My Natural History Read Online Free PDF Page A

that matter, no thwarted artistry, no sense of destiny, still less of superiority. They were just years without passion: years without much meaning: years in limbo. Perhaps that is what this awkward period of life is supposed to be like: neither child nor man, not even a teenager, in any exacting sense of the term. I was just some one who did homework – we called it prep – and watched telly and made jokes about the teachers. A time of nothing: a time in life’s waiting room.
    My limited popularity initially went to my head. I was at Emanuel School; you can see it as you pass southwards from Clapham Junction, heading for either Wimbledon or Streatham: the line splits and passes either side of the school. There was a school review called Between the Lines . At the time, it was a lapsed public school, its clientele unrestrainedly middle class. I was no longer a misfit. The pupils of Emanuel were a great deal more like me than the pupils of Sunnyhill: but all the same, I wanted to be a great deal more like them than I was. I wanted to be a conformist, I wanted to be a fitter-inner. I wanted to havea place: and it seemed to me that the way to do this was by means of sport. There were disadvantages to this plan: the greatest of which was the fact that there was no sport that I was any good at. I was still undersized, physically insignificant ; I did most of my growing later, in a great hurry, after every one else had stopped.
    The school played rugby. I was determined to make my lack of size an advantage: I would be the most elusive runner the school had ever seen, or at least, the best in my class, or form, as we called it. But I lacked pace, I lacked physical resilience, I lacked the taste for manly encounters in the mud. I didn’t care for tackling or being tackled, though in this I was hardly unique. After a couple of weeks’ trial, I was a failure and sent off to play in the useless-buggers games while the half-decent players were trained up to represent the school. The games my lot played were awful. They were painful for the participants and they must have been agony for any of the teachers (masters, we called them) who actually cared about sport. No one cared who won. No one wanted to be out there in the cold and the mud. We only did it because there was no escape. No one tackled. The worst that might happen to a ball-carrier was to be seized in a half-hearted embrace. No one went to ground if it was at all avoidable: one of the objects of the game was to get as little mud on you as possible , and so avoid the post-match shower. Scrums were a torment: no one wanted to be in a hugger-buggering massof 15 others, in serious danger of getting dirty. I was once, absurdly, sent to play hooker as punishment by our understandably frustrated captain. He thought I wasn’t trying, and reader, he was right. I gleefully punted the ball into the opposition scrum every time it came to me.
    We didn’t have many good runners, but we were all great passers. There was always a danger of getting tackled , or at least embraced, if you happened to be carrying the ball, for the ball was like the black spot, the runes that were cast in the MR James story: a portent of doom unless you could somehow divert the furies onto someone else. It follows that one of the signature moves of these games was the pass into touch: if by some mischance you had the ball, and were forced to run with it, and then saw a decent-sized opponent ahead, you passed the ball, obviously. If there was no colleague in sight – and there was always a curious melting-away in the face of anyone who might be considering a proper tackle – you passed the ball over the white line and so avoided the dreaded embrace. We neither got fit nor enjoyed ourselves, nor fulfilled any useful function . If we learned team ethics it was in the shared desire to avoid anything that sport of this kind could offer. Those games have stayed in mind as the ultimate expression of the futility