Jonny: My Autobiography Page 2

I’M not sure if I was born a perfectionist, or if I just decided subconsciously that was the way it was going to have to be.

  When my dad pulls up the car at a mini rugby game, I immediately leap out and sprint for the nearest hedge because I need to be sick. Sometimes we have to pull over in a lay-by on the way there; sometimes we have got to the club car park by then. The thought of the game ahead just gives me a kind of panic, a deep fear and a sense of doom about what will happen if it doesn’t go well.

  I am seven and I play mini rugby for Farnham, where Bilks – which is what we all call Dad – is one of the coaches. I am mad about rugby, particularly during weekdays, when Sparks, my brother, and I mess around with a ball in the garden during daylight hours, and then in the living room when it has got too dark outside.

  But Sundays are different. On Sundays, we either have a training session or we play matches. The training days I love. I can’t wait to get to the ground for training. When a game is scheduled, though, I sometimes feel I can’t bear it.

  As long as there is still a night before the game, then I’m OK. For some reason, it still seems a long way away. But on game-day morning, I wake up early, five or six o’clock, and now it is unavoidable and the fear kicks in. I feel my heart beating like mad as if my body’s telling me that something really bad’s going to happen.

  I can’t do it, I tell Mum and Dad. I can’t do it. Please, you’ve got to tell them that I can’t play.

  If it’s an away fixture, we meet the rest of the team at Castle Street in the centre of town and then head off in our cars. Bilks leads the way in our Mitsubishi Jeep, with Sparks in the front and me in the back with my friend and teammate Andy Holloway. And when we get close, that’s when I start to want to be sick.

  It’s the same every game. Pre-match panic, then we play. I normally play well and we normally win the game. Then we go home for family lunch, I watch the rugby league on the TV and, with a big smile on my face, I talk about what a great morning I’ve had.

  I don’t know what the problem is, but it must be as frustrating as hell for Mum and Bilks because they know full well that they will be going through the exact same thing next week.

  I particularly like it after home games because Bilks catches up with the other coaches in the clubhouse and Sparks and I can muck around with the rugby ball. Everyone likes doing drop kicks. We try to get them over from the 22 metre line. Most boys like to have one or two kicks and then run off and do something else, whether the kick’s gone over or not, but I can’t just pack it in like that. I enjoy so much the basic feel of kicking a ball. I carry on kicking and I won’t stop. I can kick drop goals like this for half an hour, an hour. I’m seven and I find I kind of slip into a zone where I can do it repetitively over and over again. I won’t quit until Bilks comes out of the clubhouse and tells me that I have to because we’re going home.

  Our garden is built on three levels. The bottom part has the rhubarb patch and the green bin that Dad bought to use as a dog loo. The small middle lawn is our favourite for cricket. Then there is the top bit with a crumbly brick and slate wall – another training ground. I can spend at least an hour kicking a football or a rugby ball against the wall.

  I kick the ball with my left foot, and I’ll watch my foot all the time, studying the movement of the swing. Then I’ll look at my right foot and say OK, I’m going to do exactly the same thing using this leg. I can do this day after day for hours, which completely ruins the wall. I kick with my left, kick with my right, and I keep on like that, completely losing track of time. It’s mesmerising.

  But I have to go to school the next morning and the panic sets in again. I go to Weybourne Primary and it’s like the rugby game. I wake up with my heart thumping in my chest, thinking I can’t do this, and I go crying to Mum. I can’t go, please don’t make me go.

  To settle me in, Mum has to come in to the classroom in the morning and stand at the back. As the lesson goes on, she slowly creeps out of the door. School ends at three o’clock, but I insist that Mum’s there at half past two, and when I come out she asks me if I had a good day, and I say yes it was great. But Mum knows that tomorrow morning will be a repeat of today.

  What I can’t stand is the idea of getting the work wrong. I have to get it all right. So I ask Mum can you ask the teacher not to make it too hard?

