Jonny: My Autobiography (5 page)

But when I go to kick the ball, disaster strikes. I tense my foot hard, preparing for a massive contact, but my pointed toe catches a clump of turf just before the ball. By the time I make contact I have lost all the power in my leg swing. I uproot a clump of grass and have just enough momentum left to make the ball topple over and roll once.

Although I manage to shut this out of my mind for the rest of the game, when I get home, I start thinking it through, over and over again. The replay of that kick invades my mind, coming back to haunt me, like a horror film.

What did that kick look like? What did those people standing right by me think of it? What do they think of me now? I become obsessed with the questions. I can’t change what’s happened, and I hate that. I get the fast heartbeat, panic sensation. That kick is part of me, part of my history, something I have to live with for the rest of my life. And what are those touchline parents thinking?

We have a nice family dinner and watch some TV. Then suddenly, the switch is flicked, the tiny kick is on replay again in my head. The next thing
I know, I’m running around the house for a good fifteen or twenty minutes in a massive state of distress, just trying to find some way of appeasing the pain. What must those people think of me? I just can’t bear the thought of it.

Down in the annex, I am screaming at my parents. That kick! The embarrassment! Mum has an exasperated look on her face. Bilks says look, those people will not even remember it. They have got more important things to be worrying about, I’m sure.

He says the same a month later when the thought is still haunting me and I am in tears over it again. It’s like the bird and the radio interview, an image my mind refuses to let go. I am convinced that Bilks is wrong. Those people on the touchline – they’re all going to be thinking about it and they’re all going to be talking about it. I’m never going to be able to forget it, I’m never going to be able to change it. It’s with me for ever.

If there was ever a reason to go out and spend hours practising kicking, the Clump of Earth Kick is it. It causes such intense pain. This is the reason I want to be perfect, because it just hurts so much when you’re not.

I am not a great sleeper, I never have been, and, at Pierrepont, that becomes a greater challenge when we go away on tour. I worry not only about how I will do on the rugby pitch, but about sleeping in a strange place. I’m jumpy, panicky, I don’t feel very comfortable or remotely safe. I am always touring with boys a year or two older than I am, and I’m not sure I would be able to get through it if it wasn’t for Sparks, who is captain, and Bilks, who helps out with the coaching and comes with us.

Every year, Pierrepont goes on tour to Senlis, near Paris. When we go in 1991, I’m twelve and I’m thinking about these Senlis kids, the ones I’m
going to have to tackle, who, we’ve been told, are going to be a year or two older than our team and thus two or three years older than I am. How big are they going to be? When the opposition team turns up for a game, the first thing I always do is look across to see how big they are.

So I pull hard on Sparks. My brother and his mates are all good guys, but I stick to Sparks; wherever he goes, I go too. On tour, we always go to the adidas warehouse and buy one of the Wallabies’ rugby balls, the big, round, fat, yellow ones with the black tips. We love that. But every mealtime, I worry about what sort of food will be served up, and I try to sit next to Sparks. He makes me laugh, tells me what’s going on, puts me at ease.

The nights are hard. We are billeted with local French families and I am sharing a room with a French boy, but feeling very much on my own, lying in bed, not going to sleep. One night, I work myself up into an enormous panic and tell the boy’s parents I need to get hold of my dad. I keep badgering them. I need my dad.

I have no idea how they get hold of him, because there certainly isn’t such a thing as a mobile phone around. But they track him down to an event in town, the big annual social event of the tour when all the coaches of the two sides are together, having their big rugby dinner. He comes on the phone and I tell him I can’t stay. I can’t stick this out.

At this point, he knows he has no option but to come and get me. He comes to the house where I’m staying and soon we are back at the dinner and I’m having an extra place laid for me at the opposite side of the table from my dad. They get me a Coke and I tell them that I am sorry but I can’t eat the gourmet five-course meal that everyone else is so excited about. Can I have chicken and chips, please?

The men do lots of toasting, lots of talking and laughing. It all goes way over my head, but my chicken and chips cheer me up pretty quickly. Across
the table, my dad keeps motioning are you OK? Is everything all right? I tell him I’m fine, which I am until the moment I reach out for the salt and knock my Coke clean over.

Now I’ve done it. I’ve embarrassed my dad, I’ve ruined his evening and these guys all hate me. I get massively upset about it and start to beat myself up for being so stupid. So Bilks is required, again, to come and save the day.

Ball games at Lapa Kaiya cause regular breakages but Bilks doesn’t mind too much. He understands, he likes ball games. He is quite good at replacing panes of glass, and he has to do a fair amount of work on the basketball net.

