What Sedbergh said it was doing—character, manliness, tradition—never quite reached me as lived experience. What I remember instead is what it required.
When things got too much, I kept it to myself. I would hide—in a toilet, a cubicle, somewhere out of sight. I might try to get to a phone to call my mother, or write a letter. There was no language for feeling; only escape routes.
I had known power before Sedbergh. At prep school I’d been a dormitory captain, a prefect, head chorister, captain of swimming. I didn’t want it again. I could see too clearly what it did. I followed rules to the letter and feared becoming a kind of “little Hitler.” Better, perhaps, to opt out than become that.
I don’t remember humiliation as much as a steady sense of unfairness. The punishments felt arbitrary: maps, impositions, and being confined to house. Not dramatic, but constant.
Among the boys, identity was reduced quickly—nicknames: Fatty, Skull, Chaps. We talked about girls, of course. That was constant. It filled the gaps left by everything we weren’t able to say.
Academically, everything was compartmentalised. Subject followed subject, disconnected. There were moments that stood out. A desire to express something in French poetry emerged. There was also a sense of grandeur in opera. These hinted at a world beyond the timetable.
Letters mattered. I still have them. They were proof—to others as much as to myself—that I had a life beyond those walls. Whether that life really existed or not was almost secondary. The letter was evidence.
I loved libraries, but neither the House nor the School library fed my mind. So I bought books when I could. One that stands out is Shere Hite’s The Hite Report on Female Sexuality. That says something about the gap—between what we were taught in biology and what we actually wanted to understand. There was almost no real visual or emotional education about the body, despite the formal curriculum.
The physical environment was relentless. Winter stretched from October to April—rain, cold, snow. I was used to it, being from the North, but it was still a constant presence. A background condition rather than something spoken about.
If I had written a manifesto at fourteen, it would have been simple: girls should be admitted. Both Sedbergh and the RGS eventually did this. And the curriculum needed widening—especially Art at O and A level. Something expressive. Something human.
What I didn’t write in the diary was the atmosphere created by some of the boys. It involved bullying, lying, petty theft, and exploitation. A kind of youth-offender energy. And alongside it, the private, feverish sexuality—masturbation, secrecy, confusion. None of this had a language. None of it was acknowledged.
The school did shape me, though not always in the way it intended. It put me off cross-country and fell running for a time—but I came back to it. Now I love hills, rivers, woods, greenery. That feels like something reclaimed.
What did it give me that a progressive education might not have? Perhaps an understanding of how male behaviour can turn toxic when confined. A kind of anthropological insight, lived rather than studied.
As for what remains—what in me is still “performing Sedbergh”—I would like to think very little
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