  I’m not scared of hard work, it’s just the thought of getting it wrong. Every week we have a spelling test and every week I get twenty out of twenty. One week I spell the word ‘gauge’ wrongly; I get the ‘u’ and the ‘a’ the wrong way round. I sit there, waiting for my marked paper, expecting to see another ‘20/20’, and when I see ‘19/20’, I don’t know what to do with myself and I feel the panicky heartbeat. I feel embarrassed and, as the other kids lean over to look at my sheet and remark on my imperfection in surprise, a desperate need to wind back the clock and do it again.

  In the playground afterwards, all my friends are running around laughing. These are people who have probably spelled ‘gauge’ and other words wrongly, too, and I wonder how can you be laughing? How can you be having such a good time? I just focus, all the time, on trying to get everything right. Mistakes, and the panic, make me so meticulous. If I can be perfect, I can avoid that awful feeling.

  The trouble with rugby is you can’t be perfect. Yet on the rugby field, more than anywhere else, I need perfection. Especially when it’s a Sunday game, when there’s a result, something on the line, and it matters to me and my teammates and I feel responsible for it all.

  In the Under-8s, I’m played at full-back as a sort of sweeper, a last line of defence. We play in a festival at nearby Alton rugby club and I’m in a team with boys a year older than I am. At half-time during one game, we make a lot of changes. We now have a weaker team and I sense the other boys are looking at me for help, so in the second half I just run around tackling everyone – make a tackle, get up, make another, clatter anyone you can. It feels a bit like I’m spinning plates and I can’t stop working for a second. I can’t let these plates stop spinning, because if I do, this other team are going to beat us; they’ll score and it’ll be my fault. And I can’t live with that. I make a covering tackle next to the touchline and while getting up off the floor, I say to Bilks I just can’t do this any more, it’s too much. I want to come off.

  I am mad about rugby but I hate the sense of doom that comes with every approaching Sunday fixture. Sometimes I think that if there was an option to be propelled forward by three hours, providing you could tell me it had gone OK, I would seriously consider it, even though that would mean not playing.

  But I do like being full-back. I like the challenge of having to be the tackler; it makes me feel valued. When someone in the opposition breaks the line, people can say oh don’t worry, Jonny will sort that out. And I love that. I love to be needed like that. But in order to keep on being seen in that way, I realise that I cannot afford to let people down.

  On the pitch, it’s easy to see what happens. Every team does the same thing. They give the ball to their fastest man, or their key player, who runs across the field, arcing round everyone, and then sprints up the touchline and scores. So when I see that happening, I do the opposite. I run straight to the corner to cut them off. I get into this habit of sprinting down touchlines, desperately trying to smash people into touch. I don’t know why. It’s like there’s a switch inside me. When I see those guys racing round to the corner, I don’t just want to tackle them and get them down, I want to knock them sideways on to the next field, and I want to shock those parents watching from the sidelines, too.

  One Sunday, we are playing against Alton and there is a girl in the opposition team. She takes off down the wing with the ball the way everyone does, and I’m thinking to myself do I smash her? What should I do? But I don’t get to make a decision, because as I run over to cover, she runs off slightly into touch, round the corner flag, back in and then touches down. And the ref awards the try. That’s so unjust. How can that be allowe
d to happen? And how does that make me look? They have scored and it’s the girl who’s scored. I look for Bilks on the touchline and I’m crying. It’s just not right.

  Another Sunday, we are playing an Under-8s game against Basingstoke, and I get a bump on the ear. It’s not foul play, but it hurts enough to flick that switch inside me, and my response is to raise the level of aggression. I charge round putting in the heaviest tackles I can manage. They are not fouls, either, just big hits for a small kid. And I hurt the boys I tackle. From the touchline, Bilks indicates that he is bringing me off. I’ve done nothing wrong, he explains. It’s just best for everyone that I have a rest.

  What I really like, though, is midweek when Mum picks me up from Weybourne Primary and we drive on to pick up Sparks from the school I will go to next, Pierrepont. Sometimes we get there early and while Mum sits and waits in the car, I get the ball out of the back of the car and take it into the middle of the school rugby pitch. A proper, full-sized rugby pitch. I kick the ball up in the air and catch it, and do the same again, and again, over and over. I can get completely engrossed and lose myself for twenty minutes while Mum and Sparks look on. Holding, catching and kicking a rugby ball in the middle of a big pitch – this, for me, is a real special treat.

