Fifty Years Ago: Friday, 2nd July 1976
Sedbergh School, Age 14.9
I woke at 6:30 and got up. The sun had already been up for two hours. At this time of year, it barely turns dark at all. The dormitory was already warming up, and there seemed little point in trying to sleep any longer.
I revised Geography and Physics before breakfast. The exams were coming one after another now, and there was a strange rhythm to the days: revise, sit an exam, revise some more, then another exam. In some subjects, everything came together. In others it fell apart.
These were only internal school exams. They rarely phased me. In every subjects we’d had a weekly test. We grew used to them, and what we were getting right during the term ought to translate into successful end-of-term and end-of-year results. I did well in Geography and Maths; I did badly in French and Chemistry. I seem to recall a 2/20 for Latin.
I had a bath before school.
The Maths exam was ‘as I expected’. I managed to do a lot, which always felt reassuring, even if you weren’t completely sure whether what you’d written was right.
At break, I had a coffee and took my Corps stuff back. Corps Camp was getting closer, and there was different kit to collect or return.
Geography exam – another good one. I covered a lot. That was usually my measure of an exam. If I managed to answer plenty of questions and fill enough pages, I came away reasonably satisfied.
Physics followed.
Later, Simon and I did some discus practice on Buskholm. Athletics was never my strongest area, but I enjoyed having a go. We were mates and the same age. Most days we signed up for some sort of ‘exercise’, though certain activities were compulsory. Perhaps we’d both happened to sign up for discus practice and wandered off together. The field was baked hard by the heat, and everything was dusty and unusually dry under the July sun.
By then, I had a headache. I got some aspirin. It was probably the heat. Or the coffee. Or both together. I needed to hydrate.
We should have been drinking water throughout the day, but we didn’t have access to it in the way people do now. At break I’d had coffee. Then I’d been down on the athletics field in the heat. There was still no water. The aspirin helped, but so did the glass of water I swallowed it with.
The weather had been relentlessly hot for days. Not the sort of heat people looked forward to, but the unusual, uncomfortable sort that seemed to settle over everything. The dormitory felt like an oven.
The dorm was very hot that evening.
We had a briefing for Corps Camp, probably down at the Armoury. I expect most of us were already thinking ahead to getting out onto the fells rather than listening carefully to instructions. Maps, equipment, routes and regulations were all part of it, but mostly it promised adventure.
One small battle occurred during Friday evening prep. I had been reading New Scientist. Chaps spotted it and confiscated it. He gave me three maps by way of punishment.
Friday evening prep was formally supervised in the Junior Common Room. I think it probably ran from about seven until quarter to eight. It was intended to be silent, purposeful study.
Chaps was a Chemistry teacher, though not one of mine. An Old Sedberghian, he had come straight back to the school from university and teacher training college. He was a demon at cricket and supposedly carried his left shoulder slightly raised, as though permanently poised behind the stumps waiting to hit a ball. Why he was called Chaps I can’t really remember. There was an explanation, but it has long since escaped me.
I was adamant the magazine was prep-related. It wasn’t as if I was reading pornography during Friday evening prep.
I even showed him some of the articles to prove the point.
The latest issue carried reports on the Viking 1 mission to Mars and Another discussed the final stages of the global smallpox eradication programme and argued that secure laboratory samples should be retained after the disease had been eliminated.
As far as I was concerned, this was both science and geography. In my mind, one day space would become another branch of geography. People would map it, settle it and travel across it just as earlier generations had crossed oceans and continents. My interest in Physics came from my interest in space.
Ever since the first Moon landings I had been captivated by space. At fourteen, I was thinking about a route through the RAF, a transfer to the USAF, take American citizenship and eventually get onto the space programme. I fully expected colonies to be built on the Moon within a decade.
Surely reading about Mars exploration counted as educational.
Chaps said otherwise.
The magazine disappeared into his possession.
When he returned it the following morning, however, he admitted that he’d found the Viking article interesting.
I handed over my three maps: rather than the required maps of countries on earth I handed him maps of space colonies on each of the Moon, Mars and Europa.
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