On the side of the house, down the driveway, in front of the garage, we have a big bare wall, and the area makes for a perfect basketball arena. We are obsessed with slam-dunking and hanging off the net the way the NBA players do. We are quite into our NBA. The net, though, sometimes comes off the wall, but Bilks just screws it back on using bigger bolts each time.

The joys of basketball are twofold, and nothing to do with winning or losing. We are obsessed by dunking and blocking. We have our friends round, my mate Ed Morgan and Sparks’s friend Luke Cromwell-Parmenter. Ed plays with me, and Luke with Sparks. For the match, I have created an NBA-style scoreboard out of a big cardboard box. I like the stats; I like filling in my cardboard box with a big marker pen.

Ed and Luke think this is a proper game, and we are happy for them to remain under this misapprehension. This way, I can set Ed up for a shot, which is actually really a way of setting Sparks up for a block. Likewise, Sparks will create situations so that I can dunk on Luke.

The teams here aren’t really Ed and me or Sparks and Luke. The only real team is Sparks and me, fulfilling our desire to dunk and block. Beautifully, Ed and Luke have no idea that they are merely the downtrodden supporting cast in our own game. Afterwards, we don’t talk about who won and who lost; it’s just Sparks and me reminiscing about the highlights, our best dunks, our top blocks.

When there are no teams and it’s just me at home, I go back into kicking mode. Lapa Kaiya is on a quiet cul de sac, which means I can use the road for training and the hedge as my target. I kick endless spiral punts. I kick with my left foot, collect the ball out of the hedge, then walk back down to the bottom of the road and kick another with my right foot. Left spiral, hedge, right spiral, hedge, on and on. I can discipline my mind to keep going, not to get bored or want to watch television, or even to consider anything else. It’s as if I’m flicking a ‘Tunnel Vision’ switch. That way, I can keep destroying the hedge for hours.

One of the things I enjoy most is tackling bigger people, although that’s not necessarily how I feel when I first see them.

We are back in Senlis again the following year. I am almost thirteen, and this time we stay in a dormitory, which is fun. The night before the game, we are mucking around, chirpy and happy, but the next morning, as soon as I wake up, the familiar, chronic nervous panic is there. I don’t want to go near the rugby field and I’m worried about everything to do with the game.

Later, we walk down to the pitch, which is a football pitch with football goals, and we see the opposition, and it’s one of the scariest sights I’ve ever seen. They are like full-grown men.

Not long after kick-off, Sparks, our captain, is knocked out, which hardly helps. He is helped off the pitch and sits down on his own on a grassy bank in front of a bunch of French schoolkids, who start shouting at him.

But the occasion is memorable more for what happens towards the end. I have been watching Rob Andrew, the England fly half, and have tried to study what he does. I want to copy it, particularly because he drops a lot of goals. So from about 25 metres out, slightly to the left, I strike a drop kick, off my right foot. It flies nice and true over the goal. We win the game. That is the first drop goal I have ever kicked, and it’s over a set of soccer posts!

Summertime, and my mate Andy Holloway is cast in the supporting role.

We have been watching a highlights video of the England cricket team’s 1994 tour to the West Indies, and we love Curtly Ambrose, Courtney Walsh and Kenny Benjamin. What we love is the high-bouncing stuff the bowlers deliver around the batsman’s head. We love to see the batsmen ducking and the fielders responding. We watch and rewind, watch and rewind and then we go out into the garden to reproduce.

We have the perfect setting for it. The middle lawn is the batting wicket, and it has a slight rise just where the bowler pitches the ball. Sparks has got a great arm and is evil even off a very short run-up; Sparks can really hit the bump. To spice it up more, we pour a bucket of soapy water on the grass, so the ball comes through even faster. That’s where Andy comes in.

Andy pads up. Helmet and all. He has to face Sparks. And I go up to the top lawn to play wicketkeeper. The perfect delivery is when Sparks hits the bump, Andy gets an edge and I take the diving catch; or I’ll settle for Andy
ducking the bouncer and me taking the ball up high around my head. Sparks is bowling for himself and for me. I am looking for the dramatic catches. The golden moments of summer are played out for hours as we recreate our version of the West Indies, and Andy tries to stay alive.

Soon, though, Sparks and I are allowed to play with Bilks’s Sunday team, the Aldershot Officers Club. We go to the nets on Wednesday nights and I work on my shots; they have to be perfect. I badger Bilks, wafting airshots with my bat.