Fifty years on: Monday, 31st May 1976
(Sedbergh School, Age 14)
We lent books around — novels we had enjoyed. I’m reading science fiction and medieval adventure stories. I got a book back that I’d lent to Graham. What book, I’ve no idea, Asimov or Arthur C Clarke most likely. Or, less likely, a textbook lent during a lesson.
Books, though less so than LPs, defined who you were. I liked the worlds of Foundation and 2001: A Space Odyssey — rational, futuristic, expansive. The most memorable book to get handed around was probably Emmanuelle.
I had my own copy.
Chemistry: Competition reactivity. Magnesium dropped into a blue copper sulfate solution. There was a theatricality to chemistry when it worked, something close to stage magic or special effects. The blue solution, the transformation, copper appearing where it shouldn’t. Alchemy. I can still picture it. Yet I never truly “got” chemistry. Once it slipped away from me, I never recovered the ground. I needed extra classes to make sense of it, but instead just got further and further behind while pretending I understood enough to survive.
English: Twelfth Night again. We were reading it aloud page by page. A few boys were eager to read while others shrank from it. In time, the teacher knew who to pick. I liked getting a decent part and would skip ahead through the pages beforehand to rehearse my section, which meant I often paid little attention to what came immediately before it. I doubted the value of the exercise even then. What exactly were we learning? Did meaning emerge simply because words were spoken aloud? Broken into fragments over weeks of lessons, the play lost momentum and shape. Shakespeare arrived chopped into classroom-sized portions.
Physics: electrolysis. Books are back again. So many books coming back, checked, and marked. There was a belief that neat notes proved understanding had passed successfully from the teacher and the textbook through the student’s brain and onto the page. In practice, much of it was copying out or dictation rather than the art of actually taking useful notes. Yet this was supposedly preparation for years of study still to come at school and university.
Break. I was late back, and all the chocolate biscuits had gone. Competition at breakfast and break meant that if you didn’t get there quickly, the best things disappeared. Boarding schools taught you speed and opportunism when it comes to food.
Latin: books back. Mine terrible.
Maths: matrices and graphs. Maths, at least, usually made sense.
Lunch.
I got new black shoes. My left foot was still smaller after the severe break in March 1975. For six months or so, the leg and foot had grown less. I needed two extra soles built into the shoe. I had a limp for at least a year and an altered gait when running. With my left leg slightly shorter, my left hip dipped when standing, and if I rested something across my knees while sitting down — a tray of food, for example — I’d unconsciously raise my left foot to keep it level. Small bodily adjustments that became second nature.
More English and more Twelfth Night.
French: Le Petit Nicolas.
Divinity: read bits.
Later, I looked through an RAF brochure. It was a curious and short-lived interest, given that I was already trying to escape the conformity of a place like Sedbergh. Yet flying appealed enormously. The sensation of speed and movement. Perhaps the same thrill I later found in swimming, skiing, windsurfing and running — that fleeting feeling of release from gravity and ordinary life.
Supper.
Preps. Another form of class, really, only now in a common room under the watch of House prefects and the housemaster prowling about. It wasn’t the quiet, uninterrupted study period adults probably imagined. Resistance appeared in small ways — distraction, whispering, passing notes, daydreaming. Imagination came later, once your head hit the pillow, or during stolen moments in the bog, or escaping into the countryside beyond the school.
Leave a Reply