Haxey Hood (Part 6): Mud, Blood and Booze

The Ood's other casualty is a brawny outdoor fitness instructor whose curly reddish hair and pink cheeks make him look like a cherub on steroids.

"I weigh 17 stone (240 pounds), and it didn't protect me," laughs Brian Briggs, wincing from the pain.

"I got crushed. Everyone went over, and I 'ad about three people layin' on top of my chest, and just crushin' my lower ribs so I couldn't breathe. I don't reckon they're broken, but they are very, very painful—I 'eard them crack when I was landed on."

A similar thing happened two years ago, when Brian broke his collarbone.

"This year it's just as well we fell on the field, 'cause it's a soft landing. Nice an' muddy, you don't get 'urt. When you fall on the road, that's when it really does 'urt."

This from the guy who just cracked his ribs on the field.

"One lad last year got three of 'is fingers dislocated from landin' down near the pub. So he got 'is fingers dislocated and"—he cracks his knuckles for effect—"he puts 'em all back in place and carries on!"

What with all the drinking and scope for injury, you'd expect the paramedics to frown on the Hood.

However, the moustachioed man from St. John's Ambulance takes the casualties in stride.

"Mainly just sprains and strains, the odd bit of crushing, like. When you come against something like a solid object, like a wall, or a car, it's not gonna give. So you may get a couple crush injuries, but—y'know"—he shrugs—"I think it's brilliant. I think it's absolutely fantastic. It's Old England, isn't it? It's Old England. It's something that's been goin' on for years—something we should never get rid of."

Over the next few hours, the swaying, hundred-footed drunk, the bedraggled knot of humanity, stumbles through Haxey in the dark, steaming and heaving and careening off walls, windows and even a car.

Halfway through, an old-timer shouts to the boggins to rescue him from the mob. Despite his wife's warnings, after downing two gallons of beer, he couldn't resist the pull of the Sway.

"I shouldn'ta been in it, lad" he gasps. "Aye, I'd an 'eart attack three months ago."

By the time the Hood reaches the King's Arms on the other side of the village, I'm feeling revitalised by the mad rush I get whenever I go to these events.

Mud, blood and booze in Old England; maybe I'm not so crazy after all.

* * *

©J.R. Daeschner

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Haxey Hood (Part 5): Me Hips Aren't Feelin' Too Clever

Spectators can get as close to the action as they dare—there are no sidelines, or boundaries, for that matter.

The wide-open field makes the spectacle look all the more surreal, like an urban commuter crush transplanted to the countryside, only there's no obvious reason for the rough-and-tumble.

The men are surrounded by acres of empty space; if they wanted to, they could just stop and quietly disperse, without any need for crushing against each other.

At one point, the players have to negotiate a muddy ledge onto a lower section of the field.

The drop's only eight inches, but it might as well be 80 feet. There's no way the Sway is going down it without falling over; the men would stand a better chance of landing on their feet if they jumped off a cliff.

The mud around the ledge is unbelievably sticky, a mix of earth, clay and superglue, so that their legs get locked into the claggy soil while people are still pushing from the outside in both directions and inevitably—MAN DOON! MAN DOON!—the Sway collapses over the dividing line, bodies sprawled on both sides.

After much negotiation, the boggins break the stalemate by hoisting the Hood—or rather, the men attached to the Hood—past the breaking point.

Then it falls over again.

A little guy is ripped out of the body pile and hauled off, his legs dragging in the mud.

From the way the boggins are handling him, it looks like he's a troublemaker about to get a taste of rough justice: Don't you ever (thump!) come here (thwack!) again!

Instead, the boggins drop his limp body on the field.

He's passed out, coated in mud except where his shirt's been pulled up, exposing the white, fish-belly skin of his stomach.

A St. John's Ambulance official huddles over him, cocking his head to get some air into his lungs.

Eventually, the guy's eyelids flutter to life, and he staggers to his feet like a discombobulated wino straight from the gutter.

His hair is spiked and matted around his skull, his clothes are rumpled helter-skelter and his eyeballs are red and rolling in different directions.

The right one even has a blotch of blood next to the pupil. He's been squeezed until his eyes popped!

Rather than going home or to the hospital, though, he hangs around the sidelines, waiting for another chance to jump in the Sway.

For Stephen Mitchell (initials: S&M), getting knocked down and out is all part of the fun.

"Oh, I got trampled on, yeah," he tells me. "Oh, without a doubt. Me 'ips aren't feelin' too clever at the minute… I'm bound to get a bollocking off me family because they know I need a hip replacement."

"What?"

"The bones are crumblin'."

At 34, he has chronic arthritis in both hips.

"So why on earth do you do this?"

He pauses, then grins wildly. "It's the 'Ood—ya can't explain it. It's the 'Ood!"

©J.R. Daeschner

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Haxey Hood (Part 4): He Bet His House on Bog Snorkelling

In fairness to Haxey, though, I was profoundly depressed at the time.

