Oar Than Friends by Lulu Moore EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Status: Available for Free Download
- Authors: Lulu Moore
- Language: English
- Genre: Sports Romance
- Format: PDF / EPUB
- Size: 2 MB
- Price: Free
Arthur
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(Auditioning for the intelligence services)
‘Charlie, can you keep your bloody voice down?!’ I hissed for the
seventeenth time, wondering why we’d brought him along.
Then I remembered we had to, plus he was the only one who owned a
collapsible ladder.
Don’t ask.
‘Sorry, Oz,’ he whispered, leaning said ladder against the wall of the
Cambridge University Boat House before turning to me.
I pressed down on the speaker in my earpiece, ‘Are we all clear?’
‘Clear,’ replied Bitters, our five, from behind the bush where he was
standing fifty metres up the River Cam to the left.
‘Clear,’ echoed Drake, our Canadian number four, who was in a similar
spot to the right.
We were good to go.
I glanced over to Charlie, who was silently – for once – waiting for me to
give the signal to begin what was considered our second most important
mission for the upcoming school year; behind winning the Boat Race.
And what exactly was this mission which had eight of my Oxford
crewmates and me exclusively dressed head-to-toe in black, and standing
outside a place we had no business standing at any time, let alone at eleven
p.m. on a Saturday night in late September?
One word, plain and simple.
Rivalry.
And before you mistake that term for a little friendly competition, stop.
When it comes to this particular rivalry, I’m talking about something so
deeply rooted in history it wraps itself around your bones like a boa
constrictor squeezing until you’re gasping for release. It’s a battle of wits
brought to life through generations of competitiveness flowing through our
dark- and light-blue blood.
It all began nearly 200 years ago when Charles Merivale, from the
University of Cambridge, challenged his old mate, Charles Wordsworth,
studying three counties over at Oxford, to a race. Naturally Cambridge lost,
and so began the annual rematch.
A few years after that first attempt, a wealthy parent of a winning
Cambridge boy (likely down to the shock of finally winning) gifted the
Cambridge University Boat Club a pair of golden oars. The originals, made
of solid gold, were deemed too valuable – not to mention heavy – to be
hanging in public and were promptly swept off to be housed somewhere
safer; currently behind bullet-proof glass in the university archives like
they’re the Magna Carta or something.
In their place a pair of exceptionally less valuable, but equally important,
wooden oars, painted in gold leaf, were hung above the entrance, to remind
all rowers who entered the hallowed walls of the clubhouse that they would
soon be part of greatness. The Cambridge crew was rightly proud of their
golden oars, and word soon travelled along the meandering rowing
grapevine that they existed.
There they stayed, glinting in the sunlight, until the legendary Oxford
rower, Sir Henry Billingsworth – who at that point in his life was just plain
old Henry – thought it would be amusing to steal them. Actually, steal is too
strong a word; ‘borrow for the period of one rowing season’ would be a
better description. According to fable, Henry set off with eight of his
crewmates on an expedition across Oxfordshire, Buckinghamshire and
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