Fifty Years Ago: Friday, 25th June 1976
(Sedbergh School, Cumbria. Age 14 years, 9 months).
Divinity: I got my prep back and only managed an average mark. The work had been on the trial of Jesus as described in Modern Bible Knowledge (MBK).
I found the account overly sentimental. This kind of thing always irritated me. I’m not a child at Sunday school Bible class, I’m no nitwit even if I feign ignorance when it suits me. I was interested in primary sources, and reliable contemporary accounts of Jesus, Pontius Pilate, the politics of Roman rule and the realities behind the stories. Whenever the writing became overly emotional I switch off.
PE: apparently, today was ‘athletics’, although “athletics” makes it sound more organised than it really was. Mr Tedd gave us no coaching at all, so we just played around, chatted, and wandered between the archaic pieces of gym kit: a rope from the ceiling, bars to raise your legs from, a medicine ball, a volley horse. At this stage of the summer term, two year groups are in the thick of exams, so only stand-in teachers supervise the rest of us. But why, given that we have 90 minutes to two hours of allocated exercise or ‘games’ six afternoons a week sis we need PE?
After the break, we got our Geography prep back. Most unhelpfully mine was singled out and shown alongside another boy’s work for comparison. By every definition I enjoy Geography and love maps and charts as much as writing up what we cover. I read around the subject as a hobby. Unfortunately, the other boy was in my House, and he’d made a total hash of it. Masters probably imagined this sort of thing encouraged healthy competition, or showed other boys by example what was expected of them – it didn’t work like that, certainly not at Sedbergh – the keen were despised, picked on as swots, their prep defaced or stolen – among schoolboys it create resentment. When it was announced in morning assembly that is won the annual Geography prize I was hissed and booed. Go Sedbergh! The teacher’s response to that? Nadda.
I had Latin before lunch. So dull and forgettable these days that I simply note it in my diary with the letter ‘L’.
Physics: we were doing practical work on elec and heating effects. The experiment involved the formula:
Q = I²Rt
This relates the heat produced in a conductor to the current, resistance and time. Unfortunately my batteries were flat. While everyone else was busy taking readings and making calculations, I was left wondering whether my results were wrong. The dead batteries became more memorable than the physics. I was almost certainly blamed for them being flat.
Later, back in a Geography class, as we had no one to teach us, I got on and finished my Maths prep instead. Then we had Maths, but as there was no teacher, we did athletics. Was there any teacher in this morning. Just Latin so far.
Lunch
Games: more Athletics – I ran a timed 200 metres and the 400 metres.
The highlight of the day came in the evening. I swam in the 200 metres Freestyle final and produced a time of 2 minutes 41.20 seconds. Beating the existing school record by twelve seconds.
It felt like a meaningless victory.
Barely anyone raced over 50m, let alone 200m. My dreams of coming to Sedbergh to develop as a competitive swimmer were misplaced
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