Any Human Heart Read Online Free PDF

encouragement and despair carried faintly to us over the sodden grass. We had one spectator, Mr Whitt, our assistant housemaster and theoretical coach of the house side, who, after we kicked off, bellowed and screamed on the touchline as if he were at a cup final. The teams were equally matched in terms of their deficiencies: balls were dropped, tackles fluffed, penalties missed. At half-time the score was 3-0 to Giffords’.
    I was slowly accustomizing myself to life in the scrum, which seemed mainly to involve galloping about the field chasing the ball (which I didn’t touch once in the first half). This herd-like meandering was interrupted by whistle blasts, when we would line up for a throw-in or a scrum down. The two packs would face each other and then interlock. We then became a 32-legged, human beetle trying to evacuate an oval leather ball. I knew the two props on either side of me: improbably named Brown and Smith (Smith minor, in fact, Smith senior was head boy). Brown was a muddy enthusiast, tireless and full of get-up-and-go; Smith minor — who has truly distressing acne — is a miscreant poseur like me. It was strange to be in the curious dark cave of the scrum: so many heads and faces so close to each other, strange smells and exhalations, strange cheeks rubbing against yours, arms gripping your thighs, and the mixed shovings and heavings against your buttocks, aimless exhortations ringing in your ears, the scrumhalf with the ball screaming instructions (at, I suppose, me): ‘Ready, Soutar! Wheel right! Wheel right! Hold it! Coming, one, two, three!’ And there was the sodden dirty ball at my feet and I would hack away trying to heel it out and back, sometimes succeeding, sometimes not, as everyone around me grunted and heaved and swore. This is not sport, I was thinking: give me my lonely, chilly isolation out on the left wing — at least there I could look at the landscape and the sky.
    And then the ball would be out of the scrum. The shouts and instructions would become more distant and we would break out of our crab-like clinch, look around to see where the game was and lumber off in pursuit. I have to confess I was in a state of some despair as we neared the end of the match: I was filthy, covered in mud, exhausted and I had no real idea how the score had reached 9-all.
    Then something happened in our half — a three-quarter kicked ahead and there was a fumble by the opposing full-back. Confusion, the ball over the line, fallen upon by one of the defending side. A tweet on the whistle and a drop-out on the twenty-five was ordered. Now I knew, from my perusal of the rule-book, that it was one of the hooker’s duties to confront the kicker of the 25-yard drop-out, to face him down and distract him as best he could. So I jogged up to the opponents’ 25-yard line, my boots as heavy as a deep-sea diver’s, my breath coming in great hoarse pants and with steam rising, it appeared, from every part of my body, from my shoulders and my bare knees. I still don’t know what made me do it, but, as I saw their fly-half stepping up to take the drop-kick, I simultaneously flung myself up and forward, arms raised in a vain attempt, at the very least, to put him off his stride. It worked: he kicked badly, low and hard, not high and hanging, and the ball blasted into the side of my face with such velocity that it rebounded a good twenty yards, close enough to the enemy line for one of our nippier three-quarters to dart in, snatch the ball up and score under the posts. Try converted — five points — victory to Soutar’s, 14-9.
    The side of my face was on fire. I remember that once my mother slapped me on the cheek for some misdemeanour and the same pulsing, peppery, eye-watering heat was the result. The scarred wet leather of the ball left a smarting red weal across my left cheek and on my forehead above the left eye: my face felt molten, my flesh prickly and seared.
    People — team-mates — were slapping me