Good Sport: Ian Wilson recalls the personal indignities of PE

Baggy cotton shorts – in the school colours of black with a white stripe up the sides – billowed around our five year old legs, and white singlets flapped in the gusty winds of early autumn as we stood in a circle around our kindergarten teacher and embarrassedly chanted:

“Stand up straight like letter ‘I’ Hands at side and head held high – If you stand like letter ‘C’ Curly-wurly you will be.” Focusing perhaps rather more on instruction in posture and elocution (“Ian and Hugh, do speak clearly, stop gabbling.”) this was, nevertheless, my introduction to PE.

However, many of us were to remember with nostalgia piping Miss Deane’s gentle doggerel while her flailing arms conducted this awful choir. All too soon we had graduated to the intender tutelage of an ex-army PE instructor with a penchant for punishments. An excruciating example was that the last boy to get dressed after the lesson – and thus guilty of ‘being as slow as an old woman’ – had to leave ‘the gym’ wearing an enormous woman’s hat which the “Captain” had borrowed from the school’s costume wardrobe.

Want to read more of this article?
We are proud to be a ​subscriber-funded publication with members in 185 countries. We know our readership is passionate about textiles, so we invite you to help us preserve and promote the stories, memories, and histories that fabric holds. Your support allows us to publish our magazine, and also ‘what's on’ information, and subscription interviews, reviews, and ​long-read articles in our online blog. 

ALREADY A SUBSCRIBER? CLICK HERE TO ACCESS CONTENT

OR...to continue reading….


*Magazine subscribers automatically get free access to all our online content. We send the access code by email with the publication of each issue. You will also find it on the envelope containing your magazine. Please note the access code changes every issue.*