Fifty years ago: Thursday, 10th June 1976
(Sedbergh School, age 14.8)
The tartan rug I have hooked up between my pine chest of drawers and the iron bedstead has been with me since prep school. It is the closest thing I have to personalising my black-painted metal school bed. It’s a rug with a history. It may not have the cuteness of a teddy bear, but it is closely associated with the people I love. It can be hugged, and in winter, you can wrap yourself in it and feel as if you are getting a hug back. It may not have the clarity of the Bayeux Tapestry, but I can see the storyline.
It has been placed too. Shake it, and you still get a dusting of fine sand from the beach at Beadnell. Mum once tried to wash it, but I wouldn’t let her. It smelt of people and journeys and old summers. The wool is rough and slightly scratchy, with frayed tassels at the corners and places where the weave has worn thin from years of use. Dark navy blue crossed with lighter blues, white and red stripes. It looks like something from a railway carriage or the back seat of my grandfather’s car. It is labelled. Everything I own is labelled — the rug included. It has a woven tape with my name on it: Jonathan F. Vernon Min. The “Min” stands for minimus. I was once the youngest and most junior of the three Vernon boys when I arrived at a Northumberland boarding prep school in April 1969, aged seven.”
“Vernon Min” quickly became “vermin”, and the nickname stuck. Fighting back only made it worse. I would lash out with a torrent of language picked up from drunks fighting behind the Craster Arms at Beadnell. I punched, kicked, and even scratched — because scratching worked, and I kept at it when boys said I fought like a girl. Rats fight back when cornered. In time,” vermin” stopped being an insult and became something closer to armour. Nicknames at school somehow turned into terms of attachment, even affection, however unpleasant they sounded from the outside. Masters and boys alike accumulated them: Boggy, Granny, Balmy, Bugs, Skull, Bodger, Ma Lips, Fatty, Winnet, Pills, Branston, Brown-Fumes, Chin, Greasy, Chalky, Dolly, Chips, Chaps, Sue, Aunty Mary, Hammers, Stavros. A few come to mind.
My rug is supposed to shade me from the early morning sun. It lets too much light through. On clear days like the ones we are having now, the sky starts brightening before four o’clock, and the sun is up not long after half past four. There are no curtains on the tall single-glazed ward-like windows of the junior dormitory.
My window faces south towards the River Rawthey. June 1976 is sliding into drought. Even this far north, the air feels foreign somehow — hot, still and continental. France rather than Cumbria. Languedoc perhaps. The dormitory smells different too: drying grass, floor polish, warm dust, damp towels, stale socks and soap, all mixed with the strange,e heated scent coming through the open windows from the meadow below. Even the sound of the morning seems foreign. Birds are louder than usual. The distant rush of the Rawthey reduced after months without rain.
By five o’clock, I’m sitting outside beside the grass tennis courts on the east side of Winder House, revising German for a test. The rug is serving its proper purpose now. The grass is soaked with dew despite the coming heat, and I sit cross-legged on the tartan wool in my PE shorts while the courts steam gently in the rising sun. My comprehension of German is limited.
English: Tolpuddle Martyrs test. Quite good, I really. Only one question wrong — from Bodge — about “Lord Me”, which one of the labourers apparently called Lord Melbourne at the time of their arrest. I thought the man was blaspheming.
French: more prep on the difference between the Passé Composé and the Imparfait. No one ever properly explained it in a way that made sense to me, though when you hear French spoken naturally in stories, it somehow becomes obvious. Language to me is not machinery but something alive — a river system with currents and eddies and hidden connections. Some boys can arrange grammar like Lego bricks. I cannot. I need narrative, movement,t and real speech before the pieces mean anything.
Maths with Mr Banks: vectors, then I got muddled on transformations. Easy enough to do because a Translation — sliding a shape about — uses vectors, while translations themselves are only one type of Transformation. I was told to show my coursework.
Break: a letter from Mr White, who taught Geography at Mowden for four years. Neat black-ink handwriting, kind and honest. Reading it feels like hearing from an older brother rather than a master. He writes that he is leaving the world of privileged prep-school boys and moving to work with children with educational needs in Newcastle’s West End. There was always a gentleness about him which made learning feel natural and safe rather than something beaten into you.
Latin: composition. Import. This explains a great deal about my antagonism towards Latin and Chemistry. Both subjects seem to assume that if you punish confusion often enough, understanding will eventually appear. It never occurred to some teachers that they might be failing to teach me, failing to engage me, or failing to explain why any of it mattered. Other boys seemed able to assemble Latin and Chemistry like construction sets, obediently fitting one logical piece into another. Perhaps with a tutor, or simply another way of explaining it, I might have managed better.
Instead, my mind simply freezes. Not panic exactly — more revulsion. The same feeling I get looking at gooseberries and custard. I just want the experience to stop. Staring too long at a page of Latin turns my brain to stone. Talk about Medusa.
Bronze Medallion: easy. I had taken it two years earlier. As an age-group swimmer, splashing around in pyjamas and towing somebody to the side of the pool hardly posed a challenge. Swimming at Sedbergh feels oddly low-status, though — more recreation than sport, somewhere between kite flying and messing about in boats. Running and shooting carry far more prestige.
Preps: I didn’t finish Latin. I can’t even start. My brain is saying, “Let’s give this a go,” but I’m clinging to the handbrake with both hands. I don’t want to budge.
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