Fifty Years Ago: Thursday, 24th June 1976
(Sedbergh School, Age 14.9)
Up at 6.40 and read The Tolpuddle Martyrs and Physics.
The exams were drawing ever closer and the mornings had become a mixture of revision, routine and trying not to fall asleep in the heat. The heatwave was now part of everyday life. You woke up restless. You walked between lessons hot. You sat exams feeling uncomfortable. The challenge was to keep moving between classrooms, sports fields and the swimming pool without letting the heat get the better of you.
Bath. A cold one. Alone!
Write out fifty German sayings.
I can’t now remember a single one of them. Perhaps there were only five repeated over and over my spelling and word order different every time. It was the sort of exercise our German master favoured: repetition until the language lodged itself somewhere in your head whether you wanted it to or not. The following come to mind:
Das ist mir Wurst
That’s sausage to me. (Meaning: I couldn’t care less.)
Er muss mal
He needs to go. (Toilet.)
Scheiße!
Shit! (Almost certainly learned before any proper vocabulary.)
Du bist ein Schwein.
You are a pig
Ende gut, alles gut. (All’s well that ends well.)
German itself rarely captured my imagination. What interested me was seeing English hiding inside it. Kommen Sie her was practically Come here. Wasser was water. Haus was house. It felt less like learning a foreign language than uncovering clues to a shared past. The vocabulary lists bored me, but the connections fascinated me. I suspect I was less interested in German than in the history of the English language.
English: discuss The Tolpuddle Martyrs.
We had reached the end of the book, which meant we could finally discuss it as a whole rather than chapter by chapter. I cannot remember the details of the discussion, but I do wonder now where the sympathies of the masters lay. Were they on the side of the Martyrs? Britain in 1976 was full of industrial disputes and trade union arguments. The miners’ strike was only a couple of years behind us. Even if nobody said so directly, the story must have felt more relevant then than it does today.
French: retrieve book from Room 2.
One of the recurring themes of school life seemed to be tracking down books, exercise books, folders and bits of paper that had somehow become separated from their owner.
Maths: Vigy was out (?) forgot book.
Looking at the handwriting now, I am not even sure the name says “Vigy”. It might be Jigy. It might be Uigg. Whoever it was, they were out, and I had forgotten my book anyway, which rather summed up the lesson.
German: in another room.
As exam season approached, rooms were forever being reassigned. One lesson might be in its normal classroom, the next somewhere entirely different.
There’s a notice up about Mowdeners coming to play cricket and which houses those starting next term will be in.
This caught my eye immediately. The new boys from Mowden were beginning to appear on the horizon. One name I recognised was Winder, who would eventually succeed me as Captain of Swimming. He had a Music Exhibition as well and played the trombone. More immediately, he was going to be joining my House. Looking back, it is interesting how quickly the cycle turned. Less than a year earlier I had been one of those boys arriving from prep school wondering what lay ahead. Now I was studying lists of newcomers.
Hand in work.
Latin: dross.
Just one word, but sufficient. Whatever happened in Latin that day left no lasting impression beyond boredom.
Lunch.
Swimming: Do training, get cramp in my feet.
The cramp came simply from the intensity of the training. Swimming and athletics were both in full swing, and my body was being asked to do a lot. Looking through these diary entries now, June seems to consist of a constant oscillation between academic effort and physical effort: revision, lessons, athletics, swimming, then more revision.
I do eight lengths of Carr-style Butterfly.
I think Carr may have been another swimmer who had somehow cracked butterfly and developed a technique others tried to copy. Breathing less often. Keeping the stroke flatter. Making it look effortless, which of course it never felt when you were doing it yourself.
100m: 13.8
100m hurdles: 20.3
These were athletics times on the cinder track rather than swimming. The track was hard, dusty and unforgiving in the heat. Athletics and swimming made for a strange combination. One demanded rhythm and efficiency in water, the other speed and coordination on land.
Looking back, June 1976 feels like a mixture of four things: the heat that had to be tolerated, knowledge that had to be tested, endless walking between venues, and the switching between swimming and athletics. The school seemed to be measuring us in every conceivable way. Marks, times, distances, standards and positions.
Leave a Reply