Fifty Years Ago: Thursday 8th July 1976
(Sedbergh School, Age 14.9)
Mrs Badgers signed my scrit.
French: we talked, presumably in French. By now the term was winding down, and lessons felt increasingly provisional, as though everyone knew the real business of the year was over.
Maths: I read whatever book I had brought with me. Once exams were finished, books reclaimed their place. They always did.
German: We went over the paper we had done. I scored 109 out of 150, which seemed respectable enough. There was at least a logic to German. Marks could be accounted for.
Latin: this was another matter. We did some equagraphs, or whatever they were called, and I handed over my exercise books. That was it. Six years of Latin and I was finished with the subject.
I had scored only 24%.
I laughed.
It was bravado rather than amusement. I had put in no effort and expected no marks. Twenty-four per cent was not even remarkable by my standards. I had managed 22%, 16%, and perhaps even lower in previous exams. The surprising thing was not that I had failed but that eighteen months earlier, in Common Entrance, I had achieved something like 76%.
No teacher ever commented on the collapse.
Looking back, that seems extraordinary. There was no central monitoring of progress as you passed through the school. Each class operated in its own silo, and that within the larger silo of the House. Nobody appeared to notice that a boy who had once performed well in a subject had abandoned it. My Housemaster, whom I credited with the intelligence of a bald hedgehog, certainly showed no interest.
The truth was that by then, I was rebelling against much of what prep school had handed me. Latin had become part of that inheritance. Whether fairly or unfairly, I associated it with a world I was trying to leave behind. The result was predictable. I stopped engaging, and the marks duly followed.
Lunch.
Afterwards, I began packing my kit away in my tuck box and trunk. The process had begun. Books, clothes and possessions ready for the transpennine journey home. I never felt melancholy about leaving Sedbergh—quite the reverse. The regret was always that I would have to come back. Looking back, changing House might have transformed my experience of the school, but at fourteen, that possibility never arose. Changing House might have been preferable from the school’s point of view rather than changing schools a few years down the line.
Athletics: I was late getting down to Buskholm to watch the inter-house athletics. By the time I arrived, they had evidently decided they could manage without my discus-throwing or running skills.
I was perfectly happy about that.
It was not simply the events themselves. It was the weeks of preparation beforehand that I had escaped—endless practice and organisation, all in pursuit of glory for the House. The older I became, the less persuasive I found those arguments.
There was no obstacle course either, which was a shame. Given the school’s military traditions, an obstacle course always seemed more fitting than another afternoon circling a field.
The weather was typical South Lakes summer weather: verdant grass, a stiff breeze following light rain, patches of sunshine breaking through cloud. Buskholm looked at its best under those conditions, the fells beyond alternately illuminated and shadowed as the weather moved across the valley.
The Rowntree twins, whom I had known at Mowden, were among the accomplished distance runners. We also had several large lads, perfectly built for shot put, discus, and javelin. House athletics always seemed to favour certain physiques. Mine sat awkwardly somewhere in between.
I went to grubber.
After supper, there was the school concert.
School Concert: Yardley played the organ really well.
He was one of my contemporaries and was mercilessly teased — “bated” in school language — largely because he was so different from everyone else. Looking back, he seemed almost like an adult trapped in a teenager’s body. Serious, self-contained and possessed of interests that belonged to another age.
I cannot remember what he played. Bach perhaps. A hymn. Something ecclesiastical. What I do remember is the performance itself. He sat surrounded by keyboards, pulling out stops, pressing pedals with his feet and somehow persuading this huge Victorian machine to wheeze, boom and sing. It felt like watching a peculiar magician operating an impossibly complicated piece of machinery.
His musical world and mine barely overlapped. If anything, hearing him confirmed how different our tastes were. Entirely different sounds occupied my imagination.
