to be last.
‘What happened to you?’ I couldn’t believe that she’d made it around the track even slower than I had. ‘Have you hurt yourself?’
‘No, I’m fine!’ she said, almost skipping away. ‘I didn’t want to run again, and anyway, it’s much easier going as slow as you can possibly get away with.’
She was barely even out of breath.
I ran the next stage of the 400m competition, and even put in as much effort as I had the energy to muster into reaching the finishing line not too far behind everyone else. Heck, I was proud not to have disgraced myself.
I mean, you’ve got to try, right? Unless, that is, you’re being asked to engage with a potato in an egg-and-spoon race.
Love,
Rebecca
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I wonder why PE seems to be a magnet for terrible teachers. My 7th and 8th grade (ages 13-14) teacher, Miss Ayers, was a gorgon. My stomach hurt every day before PE. I was a fast runner so of course she focused on making me climb up the scary rope and play ball games where I couldn’t really see the ball.
Ah, dearest Rebecca. Hilarious. And oh so familiar. I remember those little skirts! I could never do them up properly either! I already detest Mrs Y by the way. There have been some dreadful teachers over the years. Sigh…. A wonderful read. Thanks so much. 🤗🤗❤️💕