Five-Year Diary: Tuesday 23rd March 1976
English: Found Silas Marner.
German: on chapter, copy another boy’s notes as usual, which he is getting fed up with.
French: oral questions on the next chapter of Le Petit Nicolas.
Master (brisk, clipped):
“Alors—Vernon. Qu’est-ce qui se passe dans ce chapitre ?”
Me (hesitant, translating in his head):
“Euh… Nicolas va à l’école… et… il y a… un problème avec…”
Master (interrupting):
“En français complet. Pas d’anglais.”
Me (even more tense):
“Il… parle avec ses amis… ils sont… très… bruyants…”
Master (probing detail):
“Pourquoi sont-ils bruyants ? Donne un exemple.”
Me (guessing wildly):
“Parce que… ils jouent… et le maître est fâché.”
You get the idea …
Geog: given time to talk about Zambia, talk about the ‘Nawal’ section. A damned river? A railway under construction?
Break: Letters. One from my dentist, Mr Stubley, about the different uses of plastics for my brace. The other, a girl my age, I first met on SS Nevada in 1974, at age 12. We’d been pen pals for a couple of years. She lives in Edinburgh. I’m the one who likes to keep in touch. Contact with the outside world. And in particular with girls.
These letters brought me enormous joy. I have many of them still. Opening one just now I got the same thrill of checking where I came from – the first hint of who it might be, and then their address before seeing who it was and how they signed off. Of course a girl my age writing was special: our secret conversation, not quite a confessional.
Oddly, I just noticed, fifty years on, three different girls had chosen a card with a cartoon by Boynton. One wonders how to spell my name – I don’t remember her. Another invites me round. A third, a boarder like me, knows how to share ideas, and aspirations and a little bit of love. Fifty years on I’m also puzzled as I hadn’t realised I’d known these girls since I was 14. My recollection is that it didn’t meet them for at least another year or so. What strikes me therefore is how early teens and later teens hit a watershed: just friends or acquaintances when younger, with aspirations to be something more later on. I only remeber some of these girls ‘later on’z
Maths: more on equations.
Physics: Prep:
Read “The Deep” in the Daily Mail.
Lunch.
Talk to another boy about girls. Someone had a story that a boy had ‘tried it out’ with his sister. He wasn’t challenged. Someone wisecrack perked up and asked to be introduced to the sister. It had me wonder about the difference between the mechanics of the act; and the emotional attachment that I thought essential – to be in love so that you are ‘making love’. Entirely theoretical of course. We do human sexuality in Biology yet somehow manage to evade subjects like menstruation and erections, and anything to do with relationships, and nothing at all to do with sexual pleasure. The diagrams lacked detail: transects still left you unsure of how that ended up there. Where did your legs go? Your balls? Were you standing up – as the diagrams implied, or lying down? And why not her on top? Never mind the question of how the couple found privacy in the first place. And are they married?
We watch the Ten Mile Run. It is cold.
Rowntree wins in a time of 1.14.11. He’s in our house. I remember him a Mowden too. Proud to be a Mowdener?
Project Centre: I’m no carpenter.
Powell Hall. Wilson Run concert. Sunday Tweed jacket. Singing of the traditional ‘Long Run’ song, very British, Elgar and patriotic in tone. Very Hearty Berghian. Not my kind of thing – I grew out of it when I turned thirteen.
Didn’t finish notes (my recognition of a lax approach to coral singing).
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