Saturday 13th September 1975
My first day at Sedbergh.
I arrived awkward and self-conscious, embarrassed by the orthodontic brace on my teeth. ‘Y’ appeared with a large guitar slung over his shoulder, a flamboyant contrast to my own unease. We unpacked our trunks, though I quickly abandoned any hope of writing up the day.
At the time, I noted only: what a hope. Later, I added in my diary: I was unpopular for the first term, but I’m now good friends with “the lads.” (For ‘good friends’, think – not being set upon).
I had been keeping a diary since the beginning of the year. I kept it every day from January 1976 for the best part of fourteen years. I have my Sedbergh days covered. Every day, updates will be posted here as they happened. Why not? It’s Fifty Years on after all.
Broken Body, New Nicknames
I was only just out of a plaster cast, having badly broken my leg the previous March. I still limped, wearing ankle boots by special dispensation. I was not long off crutches, but I refused to use a stick.
The nicknames came quickly: Hoppety first, then Boots, which soon hardened into the more derogatory Booties. Later, as boys from my prep school turned up from other houses, the old detested name Granny resurfaced — a reference to my reputation for obeying rules and insisting that others did the same. I loathed it, and in some ways, I’ve spent my life trying to redefine myself against it. At least they didn’t pick up on the ‘shit mark’.
I have a birthmark, politely hidden under my right armpit and hidden from the world until I started to ‘dive’ competitively.
‘Urr, what’s that! It’s a shit mark.”
Older boys, like me at 8, and them at 9 or 10, would often point out my ‘shit mark’ as a way to ‘keep me in my place’.
I got out at age sixteen.
I’d already hitched home once. There was no keeping me from wasting my academic time. Better schools beckoned – anywhere.
I was eventually ‘offered’ Millfield (as a swimmer), and Winchester (for intellect), but felt that being at home, finally, if only for a couple of years, would be better. I’d work. I’d live. I did. Thank you to whoever listened at the time.
Sedbergh had the reputation in the 1970s of being where the ‘thick boys’ were sent (if you had the money) because you couldn’t get your bright boy into the Royal Grammar School, which had an entrance exam. I know families where the ‘thick’ one came to Sedbergh, while the ‘bright one’ went to the R.G.S. Just saying.
The RGS got me, got 4 A’Levels from me and a place at Balliol College, Oxford – just saying. (Actually, my mum got the 4th A-level from me in lower sixth, or the 1st, I suppose.).
Age 16, I had to take control of my future as my parents hadn’t just lost the plot, they had no idea, as their own messed-up lives were the priority.
Fair? Unfair?
My mother had put her life on hold, more or less. Released from marriage, my father went hell for leather into bachelor, serial husband, multiple divorcee mode.
Arrival
My parents had been divorced for three years, separated two years before that, and they lived in different orbits: my mother in the family home in Gosforth, my father at Appleby Castle, which doubled as headquarters for his businesses.
For two years, my brother had travelled back and forth on a private-hire bus from the Great North Road, and I joined him now with my trunk and tuck box, both already seasoned from five years at prep school.
I still have a note from my mother to Isaac Waltons in Newcastle: Please supply my son with a school blazer and a skirt — the latter for my sister.
First Impressions
We were dropped off in a car park in the centre of Sedbergh and wheeled our luggage trolleys up the hill past Chapel, the squash courts, and the Sanatorium. At the end of the drive stood Winder House, then as now a grey mansion with its grit courtyard and single boys’ entrance.
Downstairs were the junior standard rooms, the common room with its TV, the dining room, toilets, and six communal baths. Upstairs, studies and long dormitories like Victorian wards, divided into wooden cubicles. Our intake, however, was placed in the only open dormitory, twelve beds lined up together.
My older brother showed me the small kitchen with its kettle and toaster, and how to make hot chocolate: powder, sugar, hot water, then milk.
Letters were collected nearby. I maintained a gallery of penpals, a practice I had started when I was 12 or 13. At any one time, I was writing to at least six girls. Why girls? I’ll show you the letters someday. Girls could talk, could chat, would share. Boys that age were full of bollocks.
The Physical Burden
I don’t remember carrying my trunk — perhaps my limp excused me. But the limp and the boots marked me out regardless. “Booties” was muttered everywhere I went.
On the daily walk to the chapel or lessons, the limp was pronounced. My brace drew its own ridicule — I was ‘Jaws’ from the Bond films. An orthodontic brace, like my father’s pretentious gold Rolls-Royce Silver Shadow MK II, was a pricey item for those with the cash.
The boys in the year above enforced the pecking order without mercy.
‘Watch your peck!” was used by the most inadequate of individuals, barely a few months older than you, who felt threatened in any way, for anything. Fights did break out. Fingers were broken in punch-ups.
I was given fag duties but got off lightly, assigned to the House Head: one polished shoe each morning, nothing more. Perhaps my prep-school reputation as rule-keeper earned me role of “head of fags.” (Sic). Appointed by the House Master, my role was to assign ‘fagging duties’ to other boys. Try to assign them fairly? Forget it. The weakest got all the shit, because I was not in charge – the arses in the year group dictated everything. You know who you are.
