Fifty Years Ago: Tuesday, 6th July 1976
(Sedbergh School, Age 14.9)
Cadet Corps stuff was issued for Corp Camp.
I read a book on Everest in one go! When I find a topic I’m interested in, I get stuck in.
Everest
It was Chris Bonington’s Everest: The Hard Way. For a school full of hearty young men in a posh prison in the South Lakes fells, mountaineering was never some distant fantasy. It belonged to our surroundings. We had talks from expedition climbers. Whether Chris Bonington himself came I can no longer say for certain, but Doug Scott certainly did. His talk was about K2, where one of the expedition died during the attempt. Death wasn’t sensationalised; it simply came with the territory. The mountain was magnificent precisely because it was dangerous.
The combination of competition and landscape appealed to me. Mountains, snow, glaciers and skiing all seemed to belong together. They represented endurance, courage and places that lay beyond ordinary life.
I’ve always been like this. Find something that fascinates me and I disappear into it. One book becomes the whole day.
I got up early to revise English but I’ve lost my grammar notes. I Looked all over the place for ages but they’re not anywhere.
Looking back, having them or not probably made little difference. I simply didn’t understand grammar. I never have. Every attempt by someone to explain grammatical rules felt like somebody pushing a stick through the spokes of my bicycle while I was riding it. Everything came to a juddering halt. Language refused to arrive in neat compartments labelled noun, verb and subordinate clause. It behaved more like squeezing different coloured paints onto a palette. They mixed together until gradually a picture, or at least a meaning, emerged. That is still how I tend to write. I discover what I think through the act of writing rather than applying rules before I begin.
Biology: revise.
English exam: OK. I just finished on time.
I hadn’t run out of time, which mattered. I’d always trusted myself to tidy up as I went along rather than leave corrections until the end. By the time I’d written a sentence I wanted it to stay written. Reading back afterwards could only really correct spelling or the odd piece of punctuation. That was why I preferred writing with double spacing. It left room to insert an extra phrase without having to rewrite the page.
Geography: came 5th. 85%. Tommo 95%!!
Fast forward eight years and Tommo reappears as a fellow undergraduate at Oxford. He was reading PPE at Pembroke. For some reason I’d convinced myself he’d been at Mowden Hall with me before we finally worked out who each other really were. Two years later we were sharing a house in London. Four years after that I found myself engaged to the daughter of his Pembroke College tutor, the formidable Dr Zbigniew Pelczynski. Looking back, lives weave together in ways that nobody sitting an O-Level Geography paper could possibly imagine. I last day him, just a few years ago, at a mutual friends funeral. Blink, and it’s over!
Biology exam: do well in Part A, badly in Part B.
Lunch.
Six maps (a punishment) to do for a house prefect. What have I done to deserve that?
That’s the curious thing. You’d think I’d have written down what I’d actually done. Instead I only recorded the punishment. Two maps was fairly normal. Three was pushing it. But six? Six sounds extraordinary. It feels like the paper equivalent of a caning.
Let me explain.
On this instance I sad required to Create six similar hand-drawn maps of a country or cointilries. I chose to do the Japanese archipelago. Each map is drawn in pencil on sheets of plain A4 textbook paper. Each has its islands coloured in using a different colour. At least six cities across the islands have been named. At least six rivers have been added and named. The sea has been etched in blue crayons – just around the islands as a kind of border.
Sometimes, usually a teacher, would dictate which countries to do making life unnecessarily difficult complicated. I suppose the theory was that if a boy had been wasting his time, then he would waste theirs. Each map could take between fifteen and twentyonites to complete.
I did the outlines then Branston and Eddie helped with the colouring and writing in the annotations. Had we all been up to something but only i’d been caught?
If a map was deemed unsatisfactory you could me made to do not again.
Athletics: get the Long Jump British Athletics Standard. Practice discus.
I enjoy the discus.
I fancy myself.
Swimming had given me broad shoulders and the upper-body strength the event demanded. I liked the feel of the spin, the balance and the timing. The long jump had its own satisfaction too: don’t overstep the board, explode into the air and disappear into the sand. We measured everything in metres but still talked about it in feet and inches.
The discus belonged to another age altogether. Although Latin lessons left me cold, Greece and Rome fascinated me. Holding a discus somehow collapsed the centuries. I could almost imagine myself standing in an ancient stadium. I even wanted to say something in Latin, despite barely understanding the language.
I see myself like a Greek god at the Games – a young Mercury. Tanned, toned and looking amazing.
Not Hercules. He seemed all muscle and weight. Mercury was quicker, lighter and nearer the person I imagined myself becoming: athletic, youthful, a traveller, a messenger with wings on his feet, always moving towards somewhere new.
The phrase I fancy myself makes me smile now because I wasn’t using it as an insult. It was the sort of thing boys said about each other, sometimes admiringly, sometimes with a sneer: he fancies himself. Writing it privately was different. It was posturing, certainly, but it was also aspiration. I was sketching the young man I hoped to become. Give me another three or four years and I’d be six feet tall, bronzed, toned like an athlete, with the girlfriend of my dreams in my arms. That would be nice.
At fourteen, I was primarily attracted by worlds. I wanted to inhabit them. Reading Bonington was not simply acquiring information about mountaineering; it was mentally climbing K2. Throwing the discus was not merely practising an athletics event; it was stepping into ancient Greece. French never became meaningful through grammar, but through living among French teenagers, working in Val d’Isère and later in French television. That seems to be one of the defining characteristics of my learning throughout my life: I understand something most deeply when I can enter its world rather than merely study its rules.
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