The Netball Team

Given my mails about walking, dancing and swimming, you may have mistaken me for a sporty person. This is not the case. True, when I was little, I was very active and proud of it. I passed my Bronze Survival Swimming; I got my BAGA gym badges level four and three (looking at the specifications, I would not pass this now: I don't know what a Japana Flat is and I can absolutely not do a headstand which descends into a frog balance); I climbed the rope to the ceiling of the gym / assembly hall / dining room at school and was given the special rope climbing pencil for my efforts (if required to do so today: no ceiling, no pencil.) My father nicknamed me a little mountain goat for my enthusiastic scrambling up hills. I even got my third star at skiing (though when I initially took the Flocon level I failed it, a humiliation mitigated by my mother cannily sewing a fabric badge onto my sweatshirt so I wouldn't cry too much at not having been awarded the coveted metal one.)  But what I really wanted, above anything else, was to be on the netball team. All the cool girls at my primary school were on the netball team, and none were cooler than Larushka Ivan-Zadeh. Ah, Larushka! With her glossy brown hair and her [I can't remember anything else about her] and her incredible name, reminiscent of one of my favourite films, Dr Zhivago, in which the most beautiful woman in the history of the world, Julie Christie, plays Lara, the object of the doctor's burning passion who literally breaks his heart when he sees her from the tram at the end maybe it was a bus it's been a while since I've seen it, I can't I have to stop I will start to cry all over again. Lara Zhivago, Larushka Ivan-Zadeh - it's close enough. I wanted to be just like her. I wanted to be her. I needed to be on the netball team.  I tried and I tried. I practised and I practised. I could never manage to get the ball through the damn hoop so attacking was out of the question and I was far too short to be an effective goal defense or goal keeper but I thought I might scrape a wing defense position which seemed to be mostly running around making a nuisance of yourself, qualities which I had in spades. But I never even made it onto the B team, even though I scored a B team rounders slot, first post, without ever being able to actually hit a rounders ball. (The inferiority of the rounders team vis a vis netball was vividly brought home to me when I was hit in the face by a rounders ball and nearly broke my nose during an away game against some scrappy violent primary school in the suburbs of North London.)  Primary school came to an end. Larushka and I went to separate secondary schools, where I developed a new crush on the head girl Gabrielle Jourdan, who had glossy brown hair (there may be a theme emerging) and went on to become an actress, recently (seven years ago) seen as Pathologist in The Escape Artist with DAVID TENNANT (it all comes together). Look at her photo and tell me I wasn't right. I forgot all about Larushka until the ultimate betrayal: she became a book critic at Metro and gave Gods Behaving Badly a two star review. She's dead to me now. Anyway, back to secondary school: Larushka may have been gone, but the desire for netball remained. I was determined to make it onto the squad. With this in mind I joined the voluntary after school netball club and worked my little white ankle socks off, running, throwing, catching, leaping, shooting. So imagine my feelings when the PE teacher took me aside and told me that I had to stop coming to netball practice because I was putting the other girls off. With hindsight, she had a point: I was short, I wore glasses and had no peripheral vision, I could neither throw nor catch. But I was devastated.  From that moment onwards, sports and I were finished. I refused to make any further effort. When forced to play netball in class with the other losers not on the team practice squad, I volunteered as goal keeper - the position that involved the least movement - and would chat loudly to the goal shooter on the opposite team until we were made to stop playing as a punishment and run around the court instead, and then for every second that the teacher was not actively looking at me I would walk. When it was swimming season, I told the young male Australians who coached us that I had my period every week which meant I couldn't go in the water, and they were too embarassed to remonstrate. As I got older and could choose my sports options, I dropped netball like a hot turd and scanned the list to find the activity that I could do most sloppily. Aerobics? That'll do nicely. And then I would head for the back of the room and, in a word, doss. Finally I left school and with relief signed off from sports forever.  From then until now I have refused to have anything to do with anything involving a ball. I won't even attempt to catch a frisbee. But it wasn't over. About a year ago, I went to visit a friend of mine in Suffolk for a few days. As she picked me up from the station, she told me that she and her friends were going to play netball that night and did I want to join them? No, I said. Absolutely not. I can't play netball. I don't even own running shoes. It turned out that it wasn't really a question, and that I had the same shoe size as her nine-year-old son, so the next thing I knew I was running around on a primary school netball court wearing borrowed shorts and an old t-shirt, children's trainers and a green bib, playing netball for the first time in thirty years. And it was great. Really fun. I realised that I had blamed myself the entire time and told myself I was rubbish at sports, when in fact it turns out that netball is a hell of a lot easier when you are tall, wearing contact lenses, and have enough coordination to throw and catch. I even scored a goal.  It wasn't me. It was just the wrong sport, at the wrong time, with the wrong teacher, who saw a little girl who couldn't play netball, but not the little girl who really, really wanted to.  ***  Booking has opened for my new online storytelling show, A La Carte, at the Amsterdam Fringe! Join Milda Varnauskaite and me for six filmed stories delivered daily to your inbox, and a live Zoom picnic. September 7th to 13th, details and tickets here.