Fifty Years Ago: Thursday, 17th June 1976
(Sedbergh School, Age 14.9)
I was reading about Ripmax model aeroplanes and thinking wistfully about radio-controlled aircraft with little two-stroke engines. As a boy I’d had balsa wood gliders and chuck gliders, and this felt like the next stage up — something technical, grown-up and impossibly desirable. A few boys at Mowden had owned them. They were expensive then and still are now. Part of me worried that wanting one sounded childish and there wasn’t the space to make one either. …but I loved the idea of making something that could take flight. At Mowden we’d had cellar workshops we could wander into whenever we liked, benches full of tools, glue and wood shavings. Sedbergh had none of that freedom.
English: a test on the epilogue of The Tolpuddle Martyrs. Not brilliant, but probably all right. I think we were also looking at Thomas Hardy around this time, almost certainly The Self-Unseeing. There was something in Hardy that already spoke to me, even at fourteen — the sadness of time passing unnoticed while people live through moments they don’t realise will matter later.
Here is the ancient floor,
Footworn and hollowed and thin,
Here was the former door
Where the dead feet walked in.
She sat here in her chair,
Smiling into the fire;
He who played stood there,
Bowing it higher and higher.
Childlike, I danced in a dream;
Blessings emblazoned that day;
Everything glowed with a gleam;
Yet we were looking away!
French: Hammy said someone might take us while he was away for a week with the French exchange students.
Maths: matrices.
Break.
German: a re-test.
Latin: was mostly drawing on the desk rather than concentrating properly.
Lunch.
Cadet Corps: shirt-sleeve order under Mr Campbell. Shirt-sleeve order made us look, or so it seemed to me, like some strange version of the Afrika Korps — rolled sleeves, heat, dust, boys standing about trying to look military while still unmistakably schoolboys. Something about the whole thing became hilarious, though I can’t remember now whether Mr Campbell intentionally made it funny or whether he himself was faintly absurd and therefore impossible to take seriously.
There was another Latin test later which I made a complete hash of, though somehow I still passed.
I passed Mary — the Housemaster’s daughter — and that alone felt worthy of recording. She was the focal point for forty or more pairs of adolescent boys’ eyes. At fourteen I was fascinated by virtually every girl my age with a kind of helpless wonder and compulsion. Girls still seemed slightly miraculous to me, as though they belonged to a parallel and far more interesting world.
The Grubber: Sedbergh’s strange sweet shop and café, seemingly existing entirely for the boys, especially the middle years of the school. It was unlike anywhere else: hot, greasy, sweet, stale and comforting all at once. Three older women served behind the counter — round, unkempt, slightly intimidating and rather pongy. There were wrappers, heat, queues, coins sweating in pockets, and the smell of sweets, chips and old cooking fat hanging permanently in the air. I bought a Flake for 8p, Mintos for 10p and Midnight Mints for 10p.
By evening I was exhausted. It had been a long, hot day on my feet from dawn until dusk, moving constantly from lesson to lesson, parade to prep.
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