Later, I read The Chameleon Course by Donald Seaman. It was the story of a defected Russian scientist and his wife who underwent plastic surgery and attempted to begin a new life in England, only to find themselves trapped between the KGB and British intelligence after killing an intruder. It was exactly the kind of Cold War intrigue that appealed to me at the time, mixing reinvention, espionage and danger.
I wrote a poem.
It may have been The Tripex, which was eventually published in The Novocastrian at RGS. I cannot be certain. What I do know is that writing was becoming one of my default states—poetry one day, song lyrics the next, short stories after that. Whenever there was time to fill, I filled it with words.
Then I went for a last bath.
At the time, it was simply a bath. Looking back, it feels like another small marker in a day filled with departures. The last Latin lesson. The beginning of packing. The last athletics meeting of the year. The school concert. The last bath before breaking up.
Supper.
A further thought occurs to me about the Latin. What strikes me is not the failure itself but the absence of consequence. In memoirs by writers such as Nabokov or even Alan Bennett, there is often an adult figure who notices a talent, a decline, a rebellion, or a shift in attention. Here, nobody seems to have noticed at all. The diary entry reads almost like a record of disengagement in plain sight.
Fifty Years later
One thing strikes me as I revisit these diary entries half a century later: nobody seems to have noticed very much.
That sounds harsher than I intend, but it is difficult to escape the conclusion. There was no meaningful pastoral care, little academic scrutiny, and no obvious attempt to understand whether the school was succeeding in its stated purpose. Sedbergh was full of out of date traditions, Christian and military rituals and certainties, but I see little evidence that anyone was asking fundamental questions. Were the boys learning? Were they flourishing? Were they developing? Did the system work? Compared with the schools my own children attended, such questions scarcely seem to have been asked.
The Latin story is a good example.
Eighteen months before this entry, I had scored 76% in Common Entrance Latin. By July 1976, I was achieving 24% and laughing about it. Not because I found it funny, but because I had ceased to care. The laugh recorded in the diary was bravado. I had put in virtually no effort and expected almost nothing in return.
What surprises me now is not the mark itself. Teenagers lose interest in subjects all the time. What surprises me is that nobody appears to have wondered why.
No teacher asked. No Housemaster asked. No one sat down and said, “Jonathan, what happened?” There was no mechanism for connecting the dots. Each classroom operated in its own silo, and that within the larger silo of the boarding house. The teachers supervised us, but who was supervising them? Some barely taught at all. A boy could thrive in one area, fail in another, excel in sport, write poetry in secret, devour books, and abandon Latin, and nobody would construct a picture of the whole person.
Perhaps that is why so many of these diary entries feel self-contained. The diary was often the only place where the different parts of my life came together.
Looking back, I can see that my disengagement from Latin was not really about Latin at all. I was pushing back against much of what my prep school education had represented. Fairly or unfairly, Latin became part of that inheritance. The declining marks were less an academic failure than a symptom of a broader rebellion, one that I probably could not have articulated at fourteen. Sedbergh just have me more of the same: the same Latin primer; the same, tired approach to teaching Latin with a ‘teacher’ in his seventies.
The irony is that I was far from disengaged intellectually.
The same diary that records a disastrous Latin result also records a boy reading constantly, writing poems, attempting plays, consuming science fiction, history and thrillers, and thinking hard about the world around him. The intellectual energy was there. It was simply flowing elsewhere.
That leaves me with a question I find myself returning to again and again as I reconstruct these years: how much of what I became happened because of Sedbergh, and how much happened despite it?
The answer is undoubtedly both.
The school gave me books, opportunities, landscapes, friendships, swimming, music and experiences I would not otherwise have had. Yet many of the things that ultimately shaped my life seem to have developed largely unnoticed: my love of writing, my fascination with history and geography, my habit of independent reading, my tendency to question authority, my determination to follow interests wherever they led.
When I read the diary entry now, the most important line is not “I got 24%.”
The important fact is that nobody thought the result required an explanation.
The school recorded the mark.
The diary recorded the meaning.
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