50 years ago: Tuesday, 1st June 1976
(Sedbergh, Age 14)
I woke early to revise French and German before breakfast, trying to force vocabulary and grammar into my head while the rest of the House slowly stirred around me.
German: others got their tests back; mine were so poor that I needed to see the teacher alone.
French: I did reasonably well — 14 out of 20 — though at Sedbergh that still left you dangerously close to humiliation. Anyone scoring 15 or below received impots, a punishment connected to extra school work, not exactly “doing lines” but something akin to it. Even now, I detest the idea that my own well-meaning inability to grasp a subject could itself lead to punishment. I had done the prep and worked the extra hours. It wasn’t as if I hadn’t tried. What wasn’t working for me was the way languages were being taught.
I sat with Ben, a fellow swimmer. Fenwick from Evans House arrived very late, as though ordinary rules didn’t apply to him. We laughed at him for being so scatterbrained.
In the afternoon, the swimming team travelled across the Pennines to a swimming gala at Ampleforth College. This two-hour journey felt like a proper expedition from the isolated village of Sedbergh. It dawned on one after a couple of terms — and I was still only in my first year — that Sedbergh was remote and cut off from the world, burrowed away behind fells, hills and moors.
Inter-school events were rare and therefore disproportionately exciting. I can only remember swimming against the Royal Grammar School Newcastle, Ampleforth and perhaps Lancaster Grammar School, along with an open meet at Troutbeck and a national relays competition in Blackpool. That and inter-house galas.
Ampleforth was impressive. Its imposing Catholic abbey and cathedral towered over the landscape. We often found ourselves ranking and categorising schools and individuals. In many ways, Ampleforth appeared to be the Catholic counterpart to Sedbergh’s Quaker-oriented Anglicanism. While we didn’t have monks, there were several ordained men among the staff – we got too much religion.
I had Catholic friends, though at prep school, simply being labelled “Catholic” had once marked a boy out as somehow different.
The hall containing the six-lane pool felt immense compared to our pokey four-lane pool at Sedbergh. We juniors won, the seniors lost. Afterwards, we played water polo, which was the real excitement of the day. It was exhilarating. As a fast swimmer, I often reached the ball first and even scored.
Swimming was not a required talent at Sedbergh; they wanted talented rugby players, cricket players, and runners for the annual Ten Mile endurance race. Sedbergh was not structured to prioritise the needs of individual children. Instead, it focused on what the school needed, reflecting the beliefs of the time (and those of our fathers) about what society — even Britain itself — supposedly required.
There teas afterwards beat the high standard set at Sedbergh – there was even Tartan bitter with the sandwiches. It’s called ‘table beer’, apparently a traditional one, once brewed by the monks. Drinking itself was not unusual to me — I already had beer at home and the occasional glass of wine with meals — so the novelty was that it appeared sanctioned.
On the coach back to Sedbergh, the boys settled into their familiar groups and hierarchies. Looking back now, those journeys were not places where the masks of public school life came off. If anything, the less appealing aspects of a group of boys often came to the surface: herd mentality, laddish behaviour, crassness, snobbery, elitism, brittle Britishness, and early signs of what we would now clearly label as toxic masculinity. There were chants, songs, comments about the world outside—female, foreign, or otherwise—and endless rankings of one another.
We stopped for chips. Tucking into greasy chips wrapped in newspaper felt at odds with our tweed jackets and polished shoes.
We were back by ten o’clock. Returning to school felt like being put out of sight once more, quarantined from the world, not learning how to live in it.
Leave a Reply