Sunday 23 March 1975
‘Small choir, quite good, have to do a trio: play piano, do letters, play Tri-tactics and lose, play again and win. Lunch. Feeble tuck. Have a fight and get angry, get smashed in the stomach. Have two armies and spend all afternoon fighting, always got people on backs. Play Consequences until bedtime, and continue in dorm.’
Looking back, this day was full of the small but significant details that defined life at school—the structure of choir practice, the intensity of play, the momentary bursts of frustration, and the way the dormitory remained alive with conversation long after lights out.
The Choir and Performance
The choir was made up entirely of choristers, with sopranos, trebles, and basses singing harmoniously—though the basses sang an octave up. I remember the acoustics in the church being good enough that Decca had come in to begin recording us, though, in the end, nothing was ever released. We had seen the Vienna Boys Choir perform at Newcastle City Hall, and somehow, the idea had formed that we were just as good. Perhaps we were.
There was a real sense of camaraderieWoodland Den 1in the choir, a feeling of collective achievement as we progressed through the years and a clear progression as we developed our voices and skills. Unlike so much else at school, which could feel arbitrary or imposed, the choir was structured in a way that made sense—we trained, improved, and performed together.
Tri-tactics
The appeal of Tri-tactics was its fairness—there was an equal chance of winning or losing. That unpredictability was what made it satisfying.
Den Raiding in the Woods
I was furious when I was pulled away from what I wanted to be doing—offered up, it seemed, for some mundane duty in the senior common room when my mind was elsewhere. I didn’t resent structure, but I despised rules and routines that existed purely for their own sake. There was no good reason to be stuck supervising tidying up when I was already functioning outside the usual order of school life.
Fighting was a familiar outlet. I had been getting into scraps with my brother for years, and fights with other boys weren’t so different—less about hurting or even defeating the other person and more about releasing frustration. But this one ended abruptly. Whoever hit me in the stomach hadn’t read the unwritten rules. That was the weak spot, and getting winded meant I was out of action. They had, in effect, won.
The den raids were a ritual I was introduced to when I first arrived at the school and have participated in for every term since—13 or 14. It was the accepted, unstoppable conclusion to the term. Those with dens were given a head start, setting off from the back door to defend our structures. Then, after about ten minutes, the full force of the school would sweep through the woods like a swarm of locusts, flattening everything.
Despite our ‘hand grenades, arrows, barbed wire, and trenches,’ the outcome was never in doubt. Once a den was destroyed, its former defenders would join the raiders, and the game would roll forward like a massive, expanding wave. There was always one big den, one fortress that had to be taken. As the chaos unfolded, small breakaway groups would go after hidden dens—buried deep in the plantation or disguised in the nature reserve.
The final battle usually played out in DC’s Wood, a place ordinarily off-limits, where, for this one afternoon, the entire school could enter and attack freely. Strangely, the dens in DC’s Wood were often disappointing, as if the more senior boys had lost interest in such things.
Dorm Life and Consequences
As the term wound down that night, we played Consequences in the dorm. This game differed from the structured paper version, where players wrote down parts of a sentence on folded paper. Instead, it was a spoken round-robin storytelling game. One boy would start with a line or a sentence, and it would pass around the room, each person adding to the story.
It was a game of improvisation, and depending on who was playing, the stories could become ridiculously absurd, adventurous, or downright mischievous. It was a perfect way to pass the time on one of the last nights of term when talking after lights out was unofficially permitted—at least, within reason.
End-of-Term Feelings
There was a collective shift in mood—anticipation, nostalgia, and restlessness. I felt a strange loss, knowing I wouldn’t see some of these boys again until the next term. Friendships at school existed in tight, enclosed bursts, and everyone disappeared just like that. Sometimes, I wouldn’t see people for years until they reappeared at parties in our teens.
Holidays had become complicated since my parents’ divorce. There was no longer the same feeling of returning home—instead, it was a division of time between two houses. Only two of us could stay with Dad at a time, which meant that even among my siblings, there was this odd feeling of being split up.
How Much Did This Shape Me?
Who knows? I sing in the contrast between chaos, and that stayed with me. The ritualised destruction of the dens, the structured harmony of the choir, the strict routines of school life, and the unspoken freedom of storytelling after lights out—all these elements coexisted, shaping the rhythm of life at boarding school.
Even now, I wonder—was I drawn to order within chaos, or chaos within order?
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