The Most Fun We Ever Had
Bullrush, Chapter 1
There is nothing in life so exhilarating as being shot at without result, Winston Churchill said. That was bullrush. That was how it felt when you were winning.
Ahead of you was a wall of kids, ready to bring you down. Beyond them was your goal line, and safety. They would call your name. Their job was to put you on the ground. Your job was to get past them.
You’d come bursting over the line. You might be ducking, weaving, zipping, sidestepping. You might just be lumbering like a lorry. You might get torn down, maybe with a heap of kids on top of you.
But there were times when you might not. You would slip past them all, and as you made for the line, you’d be pumped. You’d be laughing, chucking a bit of cheek back over your shoulder as you showed them your heels.
You had been shot at without result. It felt just as good as Winston said it would.
Then, as you hit the line, someone would yell “bullrush” and everyone waiting behind the line would follow you down in a shrieking yelling laughing cloud of arms and legs and shirts waiting to be ripped.
You might have buried yourself inside that cloud, pretending you weren't there, hoping no-one would see you. Or you might be making a noisy target of yourself.
It was exhilarating. Bullrush was the best game anyone had ever thought of, and we played it whenever we could. We played it at playtime, at lunchtime, after school, at the weekend. We played it whenever we could get a few people together.
You didn't need a ref, you didn't need a whistle, you didn't need a ball, you didn't need any special gear to play. All you needed was a decent stretch of grass.
Some of us didn't even need that. They played on asphalt at Lytton Street school in Feilding. Peter FitzSimons says he played it on the unforgiving wooden floor of a church hall, and didn't especially love it. A radio listener told me you haven’t played bullrush until you've played it in the exercise yard at Paparoa prison.
Here is the genius of bullrush: it doesn’t matter whether you’re good, muddling, or completely useless at it. You can be a winner and a loser in the space of a few minutes, and so can everybody else. If you’re accustomed to being called last when they’re picking teams, this is the one time when you might get picked almost straight away. It amounts to more or less the same insult, sure, but it can be nice to go first for a change. Bullrush is for everyone.
You ask people what they remember of it and they start by saying “nothing”, and then gradually they recall a little more, and a little more, and it all comes back to them and they love it.
My own memories are fragments. At Kiwitea Primary, a country school of of eighty boys and girls, ten miles from Feilding, farms a hundred miles in every direction, we lined up for assembly every day on a concrete square. When it was over, we would march back to class with one of the big kids beating some kind of drum. There might have been a flag raising. The war had been over for twenty years but its shadow was long, and there was another one going on in Vietnam to fight the evil communists, and the Americans were making sure we were safe, and our own soldiers were helping them.
We had black and white movies from the National Film Unit. We listened to dreary broadcasts to schools on the national programme at the hour now filled by Simon Mercep. There was the smell of the Gestetner machine, as it turned out its purple pages of newsletters and handouts; the smell of the fire in the pot belly stove; the smell of chlorine. The best smell of all was a row of gum trees alongside the swimming pool.
My nose registered more than my eyes. I needed milk-bottle thickglasses when I was still a toddler, but no-one realised until I was seven. This is how I explain being tragically un-coordinated and entirely useless at ball sports.
Possibly I also lacked common sense. Even without glasses I could see the pity in the other parents’ eyes at seven-a-side rugby and on calf club day. Dad told me often there was no future in farming. I think, now, what he was saying gently was there’s no future in farming for you.
I don't remember when I first played bullrush, and I can only recall flashes of it. I can remember it often involved getting my glasses broken, which might explain the flashes.
What I also remember is that bullrush, like so many things, was something you just picked up as you went along. There was no formal induction, no explanation. Suddenly it would just be happening.
There is the learning the teacher sets out for you in clear steps in the classroom, and then there is the learning you acquire in the playground.
The playground can be a mystery. You watch the big kids, you listen, you try to make sense of it. Something happens spontaneously, a game begins, no-one really explains it, you just follow their lead, you go where it seems you have to, you run when it seems you have to run, you yell when you think you’re supposed to do that.
You have not the first idea what they're doing and what you’re supposed to do.
The first time I saw a boy get the strap, I was standing at the end of a line of six with my hand out. You follow the bigger kids, you take their lead. After swimming, in the changing sheds, when the big boys asked if we knew how to milk the cow we said yes, but it turned out to be nothing like we’d seen it done before. I don’t remember now whether we each had hold of our own penis or whether the big boys were holding them for us, but when he looked in to find out what was taking us so long the headmaster seemed to think we were doing it entirely the wrong way, and it seemed to matter quite a lot.
We stood in his office and he came down the line, each of the bigger boys getting six of the best. The office was quiet and each slap was startlingly loud. He stopped at the boy before me. We were free to go. I had only the vaguest idea what had happened. It became clear enough in time. My mother returned to teaching after 14 years and discovered the children were using new and unfamiliar slang. She asked us one night, “What’s a wanker?”
So much of what passes from kid to kid is never written down, never entered in any book. The ball remains perpetually in the air. The swear words, the games, the rules - all of them pass from one to the next. There was no book of rules for bullrush, no Bullrush Annual, no trophy. But year after year, it got passed along, and you played your first game of bullrush just by following the others, taking your place at the line alongside them and waiting to see what happened.
Everyone loved it. Almost everyone. Robyn Malcolm liked it, sort of. But when she thinks about school and sports, she thinks mostly of the sorry excuse for a teacher who jogged around the 400 metre track behind her, taunting. Robyn was a small, round girl, running slowly. Bringing up the rear of a running race, she was mortified to have the teacher drop in behind: “Come on Robyn, faster Robyn, how are you going Robyn?” he mocked, flailing his arms, theatrically kicking up his feet, playing to the laughing children watching the spectacle. She enjoyed library and drama classes very much more.
Two geek friends, Nat and Janene, say they couldn’t see the point of it. Nat played it at Leigh School, often but always reluctantly. It was dull, it was thuggish, it seemed a bit stupid. He was always pleased when it was over and he could go back to doing something interesting. Janene grew up in the USA. She says bullrush sounds a lot like Smear the Queer, which was a tiresome and unlovely thing.
But we all love to play in some way. At their annual Foo Camp technology gathering Nat and Janene and a hundred or so ferociously smart people all play a kind of poker game, mixed with Cluedo and sci-fi, called Werewolf. It involves drinking, wits, and some playing cards. You can dazzle everyone with your skill, if you possess it, but no-one minds if you play appallingly badly. There’s tension, there are players beating impossible odds, and there are gales of laughter. It’s more or less bullrush, sitting down.
Play, the best kind of play, is life unleashed. We love the joy of it, the thrill of it, the risk. In bullrush, maybe what we loved most of all was the sheer fun of it. We were laughing, the whole time. It was a game that never took itself too seriously. It’s a happy game, it’s a comedy on grass. We couldn't get enough of it.
And then one day they banned it, the fools. Or did they? We will answer this question by starting with Plato and moving forward at extreme speed.
