‘This was it. I played outside and washed hands. I felt rewarded and looked forward to the exam. Vicar was late. English I was satisfied with it. Maths I I checked and double checked when the Vicar said stop. Lunch. French felt pleased with. Especially the dictee. Wandered down to watch games, draw, played flute and played games while school had lessons. Practise at prep.’
This is cryptic and not helped by my poor choice of words. Five decades on I have a better idea of what I wished to say and some part of my brain is rushing back to this day as I type – thumbs and a finger on a QWERTY keyboard on my iPhone. My laptop and the iMac both died in the last few months and are yet to be replaced.
Back then I wrote with an ink pen, probably a Parker pen. The school did not permit us to use Biro.
I don’t get what I was doing outside on this Monday morning in February 1975 before classes. There were only two of us sitting the CE exam given the odd time of year to be taking it. Maybe we’d been let out at break but surely not before? And what do I mean by play? Up a tree in the backyard, around at the ‘gardens’ our miniature allotment plots? I haven’t a clue. If outside we were in brown boiler suits. I have snaps of boys thus kitted out taken with the pocket Kodak instamatic I had on me – about the size of a smart phone but with one function. 32 snaps to a cassette.
English, Maths and French. I wonder what put me off formal language learning at school? I did nothing for me. I had to be in the country. Many would say I’m now fluent. I am not. I understand most French on film, on TV and online. It helps enormously to have the z French in subtitles too. So good spoken French. Terrible at written French – I’ve rarely had to and can of course simply use Google translate.
The Vicar of Ovingham was the invigilator. Not noted in the diary so maybe to come, but at some point possibly in the paper on Scripture i insisted that god didn’t exist. I’d have five years or morning and evening prayers and weekends in Church but had come to disbelieve. I couldn’t feel his presence and thought the scriptures a poor historical document made up mostly of fictionalised accounts.
The school day meant after lunch a short break, then compulsory games, five days a week, with further afternoon lessons from around 3:30pm or 4:00pm heading towards supper. Perhaps we world intol 5:30pm. A double period of two 45 minute classes.
I would have gone to watch the First Eleven training on the large rugby pitch. On the grounds where as a punishment some years ago we had been sent to do ‘stone picking’ – waking back and forth looking for stones thrown up by a rake dragged around the sports fields by a tractor.
I suppose I did my drawing in the DCs Common Room. Or sketching out and about. Flute practice was most likely in one of the music cubicles or possibly in the dining room by the piano or in an attic room where there was another piano.
And so it was.
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