Fag duties included warming the outside toilet by sitting on it, bare bum, for ten minutes until the senior was ready to use it; making and bringing butter toast to rugby players and their mates in the bath; and running errands across town, whatever the weather. PA prefect had ‘fags’; if you were a bully, a lad or a sports star, you would prevail on your prefect friend to get ‘fags’ to go out ‘fagging’ for you.
The Brace and the Guitar
Y’s guitar seemed like a banner of confidence, so different from my own self-consciousness. I too was a budding player, strumming Bowie, the Beatles, and Elton John. With two others, I would later form a band, covering Thin Lizzy and the Sex Pistols. Our only concert ended with the Housemaster unplugging the sound system, of course it did. I was dressed in a torn pillow case, over my head, blood-spattered, having put a safety pin through one ear, and with some difficulty, a paper clip in the other. Did I have issues? Or ambition? Was I making a point? Yes, my life’s ambition would be to be anything OTHER than what this establishment wished to ‘turn out’ – I was unique, not something to be smashed through an inadequately shaped hole against my wishes.
The brace was both physical and social pain. Apples and toffees were off-limits, and a knock could puncture my lip. When I returned to rugby, I needed a gum shield — a “sissy” thing in those days.
Unpacking the Trunk
Clothes went into drawers without fuss; my mother had long been practised at managing trunks and uniforms. The tuck box mattered more: sandwich spread, tuna paste, baked beans, tins of Heinz tomato soup—my small reserve of comfort.
The Dormitory
That first evening, light fading, windows rattling, beds neatly made. The new boys dominated the talk. Tomfoolery soon followed — pillow fights, slipper fights, and the inevitable lighting of pyjamas with matches. For those new to boarding, I had to relive all the experiences I had at age 8. What was new to them was childish to me. And so I felt for months to come – innocents abroad. Naive. No idea. Boarding school from age 8 made you grow up fast. You had to. No choice. There was no one to hold your corner – ever.
The Rountree twin, who was our dormitory prefect, showed no interest in me, once, like him, a head chorister and captain of swimming at Mowden just two years before. We had been in the same boarding school for at least three years! Not a glance. Not a word. What an arse. I had repeatedly beaten him in swimming races. I had outclassed him as a chorister. We shared an honours board. Not a glance. Not a word. Pathetic.
Lights out came with Matron, a German ‘battle axe’ personified – a living cliche or the deputy housemaster, “Chips” Chapman, a man-boy who had risen to prominence with huge ambition from Sedbergh to university and then straight back to Sedbergh to teach. For male role models, Sedbergh was woefully inadequate. I cannot for the life of me understand why our highly intelligent, creative, ambitious parents would place us amongst this bunch of total nincompoops. The school for failing teachers and kids with a low IQ and propensity to violence, which could be redirected to the rugby field.
Too many of the teachers were either ill-qualified or utterly redundant. Drunk, perched on the end of their desk. Late or absent. And one teacher who decided to sit like Buddha, totally still as a thought experiment to see what seventeen 14-year-old boys would do. As the mishbehaviour began, I left. Went to the library and got on with some work. I was called in front of the Deputy Headmaster to explain myself. I was very clear. Ready to take it up with the Headmaster. I had already written to my father telling him what a shower they were.
I wish I had been homeschooled. Between them, my mother and father had it all.
Meals and Rituals
Grace, register, sometimes a hymn. Meals were hearty: mince and two veg, followed by pudding. Leftovers scraped into red plastic bowls.
One wall bore a floor-to-ceiling mural of Sedbergh’s rural idyll, painted in a 1930s style, Branwyn-like. Rugby was in the air everywhere — colours, blazers, honours boards, casual boasting.
The Emotional Weather
Fear, embarrassment, resignation. A new, broken start.
Had I arrived in the summer term, as first planned, I would have entered the 4th Form among the juniors. Instead, starting in September, I was placed in the 3rd Form, considered senior in that year. It made all the difference.
Fifty years on. I cannot understand why my parents thought that the kind of hideousness of an all-male boarding school would work. Good parenting works, bad parenting is sending your child off to an all-male ‘posh prison’ full of bullies, absurd rules and expectations that the school and staff had to knock out ‘boys with character’ to serve the Empire, the Army, or as Accountants, Lawyers or mediocre, entitled business owners. Or just privileged wasters.
Learn much? Not much.
What do you do when it dawns on you as a child that several of your teachers are thick? They lack teaching skills, have an inadequate understanding of the subject, and struggle to control even a ‘small’ class of 12 to 17 boys.
I am angry fifty years on because of the time I wasted having a poor education shoved down my throat, and the waste of my father’s money. business owners. Or just privileged wasters.
IN CONCLUSION
I will defend every word I write. Provoke me, and I will expand, explore, elaborate and confirm every word of it. This is someone who started cataloguing life age 11. Who kept a diary from age 13. Who has kept at ‘dream diary’ for about as long. I know the contents of my brain better than an MRI scan. It will be shared.
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