Fifty Years On: Saturday, 19th June 1976
(Sedbergh School, Age 14.9)
Saturday morning classes.
Chemistry: A test. I did reasonably well, I think, largely because I’d revised some of the areas I’d been getting wrong before. There was a faint sense of relief at being able to answer most of the questions instead of bluffing my way through. I had to know whether I’d got it or not, could remember or relearn a thing. My problem was time. Learning things I struggle with took far longer than the allocated slot we got for prep.
French. “Barmy” gave us a farewell speech because this would be the last lesson he’d be taking us for the next week. He had a soft spot for our class — the weakest French set he taught. We made him laugh. Not in a mocking way. He laughed with us and kept trying to help us despite the hopelessness of the situation. Short, smart, enthusiastic and slightly playful, he tolerated a certain amount of horseplay while still being perfectly capable of restoring order if necessary.
Frankly, short of all of us being dropped into a private girls’ school in France for a year, our hopes of improving our French were remote.
The worrying part was who might replace him while he was away. There was the horrible possibility of getting the Head of French instead — a man taller than de Gaulle and every bit as intimidating. Rumour had it he’d been in the French Resistance during the war and he taught accordingly, taking no prisoners.
Barmy gave us a test which went all right. Out of kindness more than anything else, Barmy gave Jamie two extra marks to stop him getting an impot — extra work used as punishment. It felt like a little act of mercy inside the system. None of us wanted to get impots or see someone else get one. They never taught anybody anything useful. They were simply punitive, part of the machinery of discipline that surrounded boarding-school life. At least you didn’t get caned for doing badly in a test which was what happened at Mowden.
English: Silas Marner, Chapter 17. Bodge was away. It feels as if he has missed half the term.
Break.
Projects: oblique projections. I find technical drawing deeply satisfying. There’s something calming about the demand for precision. It’s a form of art where things can be right or wrong. Nothing subjective. No interpretation. You either achieved the projection properly or you didn’t.
Then lunch.
At 1.45 the swimming team set off by bus across southern Cumbria to Heversham Grammar School. The journey through the southern Lake District had that familiar school-trip mixture of banter, kit bags, mild nerves and looking out of the windows at fields, hills, tourists and locals.
I’d been dreading the outdoor pool beforehand. I imagined another freezing outdoor setup like Mowden’s where you dived in and momentarily couldn’t breathe from the cold.
But the Heversham pool turned out to be warm after all. It had been a sunny year and the outdoor water had clearly held the heat. The pool felt larger somehow simply because it was outside under the open sky, though it certainly wasn’t modern or luxurious.
Once I got in, I relaxed immediately; I could breathe properly.
Swimming: I won my races — Front Crawl, Backstroke and relays. We raced in pairs, two swimmers from each school against one another. Sedbergh’s size gave us a considerable advantage over somewhere like Heversham. It was never an equal contest when you could draw from a far larger intake of boys.
With swimming I loved the sensation of moving quickly through water, under it more so than on the surface. At Sedbergh, swimming (like art) was treated more like a hobby than a something serious, which was a shame because I already understood instinctivel the feel of water and speed and rhythm.
The warmth of the pool, the noise of the gala, the certainty of racing and touching the wall first — all of it brought me back into myself. Swimming was one of the few places where effort translated directly into results. No favouritism, no arbitrary marks, no missing masters. You either touched first or you didn’t.
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