Fifty Years Ago: Saturday, 10th July 1976
(Sedbergh School, Age 14.9)
The day began in Winder House, Sedbergh School, Cumbria and would end over 330 miles south at Okehampton Camp on Dartmoor.
I had a bath at 5.00 a.m., then went back to sleep. I was restless rather than fully awake. There was no particular reason to be up at that hour. Perhaps it was anticipation, or simply the disruption of knowing we were off on an adventure into the unknown.
Breakfast was laid on 6.20 a.m. I had two rashers of bacon – an achievement. We were given a packed lunch from the house kitchen. The bus from the library car park dropped us at Oxenholm Station. I’m sure it was a through train / all the way to Okehampton. With fifty or so of us from Sedbergh was it a special of some kind? That used to happen.
At some point during the journey I caught up with the last few days of this diary: a few points jotted down, a few reminders, a brief note of what had happened each day. The intention was simply to write something every day of the year. No day left behind! I’ve been at it for about 15 months and haven’t missed much. The diary had not yet become the larger task it would become. Because the entries are short, I could let a few days slip and then catch up without much difficulty.
I read Asimov’s short stories. Science fiction appealed because of the ideas. The “what ifs”. The futurology. The intellectual challenge. The storytelling. I liked being shown a world slightly different from our own and then watching the consequences unfold logically from a single altered assumption. With my head buried in a book I could duck out of mischief brewing amongst some.
The train was travelling through country I already knew well. The route south from Cumbria followed landscapes familiar from journeys between Appleby and London. The railway and road often run close together, so there were places I recognised from the car window as well as the train. Yet while the countryside passed outside, my attention was mostly on Asimov’s future worlds.
Jamie got off at Preston and was left behind at a station. So was Simon, somewhere south of Manchester – Crewe I think. All for an 18p drink of orange and a packet of cigarettes?
What actually happened was part dare, part stupidity. Boys would jump off the train during station stops, rush to a vending machine or kiosk, buy something, then race back before the train departed. Most made it comfortably. I forget who they were. You had to fail at a dare to get noticed.
What I also remember now is Chin panicking and sprinting along the platform before leaping aboard the wrong train at the last moment. He ended up in Carlisle.
What intrigues me as I read the diary entries is the difference between what I believe happened over all of these years and what the diary states. There are very few of the three thousand entries that I have read back – until now. Whilst I recall the one boy who got off the train and didn’t make it back, many others did so – but where’s the story in that? We quizzed the boys who had missed their train later – in all cases they’d been out on a later train.
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