My school had a chess club, and we had a ladder. Nowadays this is some kind of abstract thing on a screen but at my school for a DT project some child had designed a physical leaderboard. I remember it as a really significant piece of woodworking. It was also quite difficult to get on it because they’d only designed it with 30 slots and so you had to play a few games before you were good enough to challenge for the leaderboard. When the time came and you were finally awarded a place the teacher would get you to write up your name on a card which would then be ceremonially slotted into place and you could feel that you had arrived. Climbing it was simple: You could challenge anyone within five places of you. If you beat them, you took their spot; if they beat you, you stayed where you were. When you went to chess club if you ducked a challenge you would lose by forfeit. Going to the teacher with your vanquished foe and having the cards ceremoniously swapped around was brilliant.
Over time I crawled up the ladder and made it to 6, which - knowing what I know now about my Chess skills - is damming on the competition.
I thought the 5 above me were beatable, but there was always one person, though, who was so much better than everyone else - I can’t remember his name now but I was in Year 8 or 9 at the time, and they were around Year 12, impossibly tall, impossibly clever, imperviously good. He’d happily play friendlies against me, but I was stuck at 6 on the leaderboard.
One week I walked into chess club and managed to collar No. 2 on the ladder - it was sometimes difficult to get matches against top players because they were often in exam years and had more important things to do than destroy us fleas again and again - but this time the flea bit them. A week later, the person who’d been in first left the school and everyone got promoted by a place, so in Year 3 of secondary school, I found myself 1st on the chess club ladder — and I knew I hadn’t earned it.
I never went back. That sounds more cowardly than it was because I left the school at the end of that year anyway, so the opportunities to defend the title were limited.
You could look at it one of two ways: either I ran away with laurels that weren’t mine, or maybe people could start asking why the school’s top chess players kept disappearing.
I know this wasn’t actually about Cheyss. My only defence is that this is a Garden, not a filing cabinet.