Fifty Years Ago: Saturday, 12th June 1976
(Sedbergh School, Age 14.8)
I was up early reading The World Atlas of Explorers. I love maps — not simply geography maps but maps of anything: routes, systems, diagrams, journeys, ideas. I like the way different illustrators and designers visualise information, with colours, symbols and lines turning whole histories and adventures into something you could hold in your hands. Maps suggested that the world was vast, structured, discoverable and somehow waiting.
Chemistry: We took notes, and on the test I got 19 out of 20 on order. Looking back, my success in Chemistry was short-lived, but at the time, it mattered. There was satisfaction in appearing competent at a difficult subject, even if the confidence never lasted.
French: prep was alright.
English: We got our work back, and I received high marks again. We were working through Twelfth Night, reading it aloud around the class in the usual unimaginative fashion, with boys taking parts in turn. At the same time, the master pushed steadily through the text from beginning to end with little real enthusiasm for Shakespeare. At least I had a part: I read Feste, the Clown, which, in retrospect, was probably apt. Shakespeare’s fools are often the sharpest observers in the room, hiding intelligence behind wit, sarcasm and performance.
After the break, we had projects and worked on isometric projection drawing: careful lines, measurements, and perspective constructions. I was excellent.
At lunch, each House hosting swimmers had a visiting boy from Durham sitting with them. School matches and galas always created temporary social arrangements in which strangers were dropped into the routines of House life for a few hours.
Swimming: a strange contradiction at Sedbergh. It was my sport, the one thing I genuinely excelled at, yet the school barely supported it properly. The pool was poor — only four lanes — and in my first year, we had not even had a proper coach. Looking back now, it is impossible not to wonder what might have happened had I received serious coaching when I was young enough to develop properly.
Even so, that afternoon I swam 30.98 for the 50 metres and broke the record. At fourteen, achievements like that gave fleeting proof that you might actually possess some genuine ability beneath the uniform, routines and endless institutional sameness. I also swam the first leg of the relay, which I always preferred because you started cleanly against the clock rather than chasing somebody else’s wash down the pool.
Afterwards, there was tea in the Cricket Pavilion. I had nothing to do with cricket itself. Still, I admired how smoothly the pavilion operated as a social machine: visitors welcomed in, tea urns working overtime, plates appearing endlessly, masters and boys all briefly behaving as though this was the natural order of English life.
Later, I played squash against PP and beat him 6–1. I had known him from Mowden. He was genuinely talented musically — piano, guitar, chorister — one of those boys whose identity at school became attached permanently to a single skill or nickname.
We got a shandy afterwards. Enough to feel faintly adult without anybody regarding it as dangerous.
Then a bath back at House
I made hot chocolate.
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