The quietest, most unassuming and, frankly quite boring and anonymous boy in my year at school surprised us all.
No, he was not a mass murderer, newly discovered son of a tycoon or had fathered 10 children by the age of 15 but announced, via a friend, that he was to make an attempt to get into the Guinness Book of Records.
Before we knew what he intended to try to do for this ambition we all, and some quite cruelly, speculated on what it could be. The smart money was on the record for the most timid personality, followed by the longest ever time taken for a voice to break and boy whose name was least known to his fellow students and masters even after 5 years in secondary education. The actual attempt to attain a paragraph in that most famous of publications was on the basis of crawling. We knew that he was a bit of a swot but this type of crawling was to be on all fours and for one whole day or however long it took to beat the current distance of 8 miles.
The long and protracted build up caught the imagination of the whole school with the catalyst being that we would all have a day off to witness the thing and also enjoy an academic free day in favour of a carnival of activities on and around the playing field. There was to be an inter house sports day with athletics events on the freshly painted running track following the end of the football and rugby season and some charitable endeavours of a bring and buy cake stall, tombola and some sideshows including the ever popular throw a heavy wet sponge at a teacher. For a consideration of 10p to a good cause, we suspected it to be the Staff Common Room Sherry Fund, we could forego our constrictive uniforms and come in whatever we wanted within some certain parameters. One of the sixth formers was to try to emulate the main record breaking attempt on crawling by taking on an even more obscure target of cutting the outer areas of the school field with only a pair of scissors.
The day arrived. The weather was perfect for those roped into the sports events and the rest as spectators. Dry and bright for early June and with a slight cooling breeze which rustled the sycamore trees up the school driveway and just noticeably rippled the candy stripe canvas canopies of the stalls.
The nerve centre for the crawler in our midst was a small caravan donated by a local charity. I recognised it as the same from which easter eggs were dispensed for those succesfully completing the annual sponsored walk some months before. He remained his usual modest self in spite of the attentions of the town newspaper and a mobile TV broadcast van from the BBC Regional programme.
I think he may have got a bit carried away in his initial announcement and was now mightily embarassed by how things had snowballed into a frenzy of media interest. His mother acted as a bit of a chaperone, minder and enforcer for which, being a rather large and domineering woman she was well suited.
It was however not every day in our sleepy market town that world records were taken on. A large crowd gathered on the start line of the crawling circuit. Various official looking types in Guinness blazers hovered around with clipboards and for some strange reason, stop watches in their hands. The Headmaster gave a speech about what a great and momentous day it was to be for the school and for.....erm,..( quick consultation of a piece of paper with the boys name on it) and then with a very dramatic and camp gesture he fired a small starting pistol into the air and the games began.
After about fifteen minutes we began to realise how boring and tedious the day was going to be as the pioneer crawler had only just reached the end of the starting straight. The group of small boys entrusted with the cricket score board as the public display of laps and distance covered fidgeted about and began to make up rude words with the pile of enamelled numbers, mostly 80085 as a very juvenile but nevertheless hilarious representation of BOOBS. We soon wandered off to check on the also very slow scissor grass cutting before getting changed for the supporting sports events.
A tannoy kept us updated on the snail-slow progress. We could see the entourage surrounding the intrepid crawler from any point on the playing field but with each successive lap there was a discernible thinning out of the crowd.
By 3.30pm Buses arrived to transport away at least half of the pupils to the outlying villages and only us who lived close by the school remained. Some 5 hours further ahead the light was fading quickly on what was fanfared as the record breaking lap and someone, later to be disciplined for it, let off a firework which seemed more of a sarcastic gesture than a celebration.
The poor crawler was by now in a sorry state, red raw on any body parts which had been in contact with the ground for the past 9 hours. He could not stand up or manage anything euphoric and I seem to remember he cried upon being congratulated by his mother. The successful newest record for that day made it into the Christmas Edition of the Guinness Book of Records but was surpassed even whilst being delivered from the printers to our local Woolworths and by some healthy distance.
I often think of .....,erm ......thingy....and how well he did that day for his few weeks of fame.
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