The Sogginess of the Long-Distance Runner

The Sogginess of the Long-Distance Runner

After decades of deep thought and painful reflection, I have reached the conclusion that sideways rain was invented on the playing fields of Foxwood School on Seacroft estate in Leeds. It was certainly the place where I first saw it, where I have seen it the most times and where I have seen it at its worst. However, I’m not so rigidly loyal to my roots that I would suggest this might be a weather phenomenon that’s exclusive to Seacroft and I’ll admit that it’s been known to exist in other locations across not only Britain, but also the world. I’ve even witnessed it myself in faraway places.

On the days that that I’ve seen it make appearances at the Cliffs of Moher on Ireland’s Atlantic coast it’s always looked spectacularly quite at home. It was significantly less welcome as it lashed incessantly against the walls of the tent during my intrepid attempt to survive a whole August week with my three young children on a campsite near Pwllheli in north-west Wales some years ago. On a particularly sad occasion I remember it causing great distress to the finalists of the homemade Victoria sponge cake competition at the 1984 Gipton village summer fête, which was later described as ‘the fête worse than death’ as a consequence of the devastating conditions. But its unrivalled intensity and ever-presence on that vast expanse of windswept steppes leading down from the graffiti-daubed walls and broken windows of the boys’ changing rooms at my old school to the cappuccino waters of the stream that marked its boundary undoubtedly categorises the area as the global epicentre of cockeyed precipitation. There are meteorologists, geography teachers, creationists, taxi drivers and pedants who will hotly disagree, but I know that I am right.

It was Mr Charles, the P.E. and games master who invented it. He’d gone into the teaching profession in the mid-1960s and was such a natural at his job that by 1972 he’d exhausted all of the macabre practices that he’d been taught at a teacher training college somewhere between York and Hades. So he set about the task of creating new ones. When he wasn’t inflicting anguish he seemed like a cheery sort of a fellow and did a lot of good in the community. He was always happy to visit former pupils in prison and he donated to charity every penny of the proceeds from the torture chamber in the hand-hewn dungeon beneath his three-bed semi in Swarcliffe. Although quite chipper himself, he just loved seeing others endure misery and, for the third year class that I was an unfortunate member of, extremes of weather seemed to be the perfect approach. In an early edition of the Observer’s Book of Wretchedness there was a colour plate of the Charles C. Charles Sideways Rain blueprint in which my mates and I were listed as part of the technical specifications.

Our class’s games lessons always took place on Monday mornings when most of us had already been made to feel quite miserable by the mere fact that we were at school. We’d much rather have been at the local mine pushing truckloads of coal up to the surface for a farthing a month, or at home listening to our parents harping on about how easy life was for the kids of today, or at home listening to our parents’ awful Carpenters records.

As we dragged ourselves into a changing room that reeked of stale sweat and disinfectant we’d never know what particular sporting hell we were going to be put through that week. Nervous eyes fixed on Charlesy as he flicked through the pages of his teachers’ note book, trying to give the impression that there was some sort of carefully planned curricular schedule in place. He’d almost always tell us that we’d be playing football because then at least a few of us might show a little enthusiasm. Those of us who weren’t intent on becoming glam rock stars had notions of going on to play the game at a professional level, so we needed to get the practice in. Whenever he suggested something other than football there would be a string of excuses from desperate young people trying to get out of it.

‘Forgot my kit Sir’ would be heard at least half a dozen times. Others would say ‘Got a cough Sir’, the braver ones deliberately mumbling these words to sound more like ‘Go fuck off Sir’. Notes from parents would be demanded and works of fiction forged on buses on the way to school that morning would be handed over. I don’t know why any of us bothered with these hand-written get-out clauses because they were always crumpled up and thrown in the bin by the teacher, irrespective of whether they were counterfeit or genuine. Not having a games kit to wear didn’t help as vests and pants served as adequate substitutes as far as Sergeant Major Charles was concerned.

‘I’ve got the shits Sir and I asked me mam for a note Sir but she went to Coldcotes school when she was a kid Sir and all the teachers there are crap Sir so they didn’t teach her proper Sir so she can’t read and write Sir’ stuttered Jeffrey Livesley in a state of utter panic on one occasion. The real reason for not having a parents’ written request for him to be excused from the lesson was that he himself hadn’t quite mastered the art of writing words of more than three letters. To be able to announce a case of diarrhoea on paper was beyond his wildest dream.

