ON A WING AND A PRAYER

Someone said: “Let there be light.”

Someone else replied: "We need a match.”

Thus, the first Woolverstone rugby fixture was made.

Of course, there was always rugby and, if the fates had so permitted, there always would have been- not just a sport but an academic way of life. Our yellowbrick road was paved with glory stories of tackles, hand-offs, sprints. dummies and that final dive to the line.

Summer, with its overheated dormitories filled with laments of revision for exams, the fruit flies irritating one’s 440 yard rush and run, the lazy dawdles on turgid boundaries waiting to bat and the inevitable squabbles in claustrophobic common rooms, was merely a break from rugby.

September was the cruellest month. breeding hopes out of a dead future, mixing temerity with fire, stirring dull boots with sharp pain. Year after rolling year, the autumn term would bring in the new intake of little possibilities. These initiates would quickly be introduced to our religion at the opening of ceremonies when each motley, misshapen group of small Lowry figures would bend angular in the blustery cold of a windswept Orwell Side. Dark and daunting in front of them, the High Priest and Druid of them all, Taffy Evans, would hold aloft a big, fat potato of a brown leather ball. "This ......," he would intone with deep Celtic solemnity to thirty pairs of unblinking, fearful eyes "..... is a torpedo.”

Thereafter, quickly came Stonehenge. Chaotic swarms of insect sopranos would chase big, fat potatoes up and down Berners for no apparent reason whatsoever other than to qualify for human status, albeit the amoeba of first-form variety. A few months of jigsaw puzzles and an Under 12's side was created to meet another school's challenge. It usually lost.

Nevertheless, the first hesitant steps had been taken on that five-year journey to Mecca, that Temple of Open Play, Church Field. The yellowbrick road had been discovered and all else was now meaningless. At the end of a meandering journey through experimental teams, the colts and the second fifteens, the incidence of an Open Exhibition somewhere was usually a chance to see if anyone could make a university side.

All academics paled in the shadow of that elite guard, the FIRST FIFTEEN. Each designated member of that select troop could strut his stuff around the school grounds, often decorated with those garlands of honour, the colours scarf and tie. Small boys languished on the fringes of such company, eager to chirrup laughingly at every wisecrack, anticipatory in the hope of acknowledgement of their own existence, subservient to the power of command. And what role-models, what great figures they were!

Each Saturday, young men with Himalayan measurements in height and girth would blend their assorted sculptures into a single, hard crabshell in order to scrum down. From the uneven surface of their lineouts one would surge up like a dolphin, smooth and sure to the catch. In loose play these roarers became a barracuda pack, hungry for man and ball and woe betide any poor soul who drifted into their ravaging frenzy.

Like a piranha awaiting the feast and snapping voraciously behind the forwards there would be a pocket dynamo, the scrum-half. Each of these possessed a reverse pass that could speed straight and true to the backs, revealing the truth of that old vision, the torpedo. All rugby teams have outside-halves. At Woolverstone, we had fly-halves; fly they were and fly they did. It was the one position which provided legends of different styles such as the cheeky jinks of a Codsy Coutts, the sinewy sidestep of a Rusty Gentry and the ghosting breaks of a Rashid.

The backs were the second hand of a clock, moving inexorably from the figure seven to the tryline of the figure nine and mirroring the move on the other side of the pitch. There were centres that sent opponents eight yards backwards with bullet dives into the midriff or who plummeted into the opposing line with enough force to break a clutch and squeeze the ball out to the outstretched hands of their wingmen.

Ah, yes. those Glory Boys, the wings Where else could you find such muscular sprinters with frying pan hands that flattened the faces of all would-be tacklers The roll-call was endless: Maggie Marriot, Den House, Hank Smith, Golly Golebiowski, Doug Gardner, Ollie Bentley and on and on. All the full backs needed to do was tackle and punt out of danger and so they did. No dead-ball kickers were ever needed. In those days, three points for a try was more than sufficient reward for them to win a game.

