Monday 24 March 1975
‘Tidy up all my books and pack my cases to leave.’
That’s the entire substance of my diary entry for Monday, March 24, 1975. After six weeks of keeping this Five-Year Diary, I finally succumbed to brevity. It suited the finality of the day. Having been put on this conveyor belt half a decade earlier, I was now coming off it, overengineered, slightly damaged and still missing bits.
My books and tuck box would have been in the small DC’s Common Room, off the entrance hall and by the Senior Common Room. The old chairs were leather-bound, as if secondhand, and well-used from a gentleman’s club. A donation from an old boy, no doubt.
I’m struggling to remember how many DCs there were, but there were around ten for the ten dorms.
I remember playing a ball game, like fives, against the surfaces of this room, which was quite against the rules.
A kit radio made by B was also against the rules. The school must not have liked the corrupting sound of pop music, so it banned it. Yet we sang Bob Dylan protest songs in the choir.
Pretentiously, to impress my father, I asked for a French and a Latin dictionary for my birthday – I had one, but not the other. I don’t recall which. I possibly still had a few of my other books, ‘The ABC of Space,’ Nigel Calder’s ‘The Weather Machine,’ and a well-thumbed, plastic-covered softback copy of ‘The Lord of the Rings.’ and perhaps a book on painting model soldiers. Items from the cellar may have included a Tamiya Tank, assorted Humbrol paints, brushes and Airfix glue. My flute, music stand, and sheet music are slotted in carefully. My English folder was given back to me by a teacher who thought it might help me—and perhaps, tucked somewhere deep, a leftover prop from the school play, such as a goat mask.
The prep school experience was a rite of passage.
We had a school trunk and a tuck box with our names on them. Both had to be packed, the trunk mainly containing clothes from the upstairs landing and assorted footwear from the lockers downstairs.
Arriving five years previously, an older boy or the caretaker had helped you with your trunk, taking it up the backstairs to the top landing for its contents to be disgorged into numbers lockers, drawers and shelves, the empty trunk to be stacked in the attic. Five years on, you show off your strength and growth by carrying your trunk and wielding it like weights at a competition.
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