Fifty Years On: Friday, 18th June 1976
(Sedbergh School, Age 14.9)
I keep checking the notice board because I’m convinced “Junior Reading” will be announced. I no longer know exactly what it even was. Perhaps a public reading competition, perhaps some kind of audition for a school play. Whatever it was, it mattered enough for me to keep looking for different times or notices pinned up on the board, hoping not to miss it. But nothing appears.
Divinity: I have to hand in last week’s prep despite not having done it. Or the books either. That familiar schoolboy calculation begins — whether the omission will actually be noticed, whether one can bluff or disappear quietly into the background.
Then there is a mysterious note in the diary: “MBK.” Even now I cannot decipher it. It may have been a person — perhaps a member of staff, maybe a Mr Knowles connected with PE — or simply one of those cryptic schoolboy abbreviations that made perfect sense at the time and none at all fifty years later.
PE: in the gym: hurdles, basketball, and then into the swimming pool. One activity folding rapidly into the next. School life at Sedbergh is intensely physical — as much about physical fitness and mentality capacity: whistles, instructions, damp towels and polished floors. I could do 100 pull-ups. I had a bar across my bedroom door at home to practice on.
Bible Bashing? More like Bible smashing. We help up a boy rip up his Bible. He was giving up on Christianity in a way he wanted to make clear. I settled with taking a novel to read into Chapel. I think the point was showing off physical strength as much as anything else, like tearing a phone directory in half. This Bible had no special personal status for us; it was by then for most of us simply another institutional textbook. I can imagine we did it in a way to irritate a teacher who was religious. Or tonchsllenge him- did a new teacher know what to do? Teenage boys could be horrid; there were plenty of horrid boys at Sedbergh in 1977.
Geography: We watch a film on the Nile, about the Aswan Dam, which was the standard Geography topic of the ttime. The juxtaposition of modern engineering and the ancient shrines and moments was impactful.
Films and atlases hint at adventure and a wider world waiting beyond the Howgill fells and school boindaries.
Latin: I hand in some Divinity prep. It’s taken me decades to realise that however separate teachers were to us by their designated classrooms, they all gathered regularly in the staff common room.
Games: I arrive late to team practice. Depending on the master and the circumstances, that can either matter or not at all. If you had been delayed by another class, or were trying to find some unfamiliar sports field half a mile from your house, there could be a degree of tolerance. Everything depended on the person, timing and mood. I don’t think this was swimming practice — more likely athletics or cricket being organised at House level.
Then evening prep. Revise Chemistry — the Periodic Table, simple reactions—something to memorise and be tested on.
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