Time and again in annual procession came the old foes: RGS Colchester, Wymondham, Culford, Norwich. St. Josephs, Holbrook. Stowmarket, Bury St. Edmunds. Wave upon wave of assaults were made on the battlements of Church Field and wave upon wave was repulsed. For anyone to win at Woolverstone was to win away at Twickenham and Old Trafford on the same day.

But if all school matches were battles, then a House Match was ........ WAR! People boast of their local derbies. The passion, cunning and commitment involved in defending the honour of one's House would have provided enough material to write ten blockbusters. Spring terms began with roving squads of press-gangs scouring the hidden reaches of libraries, stamp clubs, photography labs and young farmers' societies for peasants who could run ten yards without puffing and who could catch a lobbed ball in two hands at three paces. Obesity, asthma, anaemia, myopia - no excuse was acceptable to be released from duty. Locker rooms were raided for long-lost shirts. socks, shorts and boots or for any clothing that might fit. The Home Guard conscripts were wheeled out according to size.

Plans were carefully laid, each man assigned his special task. The bonds of cross-house friendships were torn up like invidious contracts as surreptitious questions were asked in order to ascertain details of injuries, smoking habits and opposing team line-ups. Yet it was from such ill-assorted ranks that true heroes rose like a nemesis of people-power and when the calling came, few were found wanting. Many were the occasions when a school star performer would be scything through lines of apparent weakness only to be brought down by a thunderbolt tackle. Rising cautiously, he would find himself in the company of a dishevelled six-stone weed squinting apologetically at him.

Rugby found a place for everyone, enfolding its mantle around its favourite sons whilst smiling kindly on the no-hopers, the non-believers and the wishful thinkers. Who today could dare to suggest that the England team have played better games
Then why was it that - Adrian Thompson and the iconic Martin Offiah apart - we were never recognised internationally?

Perhaps the answer lies as it seems to have done in so many aspects of Old Boys' experiences in the Real World. Given the wit of our contempt for (and possible fear of) post-Woolverstonian life, like the wayfaring homeleaver, we would not have done ourselves justice. In Suffolk. we measured ourselves against our peers and aspired to gain the respect of our older "brothers". Back amongst our families and indigenous friends, we would not have cared too much for honours, having been goaded in such pursuits for five years.

Above all, I remember the laughter at school. It was usually founded upon the most callous and cutting perspective, but it was laughter all the same. After school, laughter and the social beer gatherings from which it sprang would have got in the way of single-minded ambition. The rugby players could not be committed to gain their merits so it was the writers, the actors and the creative peop1e who came through. After all, since words and wit were already part of their environment, such people as these would have had no need to train.

When one spends a good part of life looking-for the angles as I have done, it is not difficult to reflect upon the heritage from early years. We were the Jack-the-Lads, and after Woolverstone we were better-educated Jack-the-Lads. Under constant scrutiny from an ever-present, encircling academic authority, looking for the angles usually meant creating opportunities to indulge mischevous tendencies (fortunately in a drug-free atmosphere so that the mischief was somewhat tempered).

Yet it was at rugby that looking for the angles could gain the approval of the authorities as well as our peers. The angles were dummies, sidesteps, hand-offs and the occasional unseen punch, but the heavens would smile when our efforts paid off with a clear run to the tryline. The team was a brotherhood combo representing the orchestra of our school's young manhood. The 1st XV and the legacy of Woolverstonian Rugby was the success of us all.

Coming to the end of my playing career, I used to turn out as outside-half for a local 4th XV, and doleful Saturday afternoons were spent under a dome of wintry sky on a pitch in vast parklands where the frustrated shouts of middle-aged men would fill the empty air. About three times a year I was fortunate to experience that moment of magic when The Dummy took me past tired, balding opponents and deep into enemy territory. For a minuscule second I would pass through the door of a time warp when I could hear the sound of that comforting school pack thundering up behind my right shoulder whilst to my left a quartet of backs would be racing up in support and - just briefly - I'd returned to my Woolverstone again.

Back to earth wider the claustrophobic darkness of an ensuing maul, I could quietly permit the grinning face of a fifteen year-old to appear under my muddied, greying hair. This indeed became the homecoming of me.