‘Did I say football? Oh I meant cross country.’ Before finishing his sentence Mr Charles started looking round to see how many young souls he had destroyed. The answer was always in excess of thirty as swift back-handed slaps and detentions were distributed to thwart the barrage of foul-mouthed complaints from the mouths of innocent fourteen-year-olds.

Somebody at Leeds Education Committee, who I imagined to be a nerdy little maggot sitting at a desk in a windowless room at the end of a gloomy corridor with only his lunchbox containing jam sandwiches for company, had made a terrible decision. He or she had decided that cross country running was a winter sport at the city’s schools. I probably wouldn’t have minded so much if we had been able to partake in this sadistic ritual on summer days instead, when the sideways rain was a little warmer, or if the maggot had been forced to join us on our character-building sporting ordeal. And really, I think I preferred the puffing and panting over the fields in nature’s dampest dampness to playing rugby which seemed to involve a lot of lying face down in the mud and being unable to move whilst impaled on the studs of another victim’s boot. Hockey, despite having similar rules to football, caused even more distress as each team member was armed with a lethal wooden weapon. 

The soggy Seacroft micro-climate had caused every soil particle for miles to merge with its neighbour and coagulate into the mother of all horrible sticky messes. The playing fields that lay before us seemed to produce a disgusting sucking and slurping noise long before we ever set foot into the quagmire, as if inviting us to our sludgy deaths. The whole area was one big mud bath so horrendous that even the school hippopotamus had refused to go near, and Siegfried Sassoon had written poems about it.

Nobody had heard of sportswear brands like Nike or Adidas in those days. We all wore the same standard blue and yellow reversible rugby shirts and white shorts from Rawcliffe’s, the recommended school uniform supplier which was undoubtedly the world’s most hated shop. The school kids, the parents and the shop assistants detested the annual visit in equal measure. The kids hated the uniforms, the parents hated the cost and the staff hated the kids. The week before the autumn term started the shop was always very busy but I used to wonder what they did there for the rest of the year after the cruel ‘Back to School’ posters had been taken down. 

Football boots were bought either at Wakefield’s Army & Navy Stores or from a dodgy stall in the darkest corner of Kirkgate market in the city centre where customers weren’t allowed to try on potential purchases because of the ongoing verruca epidemic. I would have killed for a verruca as the school’s infection control rules would have meant at least six weeks away from having my face and bare knees lacerated by Charlesy’s sideways rain. These football boots that set parents back by the best part of two quid were considered to be all-purpose sporting footwear. This suited Mr Charles because no pupil could ever claim to have brought the wrong boots to school, and it suited the parents because it meant that they only had to part with the best part of two quid once per academic year. The label on the box said nothing about them not being suitable for rugby, hockey or cross country running. By lying about my height I managed to avoid taking part in the summer sports at school so, although I can’t be certain of this, I wouldn’t rule out the possibility of football boots being worn by those less fortunate than myself for games of cricket, tennis or croquet.

I must admit that running through the heavy mud in those clumsy boots made my sporting feat even more impressive as layer after layer accumulated on what had looked like feet at the point of leaving home in the morning but which resembled early medieval defensive earthworks less than an hour later. Carting around so much muck required a great deal of effort and consequently did a lot to develop my thigh and calf muscles. Over the decades the Foxwood mud principle was enhanced and adopted by joggers across the globe. It’s been proven that running with weights makes a runner stronger, thus improving speed and endurance. It also strengthens the joints to reduce the likelihood of impact injuries. But we thought of it first, or at least our merciless games teacher did.

Mr Charles’ cross country events always began on the asphalt surface of the playground so that he didn’t get his shoes dirty. With the straggly participants lined up in a straggly row he would simply shout ‘go’, or words to that effect, to commence the proceedings. We didn’t have a starting pistol but I can imagine that in that part of Leeds today they would have a real gun to do the job. Although I was no fan of the actual running, I was always pleased when the race got underway because for almost an hour we would be out of range of the speed and sting of our taskmaster’s tongue and hand. Hobbling down the hill, thirty-odd spotty-faced teenage spectres would be seen to take on a pinkish-purple hue with brown flecks as a plague of mud-spattered goose pimples struck. As schoolboys wept, onlookers laughed in the gardens of nearby council houses. Insults, and sometimes stones, were thrown in both directions.

