The twins had their primary school sports yesterday.
Along with the traditional sprint and hurdles (over tiny jumps) they “competed” in a range of novelty events including an egg-and-spoon race (with a golf ball instead of an egg), sack race, goal kicking and minkey (hockey).
It brought back memory fragments of my school sports at St Michael’s in the mid 70s. I can only remember us running a sprint and a relay.
In the early years we competed on the fire track in Kay Street, Traralgon, next to the school. In later years we went to the hockey grounds at Agnes Brereton Park and the soccer grounds at Harold Preston Park.
Diverting for a moment, fire tracks were common in country towns back then and brigades used to have competitions. I think they still do, but you don’t hear much about it.
Anyhow, I have one strange recollection of school sports; that we used to do marching.
We practised for this too. Hours of parading up and down with no apparent purpose except the struggle to keep in formation. I don’t remember there being music, just the constant drill of marching.
We started with: “Left, left, left, right, left”.
I can’t fathom the purpose of this. It’s like a throwback to wartime militarism, perhaps a legacy of that period.
The marching faded out of my life. I’m not sure if that’s when I left St Michael’s in 1978 or earlier.
I’ve mentioned this on my Facebook wall in case anyone I know can remember more.
UPDATE: A quick reply from Anne B on Facebook: “Yes and we did have music and I remember it so well. Our outside lines had to take bigger steps and the inside lines had to do little steps when we turned and I even remember clearly the boy beside me once when we stopped and he peed all down his legs.”
