Fifty years ago: Monday, 3rd May 1976 – Winder House, Sedbergh. Age 14
Five-Year Diary: Woken at 5.00am by the sun. I get back to sleep eventually.
I Dream I’m walking with my girlfriend Julie-Anne along the beach at Beadnell, heading towards the footbridge over the Long Nanny. She’s very real—she’d come into my life that Christmas when I held a party specifically to get myself a girlfriend. A friend brought her along. She reminded me of a wood nymph from a Victorian fairy book. We went out a few times over Christmas, then again at Easter. I idolise her, really, and refuse to see that we’re not suited at all—she reads Jackie, listens to David Soul, and goes to Church.
In the Dream, we reach the dunes and find a kind of sunroom—like our own private beach hut. Then it begins to rain. There’s quicksand near the Long Nanny—silt and sand—you only sink to your ankles, but it’s unsettling, especially if someone like me is telling you stories about cousins being swallowed whole. The rain makes things worse. It suggests we might have to stay there. Julie-Anne would rather risk the quicksand and the wet than spend the night in that hut with me.
I don’t analyse the Dream, but I do want to ask her if she had it too, whether we met there at the same time. I’ve already half-convinced her of these things. I read her Tarot, which she was convinced was spookily true, and then proved (to my satisfaction) that we were telepathic after a few games of Mastermind. I’d planted the idea of shared dreams, even teleportation—something I’d tried before with a girl called Kathy in Sussex when we were twelve. Julie-Anne would believe most things I told her, except that God didn’t exist. Even when she didn’t believe me, it made her laugh.
Chemistry: work on pH. Prep comes back—not too bad, considering I didn’t really understand it.
I have to hand in a map of Japan to Brown-Fumes, the Head Boy. A ‘map’ is a punishment for calling him “Major Brown-Fumes” in front of other prefects. He’d always laughed before. At prep school, he’d been Brown-Fumes Major and his brother Brown-Fumes Minor—or Ploplet. He’d known me as Vermin—Vernon Minor—the youngest.
The map is no longer just a punishment piece—it’s a work of art. My mother always insisted we keep everything we made, good or bad. I’ve done this properly: cartridge paper, Caran d’Ache pencils, Japanese style. Pink sea border, red ink for towns, yellow islands, Mount Fuji smoking like Mount Doom. I present it to him framed. He gets the message. Later, he shows me a photograph of his girlfriend and asks me to draw her in ink for £5.
English/History: work returned. I get 12 out of 10. The essay was on superstition. The teacher is playing a game. If I believed in superstition, 12 would matter. 13 would have been dangerous. 27, and I’d have assumed he was a warlock recruiting me. I’d gone well beyond the brief—faked an exeat and spent six hours in the library, four after closing.
The library itself feels wrong—too polished, not used enough. It should smell of sweat, like a rugby changing room. Thinking is hard work. It should show.
Physics: light bending.
Break.
Latin. Abandon hope all who enter here.
Maths: 100%. Anything more would be unmathematical.
Lunch.
I return the history books and offer to shelve them properly myself.
French grammar.
Divinity: John Wesley. We read aloud like primary school children. I’d already read the whole book in one bath after games the previous week. I even walked to the Wesleyan Chapel in Dent for inspiration. Found none—but at least I’d made the effort. The teacher, an ordained priest, seems quite mad.
I’ve already finished Maths prep.
French all evening—learning meanings, hoping.
Caught talking. God forbid. I say I must have been talking in my sleep. Punishment escalates: from two maps to four. We all know the ladder—talking, punishments, slippering, caning, expulsion. You learn it from boys who’ve gone before. I shut up. No one was allowed to lay a finger on me anyway—only my older brother. If it had come to caning, I’d have refused. He might have snapped the cane. We’d both already been expelled once. Being shown the door wasn’t something we feared.
There are phrases we use—”Abandon hope”, “God forbid”—shared lines, a kind of code. But mostly I’m on my own. No one in my house is really on my wavelength. I’m not allowed to visit boys in other houses.
There is one older boy. We sit out on the grass tennis courts at 5.00am in the summer term. One morning, he tells me he’s leaving—not running away, but joining the army. Brown-Fumes Minor stays on, quiet and clever, takes the Oxbridge exam, and reads History at Oxford. Like me, eventually.
Meanwhile, I carry on—working the system, bending it where I can, making my own where I can’t. Teleporting out when I’ve had enough. Dreams can take me anywhere.
Leave a Reply