Blast from the past: Remembering the hell of PE lessons

Schools have always been skilled at inflicting crafty tortures on their charges - like double maths first thing on a Monday morning and psycho teachers in charge of Bunsen burners, but the real hell, the real place of boundless humiliation and fear, was the PE lesson.

For my generation of girls, PE was primarily an exercise in shame, especially if you were a well-fed country girl.

Cast your mind back to the screech of gutties on wooden gym floor. To those dusty big rubber mats you lugged out of a dark, spider-saturated store. To the rope burns and blisters on young flesh. To the wall bars, which pulled arms out of sockets and instilled a lifelong fear of heights. To the scary wooden vaulting box you were meant to leap over like a Russian gymnast. To mottled blue legs on a five-mile cross country run when you ran fast for the first mile then had to walk the rest of the way clutching the stitch in your side, whilst every so often vomiting into a bush.

PE teachers seemed to pick the coldest day of the year for runs. A day when there was a good hard frost on the ground, a biting wind and perhaps the possibility of a sleet shower. We wore tiny nylon skirts and Aertex shirts, our skin covered with goosebumps the size of golf balls. The PE teacher was snug as a bug, dressed for an Ernest Shackleton-style expedition with sturdy trousers, padded anorak and muffler.

Indoor netball was just about bearable, unless some over-competitive girl bulldozed you to the ground. The real trauma was on the all-weather pitch for team games like rounders when you were picked last because everyone knew you were useless. Of course, anyone with any sense tried to get out of PE, but it was no use saying you’d forgotten your kit; they made you get some prehistoric items out of lost property, dank with the ghostly remnants of mortifications past. So, we became dab hands at forging our mothers’ signature to explain we couldn’t do PE because of some ailment or other - like beri beri.

The changing rooms and showers at my school were in an ancient mobile. A place so smelly and mouldy, it was best not to linger long, but to get out as fast as you could to double maths. At least it was safe there.