My mind flashes back to that day in 1978, or perhaps it was 1977, when I was climbing out of the old outdoors pool at Warwick school, a place where penguins would have complained about the cold.
Moffatt A, Townsend and Petley R joined hands and rushed forward to push me back in at the deep end. My right foot was caught between the pool edge and the metal bar that ran around it and as I swallowed vast amounts of chlorinated water my ankle turned horribly. Warwick being Warwick, bullying was all part of the score and chaps like Moffatt A whose parents taught at the school and who was an all round sportsman and semi serious scholar could bully with impunity.
Masters turned a blind eye to that sort of thing just as they did to the sadism and paedophilia engaged in by their colleagues. As it happens Moffatt’s mother witnessed sadist Geoffrey Eve starting to have a go at me, shouting at me. That outburst ended with him banging my head against a set of metal lockers in the junior school changing room. But she did not intervene. She just walked away. That was just how public schools were in those terrible days.
After the pool incident my ankle swelled up like a croquet ball for a week or so but the damage never went away. Aged 19 I turned the same ankle playing basketball at Oxford. Aged 32 my rugger career came to a shuddering end, one match after making the London Irish Wild Geese. That time I could not walk for weeks. In cold weather, you can sometimes hear it click in the night.
And so yesterday, as I mowed the part of my new raised lawn that is the steepest of slopes I actually heard a noise as my ankle turned and intense pain shot through my foot. I knew it would stiffen up if I left it, so I limped on mowing a flat section of lawn. But pretty soon I was back inside the Welsh Hovel gulping down pain killers and heading for an early bed, trying to keep the swollen foot under control with extra heating.
I am limping badly today and doubt that I can complete the mowing for a couple of days though I shall try this afternoon. On reflection it does not seem as bad as after that rugby flare up. But, yet again, I find myself cursing Warwick junior school. What a terrible place it was as, one day, it will have to admit.