  Sparks and I have a video that we have become a little bit obsessed about. We like it because of one thing in particular – a kick by Gavin Hastings, in which he is wearing a quartered shirt. He takes the conversion from about 15 metres in from touch on the 22 metre line. The kick is not the hardest but it’s a beauty. I’m not sure exactly what it is about it, something to do with the way the ball flies through the air, but it is my idea of perfection. We love that clip, we play it over and over again.

  All I want to do is copy it. I know I need to kick with my right foot as well as my left, and I want to be perfect at that, too. So Sparks and I spend a lot of time imitating Gavin Hastings. When we can’t kick outside, we kick inside. We construct our own posts from toilet rolls that we stick together with Sellotape, and we create our own balls from other toilet rolls stuffed with toilet paper.

  Our house is called Lapa Kaiya, so-named from Mum’s native Zambian language, Bemba. It translates as ‘Our Shack’. The annex in Lapa Kaiya is our training ground. The room is a perfect length for toilet-roll kicking, and a sofa-bed on one side is good for unleashing a Fosbury-flop-style high jump after a particularly good kick.

  Toilet-roll kicking may not be very sophisticated but it’s OK for technique. I watch how Gavin Hastings’ leg swings. I watch how my left leg swings and I try to copy Gavin Hastings, and then transfer the same movement from my left to my right leg. Again and again. I can spend hours doing this.

  We have another video, from Rugby Special, from the autumn internationals of 1988–89. There are loads of great highlights on it, from England against Fiji and Wales against New Zealand in particular, but, again, one particular moment is the most fascinating. We rewind and play it, rewind and play. It features Graeme Bachop, playing scrum half for New Zealand. He can pass the ball off his wrists for miles. It’s outrageous.

  So we want to be able to pass like Graeme Bachop. We use one of those mini rugby balls, the ones that you get players to autograph, and we pass back and forth, back and forth, just working on using our fingers and spin-passing off our wrists.

  All our practice is fun, but it does have a deeper purpose. I write everything down in an exercise book. It’s full of doodles and drawings, most of them of me kicking a rugby ball over a set of rugby posts. After the first World Cup, in 1987, I write down my goals. I haven’t done this before. I want to play for England, I want to be England captain, I want to kick for England, I want to be involved in a World Cup, I want to win a World Cup, I want to play for the British Lions, I want to be England’s number ten and I want to be the best player the world has ever seen.

  That final one is the big goal. I want to be the best rugby player in the world.

  When we watch England games on the TV, I’m not just hoping they win. I’m watching what the players are doing to see if maybe I can learn to do it too. I watch Rob Andrew, England’s fly half, in particular. I study his kicking routine, take notes in my exercise book and then try to copy him in the garden.

  Writing down my goals like this seems to give everything added purpose. So when I play matches, there is more meaning to them. I am not just playing for Farnham or my school; I am in the process of trying to fulfil my goals.

  At my second school, Pierrepont, there are a lot of strong players, which is lucky. We have a good team, captained by Sparks, and we go through an entire season unbeaten. The dubious prize is BBC Southern Counties Radio asking if two boys can come to the studio in Guildford to be interviewed. Dan Fish and I are chosen.

  A female presenter fires questions at us. How did you get into rugby? Dan is a bit more confident than I am and plays the lead role; I have a bit of a blank and a panic but recover enough to mention the international players I like watching on TV and how I try to imitate them. I think I do pretty much OK.

  When I get home, I explain this to Mum. I tell her some of the questions, particularly the one about getting into rugby. What did you say, she asks. So I tell her and she says well done, and did you mention your dad?

  Suddenly, it dawns on me. I didn’t mention my dad, the guy who is responsible for everything, who is the reason I started playing rugby, the guy I watched playing rugby, the guy who put the ball in my hand when I was three, who has coached me since I was four and has been there always. I cannot believe I have done this. How ungrateful can I be? I cannot believe I have let my father down in such a way. After everything he has done for me, I’ve not given him the credit. My heart is going into overdrive; I’m in full panic mode. I have a real feeling of desperation. Mum, I need to go back to the radio station because I didn’t mention Bilks.

