My young nephew started boarding school last week and all of us were excited and anxious for him all at the same time. I remembered my first week at boarding school and all the new experiences to take in, the main one being that this was not home and I had to learn to adapt to living with hundreds of other girls who were all in the same boat as me.
One of the other difficult things I had to get used to was playing sport. We’re not a sporty family and in Chinese tradition, there is a veneration for “scholars” - ie “swots” to the Brits - and much less respect given to sporty types who are considered “all brawn and no brain”. So my siblings and I were never encouraged to play sports when we were in primary school in Malaysia. We all wore glasses at an early age and read lots of books. At P.E. time, my swotty friends and I would stand around on the sidelines while the other girls did star jumps etc and the teacher never tried very hard to make us join in.
So imagine my horror at being thrown out into the autumn afternoons in my first term at school in England to go and play lacrosse. The air to my tropical skin was icy. Sometimes it was grey and drizzling and in such conditions in Malaysia, we would stay indoors
or be sure we had a brolly with us. But while I hesitated on the doorstep, the other girls would pound out into the damp - and the sports mistress would hurry me along with words to the effect of: “A little bit of rain never hurt anyone”.
Lacrosse - or “lax” as the girls called it - was originally a Native-American sport. You can see a game of it in the Daniel Day-Lewis film “The Last of the Mohicans” - and it was pretty brutal, I recall. A History of Native American Lacrosse states rather ominously, “In the past, lacrosse also served to vent aggression, and territorial disputes between tribes were sometimes settled with a game, although not always amicably.” In photos of the modern American version of the game, the players wear body armour, as you can see on the right.
But we’re talking here about a British gals’ boarding school. Mention safety and body armour and you’re likely to get the response: “Stuff and nonsense, don’t be so namby-pamby - like those Americans”.
So there I was, much tinier and scrawnier than many of the solid, broad-shouldered Anglo-Saxon gals who had been brought up all their lives on brisk walks, fresh air and a belief that exercise and sport were good for you - for your health and your character. They all seemed to cradle the lax stick with natural athleticism and be able to run across the huge, enormous, vast, ginormous tracts of land that was the playing field without breaking into a paroxysm of gasping and panting and coughing. The ball is small but very heavy and yet, they could throw and catch it with the lax stick deftly and with control. My ball always just plopped onto the ground a few feet away from me - and I was terrified whenever I had to catch it ungainfully with my outstretched stick in case I missed and it hit me on the head.
But the most horrifying moment was when we were actually playing a game and I had the misfortune to be in the wrong place at the wrong time and the ball landed in my lax stick. The gals from the other team would all come bearing down on me, thundering like a herd of bison, mud kicking up in clumps. My team-mates would be calling to me to pass them the ball or to run into an opening but invariably, I’d scamper about rather ineffectually or just plain freeze.
Now, the thing about lax is that it all happens around the level of your head. You cradle the lax stick upright, the netty bit holding the ball switching back and forth in front of your face as you run. If someone is trying to get the ball off you, they whack your stick with theirs to knock the ball out. You’re supposed to body block them, twisting the stick away from attack.
So imagine a herd of thundering bison storming down at you brandishing lax sticks as if about to swipe your head off.
It just seemed so much easier to give the ball to them - like what you’re supposed to do if you’re ever mugged. Just give them the wallet or the money. Or the ball. So I’d make a pathetic attempt to throw the ball - not a proper pass to one of my team-mates but more a “here, take it, I don’t want it” kind of a gesture.
And off they would thunder, scrumming after the ball, trying to pick it up from the mud or tackling another braver gal, cracking and whacking at each other’s sticks. And I’d be left alone. Relieved and alive.
These days I’m a little bit more robust and a little bit more sporty. I go for runs. I even run in the rain. I’ve turned British, after all. But whenever there’s a team sport - like at various law firms where I’ve worked, some bright spark rustles up a game of football or rounders with another law firm or a client - my heart sinks and my stomach turns itself into knots. OK, it’s not lax or anything terrifying they’re proposing but the trauma and humiliation of team lacross and letting my team-mates down has scarred me for life!
Photos: thanks to devilblink via flickr.com and sportcamp101.com
A new publisher, SlushPileReader.com has just launched where authors can submit their manuscripts and readers can vote on whether or not that manuscript should be published as a book. 
To start off this globetrotting journey, I came across the photoblog, 
