Fifty Years Ago: Wednesday, 14th July 1976

(Okehampton Camp, Dartmoor, Age 14.9 years)

I woke Hedges at 6:40 a.m. as he was supposed to be the duty officer. I told him that if he didn’t get up, everyone else would soon be gone.

Boys thrown together in a house or at school were acquaintances, not friends. We wouldn’t have chosen to be friends had we not been confined together like this. Boarding schools were like the armed services in this respect: you don’t choose who you serve alongside. And this was very much an army experience at Okehampton.

We were pack animals and, despite ourselves, felt a kind of loyalty to the other boys in our house. It was odd because, left to my own devices, I would have picked out friends from across all four houses and formed a group with them instead. That dynamic was impossible. The whole system seemed designed to prevent it. Divide and conquer. One alpha male per house. Don’t let them gather and plot.

I always felt like something of an outsider. Sometimes I wondered if there was something wrong with me not wanting to belong to a gang, but I didn’t. If anything, I was peripatetic. I drifted between different groups and different characters over the weeks and months, never settling permanently with any of them.

Perhaps that distance made observation easier.

Even then, I carried an image of myself as someone standing slightly outside events, watching them unfold. I liked to think I could read people and situations without automatically taking sides.

That instinct went back years.

As a child, I had numerous hiding places. More than once, I could have got into serious trouble had I been discovered. One favourite spot was on top of the jacketed hot-water tank in the shower room. On one occasion, I sneaked away with a packet of chocolate digestive biscuits and settled myself there in secret.

Then I heard the door open.

My father came in.

He locked the door, used the toilet, washed his hands and left.

I didn’t move a muscle.

There was a great deal of melted chocolate to deal with afterwards.

Even then, I seemed happiest observing events from an unexpected vantage point.

Hedges was an oddball amongst oddballs and horribly baited for it. That made him toxic. Getting too close to him, or being seen to take his side, puts you in the firing line yourself. He had turned to God for succour, which only made him seem stranger to boys who already regarded religion as something faintly ridiculous.

Sport of any kind was anathema to his existence. It made Sedbergh, with all its compulsory heartiness, probably the worst place he could have been sent. It also made playing soldiers one of the most dire experiences imaginable for him.

The morning was cold. I kept my pyjama bottoms on under my trousers for extra warmth. I wasn’t aware of anyone else doing the same, but I knew I would be clothed for twenty-four hours and spending the night out on the moors. Any extra warmth was welcome.

We then spent three hours walking “tactically” for just one mile.

The whole exercise would have made a far better game of cat and mouse had anyone actually been tracking us. After a while,e it became obvious that there was nobody around at all. We could probably have sat down for half an hour, rested, then completed the distance normally, and no one would have known the difference.

Eventually, we reached our camp and found a good spot.

I tried to block the stream to create a pool, handy for washing.

It worked.

I liked damming streams. I couldn’t help myself. Even as a small boy at prep school, I had found comfort in playing around in the most modest trickles of water. There was something deeply satisfying about the engineering of water flows and the instant result.

The pool was used by everyone and, as far as I can remember, was accepted as a natural feature. Nobody arrived later and asked who had built it. It simply became part of the campsite. We had probably done much the same thing at Pioneer Camp back at Mowden. Build a dam, divert part of a stream, dig one hole for rubbish and another for human waste. The practical business of making a temporary home in the countryside had always appealed to me more than the military side of things.

We put up tents, really bivouacs made from a tarp over a line with a couple of poles.

To my eyes, it was nothing more than a blanket with strings and a couple of poles. There was a separate groundsheet beneath it. It was no tent at all, merely shelter from the wind and rain. Even then, the wind found its way underneath while water leaked in from the sides.

We agreed on a guard duty roster of two or three hours at a time.

Then it turned misty and started to rain.

The mist did not bother me. Growing up in Northumberland and crossing the Pennines often enough, I was familiar with mist. It felt oddly comforting rather than threatening. The moor simply faded away into whiteness beyond a certain distance.

I was out on guard duty at 3:15 a.m. and was still there four hours later.

At first,t it amused me.

I was alone. There was nobody to talk to and very little to do, but I could follow the night sky as the sun slowly hinted at its arrival, then rose.

After that, I became resentful.

Nobody had been sent to relieve me. The other boys in the platoon were enjoying ample sleep while I was still standing there.

I had a sharp ear. Looking back, I am fairly sure that at some point, one of the Regular Army instructors approached the camp intending to set off firecrackers amongst the sleeping cadets.

