[This is for a volume of reminiscences about my old school by former pupils. The first instalment is here.]
It would not be true to say that my passion for sport was born during my years at Northlea, since I'd already become hooked on cricket in the year or two before I arrived there, taking an interest in the Ashes series of 1954-55 when Tyson and Statham blew Australia away, and in the gripping but ultimately disappointing fortunes of Jack Cheetham's Springboks in the English summer of 1955. Before that I'd had a thing about boxing. Still, when I think back to those Northlea years, an important part of what I remember is school sport. It certainly contributed to the enthusiasm that had already begun to form.
I was never any good at anything in this department, though not for lack of interest or want of trying. I just didn't have the necessary skills. At cricket I fancied for a while that I might develop into an offspin bowler, following the example of my then hero Hugh 'Toey' Tayfield - whom I saw bowling England to defeat at the Wanderers cricket ground in Johannesburg in February 1957, when he finished with 9 for 113 on the last day, and an overall match analysis of 13 for 192 - but at that time, as in later years, the slow offbreaks I bowled, apart from not turning very much, were indeed so slow that any half-way competent batsman would have had time to change his pads between the moment of delivery and the ball's arrival at his end and still have been able to shape up comfortably for clobbering it to hell and gone. The clobbering part happened regularly. As a batsman I was also no good, and that has remained the case in adult life - in the not very many games I've taken part in. I am nearly always out caught somewhere not very far from the wicket. The sequence is typically this. I expect to be out within a delivery or two; but I usually surprise myself by seeing the ball and managing to middle it a few times, possibly even scoring a run, or a couple of runs, or maybe seven. From this I experience a rush of confidence. 'Hey, this is easy!' I tell myself. I decide that the next ball is going way over the infield and to the boundary. But I lack the judgement, the timing and the strength to execute this intention, and so I am invariably caught and off I trudge ignominiously.
Consequently, I didn't often make it on to any Northlea cricket team. I think I played a game or two for the Under 15 Bs or some such, and I was scorer a few more times than that. I seem to remember travelling to a school near Gwelo (as was) for one or another of these purposes. Was the school Guinea Fowl? In any case, that is my Northlea cricket career. And to think it might have gone untold!
Such sporting glory as I have known in my life (and it isn't much) came through rugby. This wasn't due to any talent, but simply to the fact that at the age of 16 I was big enough - and not so completely hopeless - that in 1960 I made the Northlea First XV as a prop forward. For the one or two moments of glory this yielded, however, there was a lot of suffering. My experience of every game of rugby I ever played in was one of being hugely out of breath, struggling to keep up with the play, getting up from one scrum, or ruck, or maul, only to see that I was late for the next one, and so forth. As for actually being in possession of the ball, this was for me a rare and dangerous experience. I particularly remember one practice game, not at Northlea itself but at a ground somewhere near North End - a game in which, miraculously, I contrived to get hold of the ball and was even running with it, when I was brought down in a crunching tackle by a guy called Hercules Van Tonder. Well, when you were tackled by Hercules, you stayed tackled. I could scarcely get up; when I finally managed to, I was capable only of hobbling pathetically. Raymond Suttle, who as well as teaching Latin was our rugby master, had a nice line in encouragement. He chose this moment to urge upon me that, should Hercules Van Tonder get possession of the ball any time soon, I might like to reciprocate his attentions. Yeah, right. The idea of my putting in a tackle like that on anybody was fanciful. On Hercules, forget about it.
In cricket I sustained the hope for a year or two that I one day might amount to something. In rugby I never had any such illusions. Rugby was at best toil, and for much of the time fear of injury. One such occasion was when we arrived for a game at Alan Wilson High School in Salisbury (now Harare), and I saw a couple of their guys ambling about, who turned out to be their lock forwards. I mean, these weren't boys, they were giants; they could have been playing for Mashonaland. Fear eats the soul. Fortunately, I have no recollection of the game that followed. I can only assume that I've repressed it because nothing good happened.
So where, you will be asking, was the glory? True, there was some pride in knowing that I was in the same team with guys who really could play rugby. I have the team photo here in front of me:
Back row: Dave Halley, Noel Flanagan, Hercules Van Tonder, Lennie Pascoe.But what I really meant by glory was that it happened once or twice during the season in which I was a member of the First XV that Northlea played at Hartsfield - probably against Milton - as the curtain raiser to Matabeleland versus Mashonaland. To come out under the public eye at Hartsfield, the main rugby ground in Bulawayo, before a big crowd assembled for a big provincial fixture, was to taste in a small way what it might feel like to be… oh, you know, Roy Keane, or Steve Waugh, or Joost van der Westhuizen. A couple of brief moments it was - end of story.
Middle row: Philip or Rowland Simpson, Norman Geras, Dave Muzzell, Peter Hutcheon, Nige Scott, Rodney Whyte, Trevor McKenzie.
Front row: Johnny Spence, Ray Suttle (Coach), Mike Shaw, Don Berger (Captain), Bruce Scott, Mr Owen (Headmaster), Paul Shepherd.
Then, finally, there was cross country: an annual event, and therefore six times, from 1956 to 1961, part of my Northlea experience. Here, once more, I was never any good, and in a field of a hundred-and-something runners I might struggle in somewhere just this, or just the other, side of one hundredth. But, but, but... the thing was that cross country was a team event, and from the year the school began and through all the years I was at Northlea only one house ever won the cross country and that house was Balmoral. It was the house I had the good fortune to belong to. Why did Balmoral keep winning the cross country? Was it because we were all keener and more dedicated athletes, more determined, the faithful upholders of an established school tradition? Who knows, perhaps something of all this played its part. But the most basic reason was that the house master of Balmoral was - yes, it's that man again - a certain Raymond Suttle, and for several weeks before the actual event, if you were in Balmoral, you were at school some afternoons each week, training for the cross country. Maybe some guys succeeded in getting out of this duty by offering clever excuses or having cooperative parents, but if so I don't remember them.
Come the day itself, Balmoral might have only one runner in the first five places (and Steve Cooper is a name I recall in this connection), but the frequency of Balmoral runners became ever thicker after about 10th. I don't know how much of this is accurate but... Bruce and Nigel Scott, the Simpson twins, Paul Shepherd, other runners in red... they just kept rolling in. No real contest; we'd won again. No thanks to yours truly, of course, but I'd put in the effort, not only training at school as required, but devising a route of my own at home - down from Birchenough Road, across Spreckley and on to an old dirt road that came out not far from that tennis club (Parkview?), right at the corner, down to the Bulawayo jail, right again and past Hartsfield back to 6 Birchenough. In my mid-thirties I took part in the first two London marathons, something I doubt I would ever have done had I not, through school cross country, developed a taste for long-distance plodding.
Sport was part of the ethos of the school, and despite my very limited abilities in that sphere, I don't regret that it was. I've never lost my love of it.