Singular recollections of rugby
in New Zealand in the 1960s

by Murray Bramwell

I think the year must have been 1958. It is Palmerston North, a large-ish town in New Zealand’s North Island. I am at a school like many, all up and down the country. Hokowhitu Primary School, with maybe four hundred other kids – boys with fair-isle jumpers and freckles and ringworm haircuts, the girls in plaits and white ankle socks, the teachers in tweed with pipes and brown brogue shoes. It is a school assembly and the deputy head is winding his way through a long list of notices and dire warnings, class information and sports results – and then I hear my name mentioned. My name is never mentioned. I am a pale, nondescript kid, shorter than most, always in the front row of the school photo. The word for me, made popular by Charles Atlas body-building courses of the day, was puny.

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