Sunday 16 March 1975
Waiting, went to Church, more boys in the choir, not very good. Came back. Read ‘look and learn’. The assembly had to do letters. Lunch. Senior dress rehearsal, watched. Supper. Played flute pieces. Watched Colditz. Came up to bed a MW, EW, and AW. Lights out, some boys fool around.
This is another brief Diary entry in Colin’s Five-Year Diary. A few lines sketch out the shape of a day—routine, obligation, small moments of amusement. And yet, fifty years later, those lines open a door. I don’t recall the exact day, but its routines and patterns are familiar.
Anticipation and the Sense of an Ending
“Waiting”—sets the tone. There’s an implicit sense of marking time rather than engagement.
I was biding my time. As I got older, I found delays of days or weeks intolerable. Why ‘bide time’? Why delay the inevitable once a new door has opened for you to enter or be ejected?
Now that this was my final term at Mowden Hall School, I see the subtle signs of an ending approaching. The school term was winding down, but it was more than that for me—I was approaching the end of an era. Soon, I would leave behind one form of boarding school life for another.
I was becoming more and more detached.
The Choir and Responsibility
I noted that “more boys in choir, not very good.” I wasn’t part of the recruitment process. I was the end product of being a chorister for five years. As Head Chorister, I was responsible for the boys, for seeing everyone in their cassocks and roughs, formed up in a crocodile, then walking to Church in an orderly fashion. (That’s if we dressed formally like this every Sunday or only on special occasions, such as the last service of the school term).
Our music teacher taught us technical skills and the nuances of performance: diction, breath control, speed, and tone. These details mattered to me. I wasn’t just a participant; I was invested. And yet, the boys weren’t at their best that day. Was it a lack of effort? A lack of care? Or was I simply feeling the weight of my expectations? I wonder now whether that sense of investment—of trying to shape something others didn’t care as deeply about—was one of the first tastes of creative frustration that would become familiar in my artistic pursuits. Whenever I sing, I recall the lessons I was given.
Permitted Reading and the Need for Escape
I read Look and Learn, one of the few magazines allowed at school. Comics were banned, but this was deemed acceptable, likely because of their educational tone. It wasn’t just dry facts, though—there was The Trigan Empire, a thrilling sci-fi adventure that provided a touch of escapism. We were also permitted Asterix the Gaul, but only in French – a deliberate way for the school to offer something fun while obliging us to improve our French. There may even have been one in Latin.
Letters Home: The Censored Narrative
Letter writing was a regular Sunday morning activity, done under the supervision of a teacher. These letters were vetted, supposedly to monitor handwriting, punctuation, and spelling, but also to ensure we didn’t write anything inappropriate about school life. That meant these letters were never frank. I wouldn’t have written about loneliness, frustration, or boredom. I would have shaped a version of my experience acceptable to adult eyes. Did my parents ever suspect there was more beneath the surface? And did I even understand how to edit myself for an audience?
The School Play: On the Sidelines
The senior play was in its final rehearsals, preparing for the traditional end-of-term performance at the Women’s Institute in Newton. There was always a junior and a senior play, but I wasn’t in either that year—I had been focused on my Common Entrance exams. Instead, I helped with set painting and makeup. I hadn’t remembered this detail until now. Did I mind not being on stage, or was I content to contribute in the background? I wonder if this was an early sign of my later involvement in theatre and film—not always as the one in the spotlight, but as someone shaping the production in other ways.
Music for Pleasure
I played my flute that evening—not for an exam or a performance, just because I wanted to. That alone is interesting. So much of school life was structured around achievement, around preparing for the next test or performance, but on this day, I played for myself. Possibly folk songs, something simple and familiar. I wonder if this moment of playing music just for its own sake was a quiet act of reclaiming something personal in a regimented environment.
Colditz and the Boarding School Mentality
We were allowed to watch specific TV programs, and Colditz was one of them. A show about prisoners of war, plotting escape under strict supervision—perhaps it’s no surprise that this was permitted in a school run mainly by ex-military staff. There was a particular fascination with wartime narratives at Mowden. In the woods, we played Japs and Commandos, building dens, digging trenches, and enacting commando raids. War games were part of the fabric of boyhood. There was an obstacle course and an annual contest, as there are for army recruits. I won the Junior and Senior cups first, by quite a margin, if I recall correctly.
Dormitory Rituals: Mischief and Ghost Stories
The night ended with the usual dormitory routines—ablutions, changing into pyjamas, making a bundle of our clothes and the final scramble into bed before lights out. Each dorm had a Dormitory Captain (DC), responsible for maintaining order. The age gap wasn’t always significant; sometimes a DC might only be six months older than the boys he oversaw. Before lights out, there was always some jostling and mucking around. But a different kind of energy took over once the lights went out. Every boy had a torch; the DC certainly had to have one.
Boys might quietly chat with the boy next to them or call for the DC to tell a ghost story, something to stretch out the night just a little longer. As the end of the term approached, a ‘dorm raid’ became a possibility.
Specific ghost stories were told. I recall being told ‘the Green Mist’ and ‘the Monkey’s Paw’ and recounting them to boys.
Fifty years later, these days seem like routine moments, but the more I look, the more layers I find. It took me a year or so of keeping a Diary to recognise that each day might have one thing that stood out and that it mattered far more to jot this down than to list the routine, such as ‘got up, had breakfast,’ which I hopefully did every day and still do fifty years later.
Some memories come instantly; others require teasing, connecting fragments, and asking the right questions. Revisiting the past is paradoxical: the closer I look, the more I find, yet remembering also reshapes what I thought I knew.
The Diary entry was written with a sense of posterity—the dedication in the front to my mother. A note to myself in the Diary in early April 1975 suggests I might write a book about Mowden. Though I’m unlikely to do that, my Diary entries, letters home, and the school magazine must suffice; I have written several fictionalised short stories set in an English boarding prep-school or a science-fiction equivalent.
And so I return, again and again, to these words, restoring the past the way a photographer might fix an old black-and-white photo, or the way AI might colourise and bring an old photograph to life.
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