Five-year diary: Wednesday, 17th March 1976
I woke early and read more of 2001. A good way to begin the day: astronauts, silence, intelligence. Escapism. I’d love to be off planet.
Powell Hall Morning Assembly: a surprise. My old Latin master from Mowden was there. No explanation. A character wandering in from a previous existence. He’d be gagging for a fag. He used to smoke out in the corridor before during and after class. He may even have left his tab end smouldering on the windowsill. He’d been a wonderful teacher. A brilliant storyteller and a lethal shot with a piece of chalk. If you weren’t paying attention the chalk, or sometimes a board rubber, clipped you on the ear. The safest seats were always the front rows which is wear I sat for that reason. He needed distance to get any power behind the throw. I remember his telling of the story of the creation of Rome to this day. I had a brother; we sounded like Romulus and Remus – always fighting.
Lessons followed their usual schedule:
English: The Tolpuddle Martyrs.
French: Countries: Allemagne, Pays-Bas, Royaume-Uni, that sort of thing.
Divinity: On Easter.
Latin: verbs and the remains of my prep. Half-chewed and regurgitated.
Music: At the Music School we listened to Beethoven being magnificent while several boys quietly fought sleep. We had the score and were supposed to follow along. I could, I was a former chorister and played the flute and piano. Looking around I didn’t recognise anyone from the orchestra – only the boy who played the drums in the brass band. Could he sight read? I doubt it. This exercise was about as futile as having the First XI scrum give an Irish Jig. The classroom was a ground floor recital space, a drawing room of a large Edwardian House. The room with windows onto the garden. We sat around the edges of the room. The teacher was the head of music. When he turned his back, we would leave one at a time through one garden window. We would come back in through the other window and then shuffle along. It was a sort of musical chairs. A few boys refused to move and became like stubborn stones sat in the centre of a fast flowing brook. Not once did the teacher figure out what was going on. If we tormented a teacher so much they were reduced to tears of frustration we counted it as a success. A French exchange teacher went this way. An English teacher who drank at lunchtime was easy prey in the afternoon. The cruelty of young teenage boys knows no bounds.
Lunch back at the House.
Then Unison practice — enthusiastic shouting disguised as singing.
Games: Ten Mile Running Trials. Sedbergh believes boys should fell run across the landscape for character-building purposes. If you’d twisted an ankle and got back crawling on your hands and knees you were considered school prefect material. It was character building. I came fourth in the juniors in 16.05, which was OK. Juniors? Under 16s ? Though all the way round I was thinking: I should be swimming. Or, I can last this long because of swimming.
Afternoon lessons.
Maths: Another Mowden teacher?! Mr S on topology — a subject that appears to involve tying mathematics into philosophical knots and then admiring them. He was a brilliant teacher who loved his subject. He knew how to engage with a class. He helped me towards straight As at Common Entrance and O’ Level. I got it.
Oddly enough, Mr S had also taught me at Mowden. Perhaps the school sends masters over to check how their earlier work is holding up.
Biology: cheek cells. Mine looked exactly like cheek cells.
English: Letter writing. Mine was deemed good enough. Hardly surprising. I’ve been writing letters home for the better part of seven years. Boarding school turns you into a reliable correspondent. At prep: school we had weekly letter writing class after Church on Sunday morning. Letters were read by the supervising teacher, ostensibly for spelling and grammar. You learnt to write lame, new reports and requests. If you were at Mowden, you needed to reach the postbox in Newton Village to send a letter out unread.
I still have some of these letters, saved by Mum, Dad or grandparents – relics of the pre-digital age).
I read Isaac Asimov for the mush of the lesson. Other boys were struggling with their letters. Some were being overly critical of the school I’m sure and like being in the Chinese Communist Party needed ‘re-education’.
At supper my old Latin master joined the House table. He didn’t recognise me. Another one from Mowden. Which is curious, since he taught me for years and only last year at that. But at boy at 13 looks different at 14. I briefly considered asking him to tell the Romulus and Remus story again. I also thought about asking him why oderint didn’t mean “they smelt,” as I had translated it. The correct translation for oderint, dum metuant, was → “Let them hate, so long as they fear”. I was going to say something but he went out for a fag.
Later we played Water Polo against Evans House. We won. Water-polo was considered to be like rugby in water; it was vicious. Twice I was concussed by a ball being deliberately slung at my face.
I saw my old maths teacher and Latin teacher together. They were heading to the library carpark. Then they went back over the Pennines in a light blue Morris Minor. They struck me as the oddest of couples. Not in five years had I seen them together in the corridors of Mowden Hall.
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