Stroke to His Cox
By JL Merrow
I took a moment just to savour the feeling. Bloody hell, who’d have thought it? Me, skinny little Dave Tanaka from the Isle of Wight, whose crowning physical achievement was when I finally reached five foot five. Yet here I was, with eight—yeah, eight—strapping lads hanging on my every word. Legs like Doric columns, chests like slabs of granite; if we were standing up, they’d be towering over me like those bastards who always think it’s funny to rest their pints on my head at the pub.
Not these boys, though. They were waiting, muscles bunched, for my command. Sixteen eyes locked on my face, and it wasn’t so they could think up new variations on “nancy-boy”, “runt” and “squirt”. And Chinky, obviously.
Nope, my lads were sitting there at frontstops, practic