Instead of finding everyone asleep, he found me wide awake.

He was a senior NCO. No officers came anywhere near us. An officer may have delivered a pep talk at the start of the week, but it was the NCOs who actually ran things.

We chatted quietly.

Somewhere during the conversation, he learned that I should have been relieved more than an hour and a half earlier.

That seemed to amuse him.

If nobody was going to relieve me, why not have some fun?

Originally, it had only been him. Now there were two of us.

So I let him proceed with his plan.

In fact, I helped.

The firecrackers went off amongst the bivouacs, and the resulting confusion was magnificent. Sleeping cadets suddenly became startled animals. Figures emerged from under tarpaulins, voices shouted, bodies scrambled into motion.

It transformed a dull, damp night into something memorable.

I never let on afterwards that I had effectively authorised the attack.

It created a small nodding alliance between the NCO and me. We both knew what had happened.

He recognised that I understood the game. I was comfortable outdoors, accustomed to camps and streams and sleeping under canvas. I could “play soldiers” when required.

In return, I gained a glimpse behind the curtain.

We were given dud explosives to fire off as well. The whole thing increasingly resembled a war game. Afterwards, I rejoined the platoon and played dumb, as though I knew nothing about it.

For a brief period, I seemed to be playing the role of a spy rather than a soldier.

What struck me most was how little had really changed.

Watching boys huddled beneath shelters, standing guard, carrying equipment and setting off explosives, I found myself thinking how little had altered between 1976 and the world of my grandfathers.

One had been a fighter pilot in the First World War.

Another had flown bombers.

As a boy, I had designed my own RAF aircraft of the future. Career books still encouraged dreams of becoming a pilot, and I occasionally imagined joining the RAF myself. It was the flying that appealed, rather than the military side.

Yet here we were.

Marching around the moors in drizzle.

Sleeping beneath leaking tarpaulins.

Playing at war.

The camp itself felt tired.

Long gone were the days of National Service, or even coachloads of public-school boys arriving in vast numbers to experience military life. The place felt run down, underused and faintly absurd.

It was like stepping onto the set of a Carry On film.

Had everything been in black and white, it would have felt more realistic.

Yet because of Sedbergh’s traditions, we were going to receive this experience whether we liked it or not.

Playing soldiers doesn’t suit everyone.

In truth, I was beginning to wonder how much it suited me either.

There had been a time when I enjoyed soldiering. At Mowden, what we called Pioneer Camp had been great fun. Somewhere between then and now, the pleasure had worn off.

The change had begun about eighteen months earlier.

Even before arriving at Sedbergh, I had started kicking against the system.

At prep school, I had begun to see through some of the teachers’ actions. They seemed to be performing for what they imagined paying parents wanted rather than acting in the best interests of the children in their care. A few incidents left me deeply sceptical of the game being played.

By the time I arrived at Sedbergh, I was already less willing, and sometimes completely unwilling, to cooperate.

Join the choir?

No, thank you.

Become a rugby player?

Not interested.

Study Latin?

Why?

Become a Prefect and act as a bossy boots on behalf of the system?

That appealed even less.

There was an expectation that boys like me would become part of the machinery. Organise younger boys. Police them. Act as intermediaries between authority and those beneath us. Even becoming “Head of Fags” was presented as something desirable.

To me, it increasingly resembled asking prisoners to become guards.

Yet the strange thing was that I remained highly competent at many of the things the system valued.

Adults noticed.

At Mowden, the Geography teacher was probably the only one I genuinely admired. The Maths teacher, too, was excellent at his job and kind.

At Sedbergh, the art teacher and I quickly found a rapport. He knew I was the son of an art teacher. He knew I could probably have taken Art A-Level at fifteen and done well. He trusted me to work independently and often allowed me to leave the Project Centre and draw outdoors on my own.

Much later, in my final term, a new English teacher also seemed to understand me.

By then, it was too late.

He was not going to open the gates to girls, either, which was another thing I wanted from school and was not getting.

A few senior boys understood me too, though friendships across year groups remained constrained by the school’s rigid hierarchy.

The contradiction was obvious.

The adults who impressed me most were those who gave me freedom.

The institution itself seemed determined to remove it.

For Hedges, a non-athletic, slight aesthete of a boy, this must have been the absolute anathema of anything he would ever contemplate doing.

For me, the resistance was becoming more complicated.

I could do all of this.

I simply wasn’t sure I wanted to.