I was in Year 7, the first year of secondary school and as my Dad liked to say – I was a small fish in a big pond. I was in a form with a few of my friends from primary school and everybody stuck in groups of people they knew. For the first few months we did every lesson as a form – and again sticking in our groups. Science, IT and Maths were my favourite subjects while English, Drama and PE where my most hated. At break times we played ‘it’ and slowly started socialising with other groups through the game.
After the October half-term, the more academic lessons were now based on ability instead of just who was in your form, which meant the classes got shuffled around while lessons like drama and RE remained as form lessons. Drama was on a Thursday, second period so it started at 10 and finished at 10:55 giving us a 15 minute break before the third period. The fourth period was Music, which started at 12:05 and ended at 1:00 for lunch. One Thursday, in drama (you guessed it) I had a fall.
The lesson started like any other, with me and my mates lining up outside with the rest of the class and wishing we could be anywhere else (even an English lesson) but here. The room we did drama lessons in was the old school dining room and had a laminate floor, so when we went in we all had to take our shoes off but leave socks on. On that day the drama teacher was being observed by the head of drama (job creation or what) and another member of staff.
The lesson plan was to act out a scene in slow motion and then present it to the class at the end of the lesson. We broke off into groups of friends and boys being boys, decide that we wanted to act out a fight scene in slow motion. The plan was to act out a car crash with occupants of each car fighting each other in slow mo. So, naturally, we started with the fight scene – except we didn’t want to do slow motion, we just wanted play fight. So we did! A few minutes in, we took it up a level and went Jackie Chan on each other – adding kicks to our respective arsenals.
Kicking, in a play fight, in socks, on a laminate flooring was not a good idea (I see that so clearly now) and a few seconds later I slipped over backwards. Bang. Everything went black. When I open my eyes my mates were standing over me looking down, checking I was okay. I must have been out for only a few seconds and not one of the 3 members of staff saw anything. I told them I was fine but I had a killer head ache.
The next thing I remember was sitting in the car with my dad as he drove me home at the end of the school day. He asked me how my day went and I said something like “Good, I think. I can’t really remember”. We got home and I got talking to my mum after about 10 minutes she realised something wasn’t right with me. The more I spoke to her, the more we realised that I could remember very little about my school day. After a while I remembered my fall and not much else. After half an hour of getting in, we were off to the hospital.