Fifty Years On: Sunday, 13th June 1976
(Sedbergh School, Age 14.8)
I woke early again with the morning sunlight already creeping through the dormitory windows long before the bell. Sundays should feel different, but at boarding schools, you are still beset by bells, the timetable and rules from the moment you wake. The dormitory was quiet except for shifting blankets, coughing, beds creaking and the occasional muttered voice from another cube. I often get up and sneak outside. Not this morning. I stayed where I was, half propped against the pillow, and opened The World Atlas of Exploration once more.
It is becoming a form of escape. A dormitory bed can easily become a hammock aboard a ship crossing the Atlantic or Pacific. The little wooden cube disappears, and instead, there are caravels, icebreakers, mountain passes and camel trains crossing deserts. I spent ages examining the maps: the Northwest Passage locked in ice, explorers searching for the source of the Nile, Marco Polo travelling east along the Silk Road, men hauling sledges across Antarctica into white nothingness. Every few pages, there are paintings of storms, strange coastlines, tropical islands and impossible mountains. The maps themselves are rich in detail — coloured routes stretching across oceans and continents with arrows and dotted lines showing journeys into blank parts of the world. It feels as though there are a thousand ways to escape Sedbergh if only one has the nerve to pack up and leave – or just go. Stick out your thumb on a country lane out of here.
Band practice: I was late. We did Handel’s Fireworks Music, which always sounds grand and ceremonial even when half the brass section is half asleep.
Chapel: The same old hymns again — the Top Ten from the last couple of centuries. At least I know them. Five years as a school chorister means the tunes are permanently fixed in my head, and I can harmonise automatically without thinking.
French prep: I copied out vocabulary notes for most of the lesson.
Lunch on Table One. Trifle for pudding, which was excellent.
Projects: I eventually found the piece of wood I wanted to use, though the teacher told me it wouldn’t stick properly, which was irritating after all the searching.
I dug around in my tuck box and discovered my salmon paste had gone off. It’s one of those ‘once opened, use within three days’. A tuck-box is not a fridge. The glass jar smelled dreadful. I ended up having toast with peanut butter instead.
Bath: Another form of escape. Unless there’s been a game of House Rugger or boys are coming in from the Long Run (both winter activities), you’re left to yourself. I like to sink below the water, holding my breath for a minute or so. I could be in the Red Sea, a sinking submarine under the Arctic, or in a glass jar on an alien spaceship about to be experimented on!
Supper: Chicken stew and mash. Custard and pears. Nice. Very little made it into the red plastic slop bowl, which must be an indication of approval.
Film night: it was Airport ’75. We watch this in the common room. You grab whatever chair is available, stand propped against the wall, or lie on the floor in front of the TV. The film starts reasonably enough, but goes wrong about halfway through and becomes sillier and sillier.
I find one of the actresses ugly, or scary, or odd in a way that makes me feel uncomfortable. It shouldn’t, but if someone is slightly cross-eyed, should they be the femme fatale in a disaster movie? She reminds me of a puppet from Thunderbirds.
The whole thing feels badly made, formulaic and dull. I lost interest and went back to The World Atlas of Exploration instead.
Far more exciting than disaster films are the real stories in that book: da Gama edging down the coast of Africa into unknown seas, Magellan losing ships in terrible storms, Cook mapping the Pacific, Franklin disappearing into Arctic ice, caravans moving slowly across Asia towards Cathay. The illustrations make every journey seem immense and dangerous. There are paintings of ships crushed by ice, jungles thick with mist, native kingdoms, desert crossings and tiny figures standing at the edge of enormous white landscapes. Even the maps themselves are fascinating. The routes spread out across the pages like invitations. Looking at them, I can imagine myself travelling too — somewhere beyond school bells, somewhere with girls, far away from impots, fagging duties, compulsory Chapel, and compulsory ‘games’.
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