School Sports Day

Colours. Track. Sunlight.

Lines wheel-drawn in chalk, then brushed aside, almost, with a footstep. Grey gravel, spotted after lunch with passing raindrops. Yellow and blue everywhere – blurred now and then with speed of passage. Adults wearing red. Batons passed. Discus frisbeed with its own gravity – landing, clattering and sliding. Shot putt thumping; an occasional groan of effort. Distances measured – shouted – recorded. Scores settled. Wooden centipedes raced at a snail’s pace - left! right! left! right! – shouts like political swings of indecision.

Shiny medals – gold, silver, bronze, red ribbons, blue ribbons. A podium climbed in achievement. Smiles and handshakes – laughter and hugs. A studied pose from those too cool to admit their winning excitement.

The wall. The man in charge says it’s like going upstairs, but it isn’t: it’s terrifying. I know it is. And yet a few make it look easy – scaling like monkeys, assured and nimble. I hold my breath as somebody misses a footing, but the ropes and pulleys are secure. The clouds slip past on the breeze as I look up, white against blue, time on fast forward.

Leaping – long and high. Either. Both. The bar is raised – and raised – and raised. The cheering grows louder and echoing in the hall; it dances around the rooftop as the rain begins outside. Higher. Gravity is defied and rivalry is measured by the centimetre. Spectators gather like starlings on a telegraph wire as the afternoon grows greyer, colder.


Someone has dressed in a person-sized flip flop to promote a charity event next day. There’s ice cream and chocolate, fizzy drinks and burgers and sweets. Games of football erupt like volcanoes, everywhere, their ash cloud the dust from the gravel, which is disrupting nobody. Speech bubbles of laughter drift, cartoonishly, from everyone, and as if by magic we’re all doing what we never do. A Historian leaps across the high jump bar. Economists fling the discus. Suddenly it’s as though all the trapping misery of exam season happened to someone else, as tannoy and loud-hailer echo above the laughter.

The clouds grow darker and it’s time to change for home. Friends drift back to classrooms – complicit in talk and nearness. The bars and measures, the podium and medals, the discus and the javelin and shot are brought back to the storeroom once again. The microphone falls silent as the tannoy is disconnected, disassembled. The crash mats and the laughter are slipped away. Our revels now are ended.