Inclined to change my hair, the point of difference – 50 years on: Tuesday, 18th May 1976
(Sedbergh, age 14)
German: the usual – the next chapter, and I had to read out the last paragraph. Reading anything out loud, in any language, was performance. It gave me something to do. Far from being attentive to what was being said by others, I’d skip on to my passage to read it through a few times. So much for ‘reading together’. With fourteen or so boys reading out loud, I was missing 93% of the text. This happened in English and in History, too. Once given a passage to read, my attention was drawn to my piece alone.
French: on numbers—quatre-vingts, tout ça. The peculiarities stood out: cinq and quatre-vingts. French I was poor at, but at least I’d been to the country exactly once – on a ski trip. I’d never been to Germany and had no plans of going. I was doing German to finally get out of doing Latin. Note ‘doing’ – I didn’t think of these classes as lessons, I wasn’t learning, I was having something done to me.
Geography: Ghana. Why? Who knows. maps and trade. We were often told off for fooling around. The fooling around was pranks—Chinese fire drills, attaching the teacher’s chair to his desk with bungees, passing notes, throwing things, making flippant remarks, asking absurd questions, and different boys asking the same question over and over again.
Ghana, being a former colony, felt like the school was preparing boys to go out as missionaries, civil servants or in the Army. Some teachers, particularly those new to teaching, struggled to control a class of 13/14-year-old boys who could collectively chime in with the same cruelty.
Break.
Go to the Armoury to get a cadet bag, trousers and a belt. The Armoury range and Armoury were an important part of school life. We had compulsory Cadet Corps and had to attend a week of Corps Camp on Dartmoor at least once—it was in the agreement our parents had signed when the school had taken us off their hands.
I was a good shot. Like being taught observational drawing at a young age, by Mum, Dad had got my brother and me behind guns before we were ten. Starting with an air gun, then a .22. If a child’s 12 bore was a thing, he’d had one for the few shoots we attended before our parents divorced. Getting the bag, trousers and belt was something else to dress up in: informal school uniform, Sunday formal best, gym kit, running kit, swimming, rugger or cricket … lab coats for Chemistry. Surely overalls in the Project Centre. Given the chance, I headed out onto the fells with a towel and stripped naked to sunbathe. Was it for the sense of escape? Every item of clothing had a name label: name and House, Housethan Vernon: Winder.
Town: I bought a card for Julie-Anne. It was what you did. Role play. The sense of having this connection with someone your own age, particularly a girl, from the outside world, mattered enormously. I bought chocolate for myself and on the spur of the moment, I had a haircut. At my last school, the ‘school barber’ had been handed out like a punishment. Now, it was at my pleasure. I decided I wanted whatever the other boys were not having – so short back and sides rather than hair over the ears to the shoulders, even.
Maths: papers back, 47/60. One boy got 60/60. What did he know that I didn’t? Might the Maths teacher have been attached to that boy’s House? He got extra tuition at prep. I’d have welcomed that. The staff in our House tolerated our presence, in all likelihood despised it.
Physics: read Chapter 14 and doss about. Being left to ‘read a chapter’ unsupervised was not a way to learn. They tried it on me the year before, when I was stuck at home with a badly broken leg – a box of books with no instructions or schedule was Sedbergh’s idea of distance learning. A few boys would look at the chapter – most would muck about, ruining it for everyone. Whatever happened out of boredom would escalate. And potentially get out of hand.
Lunch.
There was a talk on caving from the Royal Marines. Boys’ own stories and probably a recruitment gambit. For some this was appealing—me. I’d go down a cave, but never jump from an aeroplane.
Swim. Algipan. An earache or headache led to tension in the neck and shoulders. I got relief from a deep heat treatment like Algipan.
Mary looked shocked at my hair. At that point. I had gone from prep school to being ‘my own man’. I don’t recall the cut. I think it may have been counter to the trend, shorter, not longer—simply to look different.
Reports: bad. I cannot for the life of me recall what these were. Did ‘reports’ from all staff go to the Housemaster for him to discuss with us one by one or collectively? Perhaps.
Every encounter or possible encounter with a girl was a test of being able to reach out and develop a relationship with them. Do you know how you look in the mirror every day? I wanted to look into a girl’s face just as often during the day and feel that same natural connection. I sensed that one day I’d have this with a girl if I kept looking
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