Pippa Middleton: my schoolgirl sports confessions

When I close my eyes and think about school sports, I envisage myself on the hockey pitch, stick in hand, a luminous gumshield locked on to my chops and a bandana across my forehead. (Bandanas were all the rage back then.) Boys are watching. I can also hear the booming voice of Mr Markham, our fierce but undeniably fanciable coach, urging us all on. The other Mr M in my life (father and also coach) is on the sidelines, and I’m desperate to impress him most of all. My knees and knuckles are badly grazed from the astroturf, my shins are battered and bruised from the bully-offs. But my focus is on winning and making sure that my hair — fashioned into a slick Sporty Spice ‘up do’ — is just right. Did I mention the boys watching?

Hockey was my favourite: I was captain and proud. But all good things come to an end, and hockey ended with the Christmas term. The following term, we had to play netball. People say netball is like basketball with all the fun bits taken out. I’d tend to agree. You can’t run with the ball and only two members of the team can shoot. You spend most of the time playing a complex version of piggy-in-the-middle, except the piggies are a pack of vicious girls. My petite physique enabled me to nip and tuck my way past the bigger-chested girls. Elbows always helped; as did the derriere for defence (my ‘chest’ hadn’t developed back then) and a bit of shoulder-barging here or there. It was brutal, but turns out to have been very useful practice for handling the media in later life.