Foxwood’s playing fields didn’t really meet the size requirements for maximising suffering in students so we were instructed to cross a narrow body of water labelled on explorers’ charts as ‘The Wyke Beck’ and run a bit further, traversing the stretch of wild wasteland beyond. Mr Charles wouldn’t be able to see us there but neither would a police helicopter or an ambulance crew. Nevertheless, for all its dangers it was always a partial relief to arrive there as negotiating the stream was a traumatic event in itself. I use the word ‘partial’ because returning to the original side to complete the circuit was equally dangerous.

There were three crossing points. What you might imagine to be the safest of these was actually the most perilous. A small but sturdy ironwork footbridge formed a short interruption to the muddiness of the track and its railings would have been ideal to lean on for a few minutes while young athletes got their breaths back, but only a fool would go there. The problem was that it was a social gathering place for kids older than us who had left school and not got jobs or who should have been at school but were playing truant (or leggin’ it, as we would have said in our Yorkshire tongue). Their social skills could all be graded as somewhere between menacing and ferocious. It was easy to distinguish the truants from the unemployed as the former group would have a couple of inches of their school ties poking out from hiding places in trouser pockets. The latter lot would have each invested their dole money in a smart Crombie coat with a Yorkshire rose badge roughly sewn, stapled or glued onto the breast pocket. From a pocket in their Levi's Sta-Prest trousers their mum’s dishcloth would dangle, to be completely removed only when it was required for wiping mud from their highly polished oxblood, twenty lace hole, Dr Marten’s boots. Seacroft simply oozed style in those semi-halcyon days of the early 1970s.

‘Got any cigs kid?’ was their battle cry. Kids who had cigarettes would see them confiscated before having their shins kicked. Kids who had no cigarettes to offer would receive kicks on their shins a bit harder than those suffered by the generous smoking kids. Kids who showed any resistance to the oppressive regime of shirkers would get a full body kicking and be thrown into the beck.

Other crossing points were available. Two or three hundred metres upstream the obstacle was spanned by a closed sewage pipe. However, this was difficult to climb onto as there remained rusty shreds of evidence of it once having been protected by barbed wire. Anybody who became unsteady whilst negotiating the convex surface would graze their knees on the concrete structure as they slid down before falling into the beck at the point where the water was probably at its deepest.

Another option was the council estate equivalent of stepping stones. Reaching the opposite bank by means of this makeshift causeway constructed from discarded car tyres, prams and oil cans required nerves of steel. At first glance it looked reasonably solid but its uneven and slippery qualities rendered it hazardous and again at a point where the beck was worryingly deep. To find yourself standing up to your thighs in freezing cold water was bad enough but it was even worse if you’d fallen through the rotting panels of an old wooden door to get there and then got stuck.

A few of my friends and I would just accept that we were going to get our feet wet and choose to walk through the water at our secret place where we knew it was only ankle deep. This made the socks soggy and uncomfortable but at least we had the advantage of some of the mud being washed off our boots. Without this minor cleansing process, we would never have managed to do a sprint finish.

It didn’t matter how bad we were at running as long as we went all out hell for leather for the final uphill four hundred metres. If Mr Charles saw us moving quickly and then gasping for breath, he would think that we had been taking the lesson seriously and putting some effort in. Other non-sprinting classmates would be out of breath because they had stopped to smoke a cig with the truants and the jobless. It didn’t seem to matter how we had gone about it, but as long as there were signs of lung failure at the finish line we got a pat on the back from the teacher who, of course, would be wearing gloves because he didn’t want to get his hands dirty and wet from our saturated clothing.

Later in life I described these distressing circumstances to people of my generation who had attended other seats of learning in Leeds. ‘Oh, it wasn’t like that at our school,’ they would say. ‘It only drizzled at our school.’ Foxwood School was demolished in 2009 but, to this day, Charlesy’s laugh can still be heard as ghostly sideways rain whips against the barren land that was once its playing fields.

Our school did, miraculously, produce a number of outstanding sports people in its time, the most notable being Ellery Hanley (the former Leeds and Great Britain rugby league captain) and David Harvey (the former Leeds United and Scotland goalkeeper). The fact that Foxwood’s list of sporting elite includes neither me nor any long distance runners is probably not surprising.                      

And finally…

Ladies and gentlemen, the story you have just read is true-ish. Only the names have been changed to protect me. I’m still in touch with one of my school teachers from those days. Thanks to the wonders of modern technology, she sometimes reads what I write and I’m still a little bit scared of her even though she’s in her late seventies and we live 3,000 kilometres apart.

Image:

My own photograph of me on the croquet lawn at Foxwood School in Leeds, circa 1972.