J F Vernon Blog

Fifty years on: Sunday, 23rd May 1976

(Sedbergh, Age 14)

No band practice (brass band, not rock and roll)

Sunday Chapel: compulsory.

I asked the elderly priest who taught Latin about the Colts A’s

Swim: do a mere eight lengths (200m) and stop. I asked someone to look out for Colt D’s.

Lunch: Our table was joined by the Housemaster’s wife and their teenage daughter. We’re dressed in our Sunday best and are supposed to be on our best behaviour. Mary doesn’t speak to anyone, but she whispers to her Mum – nickname is ‘Ma Lips’. Ben manages to speak to her; he’s 13. I think she’s 12 or 13. Chalky is not impressed. His girlfriend talks all the time. 

Project Centre: I’m making a wooden cassette rack and salad servers. Both are wonky, but they work, so what? So I care. I feel like a caveman. Though he wouldn’t have had cassettes.  

Doss: My afternoon summarised. Dossing requires skill – it’s active drifting, such as: kitchen hatch for snacks, kicking a ball against the side of the House, trying to play a tune on my flute while standing on one leg, sitting for too long on the bog, delving through books in the library, contemplating running off to join the RAF.

I wouldn’t call boarding school life’ fun-packed’, but it is supposed to keep us busy and out of trouble. 

Afternoon Film: Lord Jim. A Religious message about redemption. Sentimental. I thought it was good.

Design: L.Pracks. (any idea? I don’t.

I’m reading “He and She,” a sex education book for teenage boys, published in 1958 and written by Kenneth C. Barnes, who was born in 1903.

I can’t fathom why I’m reading it. Had I stumbled upon it in the House library? Was it required reading? As a Quaker, he may have been approved reading. Who knows?

Barnes had been a biology teacher at Bedales in 1930. I’m not sure how that helps. How the bits fit is the end of it, not the beginning and the middle.

The author aimed the book at older teens and young men in their twenties. It is 1976, not the 1950s – things have moved on; the School and the teachers in it have not.

From “He and She”, I was supposed to learn the following about sex; I am quoting directly:

“Young people have to go their own way, learn their own lessons from their own mistakes … to make their own honest judgements … as each situation (in an intimate relationship) is always a new situation in which you have to use your own judgement.

I found sentiments such as this appealing: “The good experience leaves no guilt; it is supremely satisfying; it can be thought of afterwards with a sensual relish, yet as having given something deep and lasting to one’s life.”

On a more mature level, (sexual intimacy) is a “Part of family life … and getting to know each other.”

However, I am learning on page 48, “that some boys do experience sexual intercourse while they are still at school, perhaps through having found the sought-after girl who is not properly looked after at home and is therefore loose and uncontrolled in her behaviour.”

I rather think this kind of girl appealed to me, rather than put me off! I wonder if it was by way of some kind of education on life that Mum had me read David Niven’s memoir The Moon’s a Balloon, in which he lost his virginity, in his teens, I think, to a Soho prostitute. Not that I planned to do that.

The mind boggled. The bed jiggled. My mind went into overdrive. 

A boy from our House plays the school organ in Powell Hall. We are supposed to be impressed. Why play with your own organ when the School has a bigger one?