For more years than I cared to count, I'd been sneaking away on weekends and spending precious holiday time in the backwaters of Britain, living a double life as a weekday wage-slave and a weekend shin kicker.

Only my family and a few friends knew my terrible secret.

It wasn't the kind of thing you talked about in polite company; not in professional North London, at least.

It would be like confessing to a Marmite-related fetish. People would stop inviting us to dinner. They wouldn't let our daughter play with their children. They would cross the street for fear that my madness was contagious.

Anyway, once I had enough material, I quit the day job, remortgaged the flat and took a year off to finish my book.

"That's a brave move," an ex-colleague said, "especially for someone with a child."

The subtext was clear—by "brave" he meant "stupid" and possibly "irresponsible".

More than a year later, I was facing disaster, desperately trying to sell a book about gurning and Pope burning to publishers—mostly middle-class Londoners—who couldn't care less about hicks in the sticks and their strange an-tics.

In my mind, I had wandered into shin kicking and stumbled onto The Big Book of Britain.

In reality, it looked like my work was going to end up buried among other misfiled titles at the library, somewhere between The Wacky World of Welding and Great Bison I Have Known.

And that was if I was lucky! I was facing disgrace!—Financial ruin!—Public ridicule! "See that guy?" people would jeer, "He bet his house on bog snorkelling!"

No matter how many tales of rejection-to-victory I heard, they weren't enough to lift the depression, not even the one about the publisher who told JK Rowling, "You'll never make any money out of children's books, Jo."

No doubt she cackled like Voldemort now as she threw another fifty-pound note on the fire.

Things had worked out for her… but what about me?

All that was the mental distortion, the hissing white noise warping my perceptions, when I first saw Haxey and the Hood.

On the rare occasions that it is mentioned by the media, they typically hype Haxey Hood as being ultraviolent.

But it isn't so much violent as… ultrasurreal—gloriously, profoundly absurd: a bizarre crush with no apparent reason for being; a seemingly meaningless struggle.

Dozens of men risk hypothermia to push and shove each other, arging and barging, hurling and burling, hubbing and bubbing in the mud and manure, emitting primal noises as they try to herd the slow-moving stampede, the hundred-footed elephant, across the field.

The thing is, you can't even see the Hood, the object of all the grunting and shunting.

In rugby and football, at least the ball is regularly passed and kicked.

Not so the Hood. A leather cylinder, it quickly disappears in the crush only to resurface again at the end.

In fact, some years it has disappeared altogether—in the chaos of the Sway, the men didn't realise until some time afterwards that the Hood had been stolen.

Rather than a piece of leather, it looks like the men are tussling over a boiling cauldron or a block of dry ice, judging from the clouds of steam billowing up from the centre, their combined body heat vapourising in the freezing cold.

It takes nearly two hours for the writhing mass of humanity to cover 200 yards, mainly because it keeps keeling over in the mud.

And when the Sway collapses, it can take a while for the officials to untangle the limbs and unpick the carnage.

You'd get a similar effect if you shoved the men into a dumpster, lifted them 50 feet into the air, and then tipped them onto the ground.

©J.R. Daeschner

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Haxey Hood (Part 3): Fifty Miles From Spurn

Haxey itself didn't seem to have any real beginning or end; it was a long, thin row of redbrick buildings strung out along a high street, without any obvious centre or reason for being.

It looked like it had been designed by a Soviet planning committee as Northern People's Collective #3268, typified by the plain lettering on a drab building halfway down the high street: MEMORIAL HALL.

They might as well have labelled the rest of the town accordingly: CHURCH, CHAPEL, SHOP #1, SHOP #2, PUB #1, PUB #2, and so forth.

Why use names when labels would suffice? Titles were the bourgeois affectations of soft southerners.

John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, hailed from Epworth, the next town over. No wonder the locals had looked to heaven; there sure wasn't much for 'em down here on earth.

The land around Haxey—at least what you could see through the mist—was brutally flat; reclaimed marshland from the days when the area was an island, the Isle of Axholme.

The Hood took place on what the locals called a hill, but Haxey Field sure looked flat to me.

And the weather didn't help, either. Apart from the mist and patches of snow, the sky was an industrial, boiler-room grey.

A half hour before the match, just as everyone was coming out of the pub for the Fool's Speech, a freezing drizzle completed the setting.

The flat wasteland… the all-conquering mist and cold… the seemingly pointless strife: this was Sartre and Beckett territory, relocated to the North of England.

The Lord of the Hood and his Boggins

A book on the Port of Goole was called 50 Miles from Spurn—a fitting title for Haxey as well, or some kooky existentialist sketch:

A: (gloomily) "Where are we?"
B: "I don't know."
A: (joyously) "You don't know?"
B: "You know Spurn?"
A: (aghast) "Oh no. Not Spurn!"
B: "No, no—not Spurn. (Pause.) Fifty miles from it."

