Do you remember the game “British Bulldog”? Repeatedly banned for basically being an excuse to beat the crap out of the slow, fat kids under the pretence of healty playground activity, it went by several names at our school as each preceding one was banned (“It’s not Bulldog, miss; it’s Rottweiller”). Sessions invariably ended up with one or more participants reduced to tears, blood, or a crumpled pile of limbs, some of which may have bent in more places than they did when the game started. It was the kind of thing that people would write letters to the Daily Mail about these days (“Horror in the Playground!”) and we loved it.
The precise rules often varied, but the premise was always the same. There’s a bunch of ‘catchers’ in the middle of the playground, and the players basically have to run from one end of the schoolyard to the other without getting caught. Depending on how malicious the catchers were feeling, the definition of being caught varied between simply being ‘tagged’ (the nice, teacher-approved version of the game that, naturally, was no fun whatsoever) and being pinned flat to the ground, wrestling style; the usual compromise was “hands and knees on the ground”, which provided a nice balance between skilled gameplay and bloody-minded violence.
Anyway. This particular tale of pain and humiliation involves the game of bulldog – but with one important difference, which will become evident as my tale progresses. Let me take you back in time…
I spent a large part of my teenage years in Norfolk. Norfolk is an odd place. It tries so very desperately to keep up with the latest fashion trends, but usually the news of what is currently in style everywhere else is delivered via a series of chinese whispers, and tends to arrive several years too late and be almost, but not entirely, unlike what was originally intended. So, whilst the rest of the country’s teenagers were making fake IDs and trying to get into bars and clubs, in Norfolk, we went rollerskating. But not just any old rollerskating. We went to SuperSkate.
Imagine, if you will, the bastard offspring of a 1970s rollerdisco, a school disco, and a shonky, el-cheapo nightclub. Put it in the middle of an industrial estate in Norwich, add early 90s dance music, a non-alcoholic bar and fill with hormonally imbalanced teenagers. That’s SuperSkate. And I was there, every saturday night without fail, for far too many years. That’s how cool I was. Yes.
Most of the time, you just skated round and round the rink; the slower skaters on the edge, clutching desperately to the barrier in an attempt not to fall over and make a tit of themselves; the faster skaters in the middle, showing off and looking far too cool for their own good. This was all well and good, but it got a bit tedious after a point, so the staff started to introduce ‘specialist’ sessions – five minute breaks from normal skating where other things happened. There was a speedskating session (always my favourite), a backwards session, a chariots session (pushing other people around, basically) and, highlight of the evening, British Bulldog.
Yes. British Bulldog. On rollerskates.
I’ll just wait a minute whilst your brain processes the full potential horror of that. The most bloody and violent of playground games. On rollerskates. With the staff as the catchers. It sounds like a recipe for pain, and it was. To this day, I don’t know how they escaped without a lawsuit. But they did, and we loved it.
The games usually panned out in the same way: first off, all the slow skaters were caught. This usually happened with a minimum of fuss and pain, and they were removed from the rink before any real violence occurred. Next up, the catchers would try and eliminate the few really good skaters, so they didn’t cause problems later on when things got nasty. That left everyone in between – myself included – the people who could skate well enough to evade capture most of the time, but not well enough that dirty tactics didn’t stop us. And heaven help you if you made it down to the final three or four. Boy, were you in for a pasting then. And my particular tale involves the one time I made it to that exalted position.
There were four of us left on the rink. There were four catchers. One each. Mano-a-mano. We faced off. The rink was lined with cheering crowds, all egging us on, and all secretly hoping for something really nasty and violent to happen – fortunately, they weren’t going to be disappointed tonight. The DJ started the countdown, we tensed, ready to dash – and then we were off.
I darted forwards, towards my catcher, then suddenly dodged to one side. My catcher had anticipated this, though, and followed me. As we came close to our inevitable point of intersection, I switched direction again. He hadn’t anticipated it this time, though, and couldn’t get there in time. I was going to make it! Yes! Unfortunately, my catcher had other ideas – he wasn’t going to let me go that easily. As he struggled to change direction, he stuck his arm straight out in a desperate attempt to grab a hold of me. I noticed it only too late. **BAM**. Clotheslined. My face and his arm connected with a combined impact force somewhere around that you might expect between a fast-bowled cricket ball and the stumps when England are in for bat – and the inevitable result was curiously similar. My nose exploded – blood went everywhere. A veritable fountain of the stuff. My best t-shirt and jeans – ruined forever.
Conclusively out of the game, my face experiencing pain the likes of which I had never known before, and with more blood than my body could possibly have contained gushing out from my nose, I made my way off the floor, and to the first aid room. As I was leaving, I the DJ came on the PA to give an announcement.
“Well, folks – we’ve had bruises, we’ve had broken bones, but that’s the first time we’ve ever drawn blood! A big hand for our valiant contender!”
It was the best game of bulldog ever. Same time next week? Damn right.
