Fifty Years Ago: Wednesday, 7th July 1976
(Sedbergh School, Age 14.9)
No exams!
Get History papers back. Mint!
Mint (Adjective): Translates to “great,” “excellent,” or “fantastic”. It originates from the phrase “in mint condition” (referring to flawless, freshly pressed coins) but has evolved into general praise.
Looking back— it is pure period slang. (it’s like my son saying ‘sick’ when he was my age in 2021. At Sedbergh in 1976 we would say something was mint or minted if it was good, a great result, job done. Not so much a mark as a judgement. Things were either mint or they weren’t. I think I got it from my older brother.
French: it was spent going over papers. Two boys get off attending music lessons. I can’t fever what either if them played: the violin for one, the Church organ the other.
Divinity: talk about the Church.
Then I had my music lesson. My music teacher and I did a Bach sonata; I played the flute; she played the piano. I enjoyed it all the more knowing that my form was doing chores, clearing a classroom for the end of term. There was no guilt whatsoever attached to missing that. While they shifted desks and swept floors, I sat in a music room playing Bach. That seemed an excellent arrangement.
The contrast came later.
English: papers back. Did very badly. 49%.
I find myself wondering how on earth I managed it. Had the heatwave deprived me of the ability to spell or compose a sentence? Only a few lines earlier I had recorded History as mint. The inconsistency seems remarkable. One lesson suggesting competence, another suggesting the exact opposite. How could I do so well in one and so badly in the other? Possibly because I’d found the world of the Tudors and Stuarts of far greater interest than the world of Silas Marner.
Maths: go over papers. Did badly as well. This is very unusual – I’d always done well at maths.
That probably reinforced the feeling. It is striking how often school life seemed to oscillate between confidence and self-doubt according to whichever teacher happened to be handing papers back that day.
Biology. Do stuff on litter.
Even now I am not entirely sure what I meant. Could there really have been a Biology topic called litter? It seems more likely that I meant leaf litter: decomposition, woodland ecology, insects and fungi working through the layers of dead leaves on a forest floor.
Swimming: practice relays.
At this stage of the summer term it would have been House relays. Swimming made more sense than examinations. You either touched the wall first or you didn’t. There was less ambiguity in it.
Chuck discus down at Buskholme.
Band practice.
The school brass band. Rather like a miners’ band, except populated by public school boys in jackets and ties. There is something faintly absurd about the image now. Industrial Britain transplanted into a Yorkshire boarding school. Yet I enjoyed it. The sound of brass instruments together always had a kind of muscular certainty about it.
A day suspended between achievement and disappointment, but with enough music and swimming in it to make the disappointments easier to forget.
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