Eight wheels and a lot of nerve, by Nadia Ferreira
An original contemporary magazine article.
The first thing that hits you in the sports hall at Kelsby Leisure Centre on a Wednesday night is the noise: the low rumble of forty skates on a wooden floor, the slap of bodies meeting at speed and, cutting through it all, a whistle and a voice yelling ‘Jammer up! Go, go, go!’ The second thing is the smell, which is mostly sweat and knee pads. The third, if you stand too close to the track, is a woman called Thunder Mum.
Thunder Mum, or Kerry Walsh as she is known to her colleagues at the building society, is the captain of the Kelsby Wreckers, the town’s roller derby team, and she has just knocked a teammate clean off her skates. The teammate bounces up, laughing. They bump fists. Then they do it again.
If you have never seen roller derby, picture a race and a rugby match taking place at the same time, on roller skates, on an oval track. Each team has a ‘jammer’, who scores points by lapping opponents, and four ‘blockers’, who try to stop the other jammer by any legal means, which mostly involves hips, shoulders and an alarming amount of determination. It is fast, physical and, to the uninitiated, gloriously confusing.
It is also, by common agreement among the players, the friendliest sport in the world.
That sounds unlikely when you are watching someone called Deadly Nightshade hurtle towards the floor, but spend an evening with the Wreckers and it starts to make sense. The squad includes a vet, two teachers, a bus driver, a grandmother of three and a nineteen-year-old engineering student. Their ages run from eighteen to sixty-one. Some joined to get fit; some, like Kerry, joined after a divorce; one, a quietly spoken carer called Amira, joined because, she says, ‘I spent my whole life apologising for taking up space. Here, taking up space is the point.’
New members, known as ‘fresh meat’, are never thrown in at the deep end. The first eight weeks are spent learning to fall safely, again and again, until hitting the floor stops being frightening. ‘Everyone falls,’ says Kerry. ‘The skill is getting back up before anyone notices. Usually they notice. Usually they cheer.’
The cheering is constant. When a nervous beginner manages her first full lap without grabbing the wall, the whole hall stops to applaud. When a blocker takes a heavy hit, two opponents skate over to check she is all right. After each bout the teams form a line and high-five their rivals, and afterwards they all go to the same pub.
None of this makes the game soft. Injuries happen. In three seasons the Wreckers have collected two broken wrists, one cracked rib and a collection of bruises that the players photograph and compare like holiday snaps. Kerry shows me one on her thigh the size and colour of an aubergine. She is extremely proud of it.
At ten o’clock the whistle blows for the last time. Skates come off, cake comes out, and someone’s toddler is passed from lap to lap. Somewhere in the middle of it, Thunder Mum is explaining the rules to a nervous newcomer, very slowly, very kindly, with a bag of frozen peas pressed to her knee.
Roller derby is described as fierce but welcoming. How does the writer try to show this?
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120 exam-style questions on Eduqas GCSE English Language 2.1.1 Two unseen non-fiction texts, 19th and 21st century. Each one has a worked solution and a mark scheme showing where the marks go.