A decline, a fall, a grazed knee and a sticker – sports day is looming
The summer term in English schools is an uneasy time – a curious mixture of the languorous and the febrile. Ahead lie the sunlit uplands of the school holidays, but before reaching them, the unfortunate pupils must scale the Hill of Difficulty of examinations, and the Valley of Humiliation that is school sports day.
Take a quantity of children, of varying size and physical prowess. Put spoons in their little hands, balance eggs on them and make them run as fast as they can. Whoopsie-daisy! Never mind! It’s only a little scratch. Now, let’s tie your leg to Sarah’s. Off you go! Oh dear! No need for that, Sarah, she didn’t do it on purpose. And so on.
The possibilities for tears, humiliation and permanent psychological trauma are endless. Which is why in some educational circles there has flourished a fashion for non-competitive sports days. Not everyone is keen on these. In 2014, Harry Wallop wrote aggrievedly in The Daily Telegraph of the “complete lack of competition” at his children’s sports day, where stickers with “1st! Congratulations” and “2nd Place. Well Done!” were handed out at random.
But now it seems the thinking has changed again, with more schools returning to the competitive model: “I think we should be able to celebrate a child who can run like the wind,” said Victoria Keen, headteacher of Taxal and Fernilee Church of England Primary School in Derbyshire, where competitive sports days were reintroduced three years ago. So is it back to the harsh old days of triumph for the few, recriminations for the many? Perhaps it is more complicated than that.
Some years ago I went to visit an old friend who worked as a matron at a public school. When I arrived, she announced that her boys were playing another school at rugby. Our afternoon would be spent on the touchline, bellowing “Play up, St Custard’s!”
The two sides were in their early teens. Our lot were beardless youths with soprano voices and the mild eccentricity of the very clever. The scrum-half confided that once the match was over, he planned to continue working on his cantata.
The other side were indistinguishable from the All Blacks in size and demeanour. They didn’t actually perform a haka, but it wasn’t necessary. The trembling of the ground as they advanced onto the pitch was alarming enough. The final result was not in doubt. “Won’t they feel crushed?” I said to Matron as we went indoors for some restorative gin. “Not them,” she said. “By suppertime they’ll have turned it into a funny story.”
While their fleeter classmates polish their winners’ cups, the uncoordinated, the weedy, myopic and hopelessly vague, who would rather be working on their cantatas than running like the wind, can always find consolation in satire. “Few associated games with pleasure,” wrote Evelyn Waugh of his schooldays in his memoir,
A Little Learning. “They were a source of intense competition, anxiety and recrimination to those who excelled; of boredom and discomfort to those who were bad at them.”
If Waugh Mi. had managed to avoid competitive games at Lancing, his schooldays might have been happier, but the loss to generations of readers would have been incalculable: deprived of the savage (but strangely recognisable) description in Decline and Fall of that most anarchic of scholastic traditions, the school sports day.