Saturday, 13th September 1975
(Gosforth/Sedbergh. Age 13)
My five-year diary had already captured the tail end of boarding prep school and was now meant to record the entirety of public school — or “posh prison,” as I would later call it. I would eventually begin a second Five Year Diarg in January 1980, the year of my A-levels, but at thirteen this one still felt like a serious undertaking: a record of becoming someone. My teen years. Age 13 I started public school. Age 19 I started as an undergraduate at Oxford.
I had shattered my leg skiing in March 1975 and stopped writing the diary I’d been given for Christmas 1974. From April through to September 1975 evwey day at home had felt repetitive and diminished. Hospitals, plaster, crutches, daytime television, boredom, embarrassment, and the slow indignity of learning to walk again. I could not bear writing down each evening what I had failed to do that day.
Had the accident not happened, I would have started Sedbergh in April. Instead, six months later, I was finally fit enough to return to school and was put on the private-hire coach from Melton Park bound for Sedbergh. My older brother was already there and was supposed to help me settle in. Between Mowden Hall and Sedbergh I already had five years of boarding school behind me. How much worse could this place really be?
The morning itself felt like the end of summer. Dry and blustery. Cool enough for a jumper. Gosforth suburbia under a pale sky.
We lived on the far side of Melton Park then, part of that expanding early-1960s Newcastle world of detached houses, broad roads and newly planted trees that still looked too young for the estates around them. Mum loaded the trunks into the boot of her Austin Maxi and drove us over to the coach pick-up point. There was little ceremony about it.
If I needed help with the luggage because of the leg, it was not really offered.
Oddly, I can remember earlier first days more vividly than this one. Ascham House when I was five or six: grey shorts, red blazer, red school cap, all the teachers women, waiting my turn in the playroom for the wooden rocking horse. Then Mowden Hall in 1970, probably delivered by both parents before the marriage finally collapsed completely. Even now I cannot quite remember whether they were still together then or merely performing togetherness for the children.
This departure felt different from both.
Not exciting.
Not dramatic.
Administrative almost.
I may have been taking the Sedbergh coach for the first time, but the route itself was already deeply familiar. For two years Dad had been living in Appleby, so the A1 south and the turn west along the A66 had become part of the geography of divorce. Scotch Corner especially belonged to a kind of family cartography: children exchanged in hotel car parks between parents who no longer travelled together.
I already knew the shape of the Pennines from a car window — where the road widened into dual carriageway, where the snow sometimes blocked the high passes in winter, where the weather changed as you crossed westward. The difference now was height. From the coach you could see over the dry-stone walls.
I arrived at Sedbergh not as a healthy new boy but as a damaged one.
I still limped and carried a stick. My left leg felt unreliable after six months in plaster. One foot was now slightly smaller than the other, which forced me into awkward ankle boots because ordinary shoes slipped off. At thirteen, bodily differences are magnified instantly by boys. I went from “Hoppety” to “Booties” in a matter of weeks.
Being excused rugby for the season marked me out immediately. At first I probably underestimated what that meant socially. Later it dawned on me. Rugby was one of the currencies of belonging.
The trunk and tuck box, however, were reassuringly familiar. The same ones I had used since arriving at Mowden Hall in 1970. Their old labels and scratches carried continuity across schools, trains, dormitories and divided homes. I already knew the rituals: name tapes, shoe polish, military folding, how not to look homesick. Prep school had institutionalised you young.
It had also taught you what not to do.
Do not be soft.
Do not defend the bullied.
Do not attach yourself to older boys.
Do not show fear.
Do not cry.
You learned quickly how to spot “the arse” and his acolytes.
Day boys were regarded as wets — boys who still went home to Mummy every evening. That alone made them faintly suspect within the culture. Emotional suppression, meanwhile, was interpreted by adults as maturity.
The coach itself smelled of tartan upholstery, stale tobacco, diesel fumes, crisps and adolescent body odour. Older boys occupied the rear seats automatically. New boys and younger ones drifted toward the front. Hierarchy had already formed before the engine even started.
Some boys boasted loudly. Others withdrew into themselves. Cigarettes appeared almost immediately among the older boys in the back rows, smoke drifting forward through the coach despite attempts to hide it.
There were no headphones in 1975. Portable cassette players barely existed and would have looked absurdly futuristic if they had. Conversation, cigarettes and staring through windows filled the hours.
It was a relief to discover Paul Peters on the coach. An old Mowden acquaintance rather than a close friend, but familiar enough to steady things slightly. We shared music and choir in common; he played piano. Conversation slipped naturally into comparisons and questions about Sedbergh.
The older Mowden boys, meanwhile, largely ignored us or behaved as though they scarcely knew us. That was one of the first lessons of public school: old loyalties were disposable once hierarchy shifted.
Outside the coach windows another social drama unfolded.
Parents fussed over trunks.
For some Grandparents hovered and Younger sisters wandered about awkwardly because they were too young to be left at home.
I found the fuss faintly embarrassing. Boys whose parents hovered too much seemed soft to me. Families were hiring. Yet at the same time I watched them closely.
I noticed the cars people arrived in. I noticed sibling relationships.
I noticed girlfriends.
Girls stood in loose clusters near the coach as though spectating at a rugby match. Usually only one of them actually belonged to a boy there. The rest came for the theatre of it. A boy in tweed school jacket kissing his girlfriend goodbye seemed impossibly mature to me then, almost adult. I could already tell the difference between a genuine kiss and one performed for the benefit of faces pressed against coach windows.
And beneath all that adolescent judgement sat something else:
it was nice to see evidence that somebody was loved.
Girls represented more than romance at that age. They hinted at warmth, family, softness — a world outside the enclosed male system we were entering.
Home disappeared for me the moment we crossed the Tyne Bridge into Gateshead. Once Newcastle fell behind us, the journey psychologically shifted. Durham. Scotch Corner. The long westward pull over the Pennines.
Scotch Corner was the point of no return.
Oddly though, “home” began to flicker back into existence near Brough because Dad now lived further along the Eden Valley at Appleby. Geography itself had become emotionally divided.
The further west we travelled, the wetter the landscape usually became. By the time the coach descended beneath the enclosing bulk of the Howgills, the mood inside had changed too.
Louder boys quietened.
Older boys woke up.
New boys stared silently through windows pretending not to think too much.
And there it was waiting.
Not grand exactly.
Not even particularly impressive at first sight.
Small.
Enclosed.
The school was the town and the town was the school.
Stone buildings.
Cold washrooms.
Hierarchy.
Scrutiny.
Noise.
The strange mixture of privilege and emotional neglect that characterised elite British boarding schools of that era.
The journey would repeat itself over and over during the next three years. Different music. Different worries. Different versions of myself.
But this first journey mattered most because it marked the real crossing: not simply from home to school, but from childhood into the enclosed male world that would shape much of the next decade of my life.
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