Five-year Diary: Monday, 8th March 1976
Wake up early to read Suedehead, which I’m enjoying so far.
Revise for Chemistry Test and get 12/15. Take notes. Some boy has the flu yet again and is sent home. (Im my three years at Sedbergh, I am never ill, never off for a day, let alone sent home).
English: Do poems which we read allow. Not poems like what we wrote, but boring poems by Wordsworth, Keats or Coleridge – I imagine, not having written down who we studied.
Physics. Do heat work. Chapter whatever in Abbott’s Ordinary Level Physics. Someone, a boy or the teacher, breaks their glass.
Break: Two sandwiches and two black bullets.
Latin. Told my prep: it was bad, and I had to rewrite it. Our teacher reminds me of Davros, leader of the Daleks. I don’t feel duty-bound to do anything well for him.
Maths: Sliderule work. (Calculators made an appearance in 1977, just in time for our O’ Levels. As a young boy, we could slot our willies into. The slide rule was used to build guillotines during the French Revolution. Just saying! We also imagined that this could have been a way to turn a Cavalier into a Roundhead by chopping off their foreskin.
Lunch.
Do unison work. Each House our up a choir and in due course we compete for a cup. I moan at the lack of any ability in our choir. It’s sluggish. Lacks tone. This coming from a former head chorister.
English: Do Midsummers Night Dream. I get to read Puck.
French: set a revision prep:
Divinity: write on Amos to Nehemiah. I resent that I do well in ‘scripture’ or Bible class. It’s all stories. I find these easy to recall. I don’t believe in God.
Supper.
Prep: all my time taken up with what we had been set.
Bath. Remember. These are communal. One room, six baths. If all the baths were taken you could either: take a shower, exposing your adolescent nudity and slow onset of puberty to the other boys, get into a bath with someone else – each bath could take three boys at a time if they swung their legs out – or wait.
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