©J.R. Daeschner

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Haxey Hood (Part 2): The Guy With the Half-Goatee

James Bland happened to be the first person I bumped into in Haxey.

We were crushed up against the bar in last year's pre-match pub-crawl—the pre-Sway Sway, so to speak.

I didn't know it at the time, but I was standing next to a living legend, one of the hard nuts—or were they just nuts?—who stayed in the middle all day, their hands clamped to the Hood as they fought off rivals.

'Blandie' immediately stood out.

Not because of his ginger mullet—short on top and wispy down the back—or his hooped earrings, but because of his goatee.

A half-goatee, actually, one side of his face bare and the other carpeted with red whiskers.

Was he an eccentric who re-enacted historical battles?

Or maybe a self-loathing Englishman who got kilted up like a Highland Scot on weekends?

For all I knew, he got his kicks dressing as a two-faced man-woman, with a bride on one side and a groom on the other.

I had no idea. And it's not particularly polite—or wise—to ask a stranger in a strange pub about his strange facial hair.

Blandie has since upgraded
to a half-beard and dreadlocks

I finally had a chance to ask him when he shouted to a friend across the room, a heavyset guy with a big H shaved into the top of his head.

So that was it—they were groomed especially for the occasion.

And they weren't the only ones. The two main officials, the Lord of the Hood and the Chief Boggin, wore black ties and red hunting jackets, as well as fetchingly floral top hats with tall pheasant feathers sticking out—for that crucial touch of fauna.

The "Fool" had a blackened face with smears of colour on it, plus a bowler hat and a suit of rags, while the ten other boggins were dressed in scarlet sweatshirts with their jeans tucked into their socks in preparation for the mother of all matches.

For the time being, though, the only projectiles in their hands were pints, and they were belting out drinking songs in boozers so crowded it was almost impossible to get to the bar.

"Just poosh on through, luv!" two pint-sized grannies told me. "That's what we do!"

Truth be told, I hadn't been very impressed with Haxey at first.

Tucked in a mist-covered corner of North Lincolnshire next to Yorkshire and Nottinghamshire, it was surrounded by towns and villages with names so miserable they must have been inflicted on purpose: Scunthorpe… Scrooby… Grimsby… Goole.

Maybe the Saxons thought that if they gave them ugly names, the Vikings wouldn't bother pillaging them.

Unfortunately, it didn't work then, and now it succeeds only in scaring off tourists—anyone fancy a romantic getaway to Goole?

A promotional poster on the Tube in London declared: "Doncaster—A City in All But Name."

And what a difference a name makes.

©J.R. Daeschner

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Haxey Hood (Part 1): The Mother of All Football Matches: Swaying the Hood in Haxey

"Savour the pain, boys! Savour the pain!"

That's easy for him to say.

Blandie's lying near the top of the heap, and I'm down at the bottom, squashed by a dozen or more bodies, a thousand pounds of pressure concentrated within six feet.

Don't squeal like a pig.

I can't move, and I'm vaguely aware of the groans emanating from the bald heads and buzz cuts around me.

My torso feels like one of those giblet bags crammed up the backside of a butchered turkey.

The coroner will open me up and find nothing but a creamy pâté inside, human foie gras in a skin-and-bones bag.

At least I'm still conscious—not like that kid they pulled out of the crush a couple of collapses ago.

The Lord of the Hood—distinguished by his flowery top hat—jumped in to stop the ruckus, brandishing his wicker wand of office and bellowing: "MAN DOON! MAN DOON!"

The teenager was ripped out of the tangle of bodies and laid flat on the field, unconscious, his eyes fluttering and head and hands twitching. Either he was knocked out or fainted from the lack of oxygen.

"I hate it when that happens," an official frowned, without any irony.

But that kind of thing is bound to happen in the Haxey Hood, an organised riot that takes place every year on January 6th, supposedly since at least the 1200s.

Take as many as 300 men, get them liquored up, stick them on a claggy field in the freezing cold and throw a leather tube known as a Hood into the middle of the mob.

This being England, and The North in particular, the goal of the game is a no-brainer: to get back to the pub for more drinking.

The problem is, there are four locals within a one-mile radius—three in Haxey and one in the rival village of Westwoodside, on the other side of the field. And if they finish the game too soon, it would spoil the fun.

So, instead of heading straight for the nearest boozer, the competitors end up pushing in opposite directions, creating a slowly rotating human hurricane capable of trampling anyone or anything in its path—occasionally demolishing walls, tearing down hedges and bursting through people's front doors.

This asphyxiating crush of humanity, this juggernaut of flesh and bone, has an absurdly genteel name: the Sway.

Although it looks like the world's biggest scrum—in fact, it is an ancestor of rugby and football—there are crucial differences.

"It's not a scroom because you're standin' up," Blandie had explained in the pub. "If you were bent over, you'd snap your neck."

* * *

©J.R. Daeschner

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