  Mum says oh, it doesn’t matter. People will have forgotten by now anyway. No, I say, I need to go back. I can feel myself welling up. I have to get back there and put this thing right or else life will never be OK.

  Mum says she has the answer. I’ll write them a letter, she says, to ask them to put the facts right. That kind of helps but not for long. I cannot get this thing out of my system. The next day after school I am no less desperate. I am in tears again. I can’t believe I let Bilks down. I feel devastated. I go to my room and think about what to do. I write my own letter to the radio station. Would it be possible to re-air the interview but allow me to add in a different answer?

  I write a lot of these letters over the coming days. I don’t send any of them. I spend most of the time in tears, just writing these things, screaming at Mum and Dad, saying that I have to change it, that I have to do this. I have to do something. It’s as though something incredibly serious has happened, the end of the world.

  Bilks says don’t worry. He tells me over and over that he is not bothered. Not at all. But that doesn’t really help. It does die a bit over time, but occasionally it comes back, haunting me, like a ghost. I’ll be playing basketball outside with Sparks and suddenly I am miles away. I feel the panic and I know I need to go inside because something’s not right. I stop the game. I need to go and say sorry to my dad. Sorry about not mentioning you in the interview. And maybe I could ring that radio station.

  Mum, I ask, weeks, months later, did you send that letter? Do you think they’ll say anything on the radio?

  It is not long before I find my next reason to flip out.

  I come home from school and see a blackbird on the ground, struggling, half-dead. It must have flown into the window. Wouldn’t it be great to pick it up and take it inside, help it out? So I do. Mum helps me put it into a shoe box, padded out with tissue, its own little living room. Then I go upstairs for a bath, and afterwards mess around in my room, forgetting about the bird, until Mum calls me for supper. When I go downstairs, the bird is dead.

  It’s dead because I wasn’t there to help it. I was too busy having fun to care. This
is my fault. I have killed the bird. I am overwhelmed by what I have done. The tears, the screaming, are back. This bird was my responsibility and I have let it down. How can I make amends? Mum, what can I do? I have killed the bird.

  Don’t worry, she says. You did your best. It would have died anyway. There’s nothing more you could have done. But I have to atone. I cannot live with this. I start writing letters again. Most of them are to God. Sorry. I am so sorry I didn’t look after the bird better.

  I cannot stand this intense, choking feeling. Mum, I let the bird down. I am screaming. What if I have to live with it for the rest of my life? I can’t do it, I can’t do it. I have to get rid of this feeling somehow. Mum and Dad and Sparks all say the same thing. This isn’t achieving anything. Everything will be all right. You need to forget about it and move on.

  But I am not just obsessive about kicking rugby balls. I can grapple with this problem pretty single-mindedly, too. I cannot put aside the image of the bird and my responsibility for its death. I have to try to work it out, find a solution to a situation that doesn’t have one.

  Sparks and I have a strange fascination with my left calf. It has got a massive bruise on it and the feeling in it has kind of gone.

  It happened down at Farnham Sports Centre on the bouncy castle. I bounced off and landed on the floor and then this big guy, who must have been six years older than I am, landed on top of me. He was supposed to be in charge, monitoring the kids and general behaviour on the castle, but instead he was bouncing around, and the moment I bounced off, he came off too, both knees flat on my calf with all his bodyweight.

  It hurt big time and took ages to get up and walk. But I managed it, and somehow I managed to get through an Under-11s tennis tournament the next day. I wore a big tubey grip bandage on my leg, which made me feel very proud.

  Now my calf is swollen, and the sensation in it is a little weird. So, in our bedroom before bedtime, Sparks and I are sitting on my bed playing a game to test it out. It’s a simple game – we just hit the calf with our knuckles to see how hard we can do it before it hurts too much. Sparks has a go and then it’s my turn. It’s hilarious how hard you can hit your leg when the feeling in it has gone.