Five-Year Diary: Mon 8th March 1976
I wake up early on purpose. Not for God. Not for House prayers. For Suedehead.
Revised for the Chemistry test. Thirteen out of fifteen. Perfectly pitched: high enough to look diligent, low enough not to look keen. I take notes as if I care deeply about ionic bonds.
There’s a boy who has the flu again and is sent home. Amazing. In three years I will never once been ill. Not a sniffle worthy of parental extraction. I could probably be carried out on a stretcher and they’d still say, “Rub Vicks on it” our House Matron’s mantra.
English. We read poems out loud. Not our poems, obviously. Not the ones where something actually happens. Wordsworth or Keats or Coleridge, I assume. They all write about clouds or death or walking slowly somewhere. I suspect if one of them had attended Sedbergh he would have written about rain, the sheep, the lack of posh tottty and compulsory fell running.
Physics: on Heat. Chapter whatever in Abbott’s Ordinary Level Physics. Ordinary being the keyword. Somebody carelessly breaks a glass. It is the most exciting moment of the term. At prep: school Mr B used to do explosions, some by mistake. For a second we all look up as if the firebrigade will show up as the teacher is such a helarh and safer nut.
Break: two sandwiches and two black bullets. Sugar disguised as refreshment.
Latin. I am told my prep was bad and must be rewritten. The Latin master reminds me of Davros from Doctor Who, except without the charm. I feel no natural urge to excel for a man who looks as though he is about to exterminate me for misplacing a gerund. If inspiration does not strike, neither do I.
Maths: slide rule work. I recall how we deployed them at prep: school – none of it printable. The things we’d pretend to guillotine – not just our fingers. Calculators are rumoured to be coming next year, which feels like the Industrial Revolution arriving just in time for our O’ Levels. Typical.
Lunch.
Unison practice. Each House pretending to be a choir. I moan about the lack of tone, which is rich coming from someone who used to be head chorister and now mostly mouths the words. It is sluggish. Funereal. If we win a cup it will be out of pity.
English again: A Midsummer Night’s Dream. I read Puck. Finally, a character who understands mischief as vocation.
French: revision prep set.
Divinity: write on Amos to Nehemiah. I resent how easily I do well at Scripture. It’s just narrative recall. Plot points. Smite here, lament there. I don’t believe in God, but I do believe in remembering stories accurately enough to pass.
Supper.
Bath. Communal, obviously. One room. Six baths. If they’re full, you either shower — publicly unveiling where you stand in the slow progressionof puberty — or climb into a bath with two other boys and swing your legs out like crabs trying to escape from a bucket – or wait. I get in with a disgruntled 5th former – it would bad form not to budge over. I’d had six years of communal plunge baths at prep: school so couldn’t give a monkeys what I saw or they saw.
Showering with swimming trunks on was called ‘girlish’ and the boy would be lashed with the wet end of a towel until he took his kit off.
I read Suedehead before lights out.
Very London. Fights, birds, boots, reputation. All hard. Blokes live entirely by who can hit hardest (sounds like rugged), and who’s going out with whom (except we have none of that in posh prison). Bit grim in places but gripping. It makss Sedbergh feel 100 miles and 100 years from reality. Not sure if it’s admirable or just sad — lots of swagger but not much else underneath. Still, you keep turning the pages. Feels like illicit reading it. From a big in lower sixth. Interesting how much image matters. Clothes are more important than character. Not sure I’d last five minutes down there.
Leave a Reply