My Animal Life(18)

I have always loved, and enjoyed, my body, though I didn’t listen to what it told me. I liked being able to run and climb. I approved of my body; it did what it should. I had to be a tomboy, to be like my brothers, but I also remember distinctly, aged thirteen, looking in the mirror and seeing new breasts above my ribcage. Yes, I thought smugly, just as I expected, they are coming out perfectly, as they would (later, of course, I would learn, through pain, that the body I loved was imperfect, frangible). I enjoyed, above all, the sensation of speed, for I had always been a good runner, which translated, with age, into being a sprinter, a skill which stood me in good stead at school. The very children who tormented me gave me a half-admiring nickname: ‘MG Fast Car’, said as all one word, because I could get away from them, and I often had to, on the way home, as they pursued me, half-serious, down the church path. I preferred it so much to ‘Gee-gee’, or the worst name of all, ‘Dobbin’s daughter’, which cut me to the quick because it meant my father, Mr Gee the secondary school headmaster, was secretly called ‘Dobbin’ by my classmates’ elder brothers. ‘MG-Fast-Car’ was expensive, racy.

Being able to run got me grudging respect, whereas doing well at lessons caused only hatred, in that village school in Billingshurst where out of forty-three children in Mr Upton’s class, only ‘me and Ivor Laker’ passed the eleven plus and got into grammar school. But everyone had bodies. Everyone did sport.

Both my parents had been athletic, my father a footballer and middle distance runner, my mother a sprinter, hurdler, hockey-player, with the result that they became perhaps too involved in my success as a teenage athlete. But races can only have one winner. Mostly I did win my races at school, and in my fourth year at grammar school, just before I gave up, amassed the most points on Sports Day, as both of them had in the days when this honour was called victor, or victrix, ludorum. I competed as a junior for my county: won some small medals, their silver now grey, with the blue Sussex shield blazoned with small yellow birds. Trained, for a while, with Brighton Ladies Athletic club, in shocking pink tops and streamlined black satin shorts, and won, on one glorious day in London, the hundred metres at a big inter-club meet. (I came back and told Grandpa Gee, the former sprinter, now buckled by a stroke, strapped into black, built-up, surgical boots, and living with us as he struggled back to fitness, only to suffer another stroke. He laughed with joy. Margaret had trounced the Londoners! ‘Well done girl! That showed them.’ That day I was his granddaughter as never before.)

But the changing-rooms, the jockery, began to repel me, and in retrospect, I never could have been top flight. I wasn’t quite tall or long-limbed enough. Besides, something important was being forgotten, with all the adrenalin and nervousness, the warming up, the weight-training, and my parents asking eagerly if I had won.

The joy of it. That was what had gone. The thing I had felt on the beach as a toddler, when my stubby little feet and my chubby child legs sped up until they passed the vital line between walking and running, when both feet are off the ground at once. That precious thing, pure movement. Gravity defeated, the lift into flight. The thing that comes to anyone running full-tilt, without pain or pressure, the real joy of the sprint, the all-subsuming sense that you and your body are one, and the unity is weightless, sheer speed, pure flow. You are not lifting or moving anything; nothing is moving or lifting you. You are the movement. You are in flight. Pure animal alchemised into spirit.

One other time I felt the same joy, something atavistic that pre-dates modern humans, their vegetable state briefly interrupted by panting, sweating sessions down the gym. Now activity is seen as a self-limiting episode, whereas, once, surely, life was motion.

When John and I were teenagers, and my little brother was ten years younger, our parents took us on camping trips so we could afford to go abroad. We didn’t have a car, which might have stymied some people, but we loaded our camping gear into prams and push-chairs, which somehow or other we heaved on to trains (consider the terror at European stations, as the huge foreign expresses roared in beside the platform and we had to get two prams and a pushchair on board, from the hoods of which the round bottoms of duffel-bags looked out, the small brass studs like a pair of piggy eyes, the body of the prams full of tents, billy-cans, cooking-stoves, wind-breaks, sleeping-bags, provisions. Imagine my father, marshalling his troops! Three prams, his three children, a friend each for John and me, his wife, his precious camera-bag, his briefcase, rucksacks for my father and the two elder boys. Three vehicles, five children, a pile of bags and baggages. Looking back on it all, I salute you, Dad. I forgive the bawlings-out as we panicked on to trains.)