Games
But I jump the years, those years which then seemed to stretch ahead like an age. Time never passed quickly enough. Now they seem just to have flitted across forty years, like a short holiday.
Holiday those years were, a happy time or is it just that looking back one forgets all or most of the unhappy days. Unhappy days I'm sure there were, they come for us all in greater or lesser measure.
I was a good athlete and keen on most kinds of sport. Football I have mentioned and that was perhaps where I was best. But we also played rugby and cricket. Wrestled on the long summer evenings on any old field, but mostly on one corner of the Grammar School field.
Perhaps a dozen or twenty boys would gather of an evening, mostly to play football, but often we would tire of that and then the cry went up, that is for wrestling. The wrestling was Cumberland and Westmorland style, and we kept strictly to the rules. First we roughly sorted out the weights after not a little encouragement.
The the hats were lain in a heap and one sat in front of them with his back towards them, and drew them out two at a time. It was best out of three falls and the taller boys had really the advantage. Not always though. One Chris Whitehead by name (more of him anon) who was a year or so older than myself and also some inches shorter, perhaps four or six inches shorter, was a demon. His favourite "trip" as we called the various methods of felling your opponent, was the Cumberland Buttock, "Buttock" we called it.
It is accomplished by a quick turn of the body at the correct moment, bringing one's rump to the opposing stomach and a quick pull and half bend both together and if it has been done properly nothing could stop you going right over his head. I recall Chris and I being paired one day and he threw me over his head three times.
Here I diverge a little to remark that a Cumberland or Westmorland man is a queer customer to run up argument in a rough house if one gets in too close.
The style of wrestling is not very popular other than in the northern counties, which is a pity for it is a good, clean and clever mode of wrestling. I have never seen anyone hurt wrestling unless it was an odd person winded.
Uncle Douglas Clark, who hailed from Ellenborough near Maryport, was champion of the World Heavyweight wrestling at this style when I was about fifteen years. I have seen him perform on a number of occasions. He also played Rugby League, or Northern Union as we called it at home, for Huddersfield and Cumberland, for whom he was captain, and for England for a number of years. He was on Mother's side of the family.