J F Vernon Blog

Fifty Years Ago: Tuesday, 15th June 1976
(Sedbergh School, Age 14.9)

I was woken up at seven by my brother. He’d got an “impot” from R. H. Thomas, which usually meant extra work or some sort of punishment detail. This time, he’d been ordered to swim eight lengths before breakfast and wanted to borrow my goggles. It seemed extraordinary. Going for a run was the usual thing, up to the top of Winder before breakfast, that sort of thing. Nobody appeared to think this was odd. That was just how school worked. You accepted the rules, the timetable and whatever system existed above you.

Once I was awake, there wasn’t much point in trying to get back to sleep, so I got up and revised English while everyone else was still half asleep. I was working on Silas Marner and Twelfth Night. Shakespeare always felt easier when you’d gone over it quietly before the day properly started.

In German, we got our tests back. I ended up with ten “impots” for not paying attention. Actually, I’d done rather well in my test for a change. Everything at school was ranked and competitive — marks, positions in class, exam tables, House standing — so you were always measuring yourself against everyone else, whether you meant to or not. 

French was alright too. I passed with 18 out of 24, which felt respectable enough. Exams seemed to hang over everything at the moment. Even when lessons themselves were dull, there was the constant awareness of marks, reports and where you stood compared to everybody else.

In Geography, we watched a film strip about the Nile River. I can’t honestly remember whether “film strips” were actually short films or simply slides shown through a projector with a commentary over the top. Either way, once the lights were dimmed, everyone immediately started mucking about because half the room thought darkness automatically meant chaos. There was always the clicking sound of the projector and that faint warm smell from the machine itself. I liked the subject, though. The Nile seemed impossibly distant from Sedbergh — deserts, temples, crocodiles, and riverboats drifting through blazing heat, while outside our windows, everything was dry stone walls, damp fields, and school rules.

After the break, we had Music with Sutherland and played a flute duet. Music lessons were oddly relaxing compared to everything else because, for a little while at least, you could concentrate on making something sound right rather than worrying about marks and rankings.

Physics prep was mostly writing up the method for an experiment. Fairly dull work, though there was satisfaction in getting everything neat and properly set out.

Later on, I spent some time reading the Graupner catalogue. At Mowden, we’d all been obsessed with model aeroplanes and making elaborate Second World War dioramas, though somehow that enthusiasm didn’t really carry over to Sedbergh. Still, I loved looking through the catalogues. I was probably more interested in gliders or sleek speedboats by then. What mattered was that they were things you could actually build and play with — small worlds you could make yourself. After supper, we had preps: Divinity and German. In the Third Form, we worked in the junior common room, all eight or so of us together, each with our own little locked desk space built around the walls. By then, school life simply felt normal. You lived inside its system twenty-four hours a day. There was no real break from the timetable, the rules, the routines or the same people around you constantly. At fourteen, I mostly just accepted it as the way life was.