Wednesday, 15th September 1976
(Winder House, Sedbergh School — Age 14:11)
Geography: Our new Geography teacher was Mr Brooks. It was the beginning of a new academic year, so there were new teachers, and he seemed young compared with many of the masters — the next generation. He was rather like a hippy from Woodstock who had been given a haircut and put in a suit. He looked as though he would have been more in his element up a mountain or at a concert than in a classroom of fourteen-year-old boys.
He was gentle and kindly, but that was going to be a problem. Boys saw a weakness and exploited it. He did not seem to have either the desire or the experience to keep us in order. I was not disappointed with him at this stage, though. He knew his physical geography, and Geography was one of my best subjects.
I got a book on Ireland and Great Britain. It was an O-level Geography textbook which I bought second-hand from the school shop. This was proper O-level work now.
Double Biology:
We were on Nuffield: Introducing Living Things, C3, Naming Living Things.
The chapter was carefully introduced and kept simple. It began with the immense number of living things and the problem of how you could possibly name and organise them all. The examples were deliberately ordinary things we were likely to know already: worms, arthropods, a horse-chestnut twig, other boys and girls of our own age, even dogs.
The Latin names left me cold. I could see the problem they were meant to solve, but the words themselves seemed unnecessarily foreign and complicated. Common Earthworm I could cope with. Lumbricus terrestris meant almost nothing to me. Latin seemed to pass straight through my head. It was as if I was colour-blind to it: I could see that something was there but could not distinguish enough in it to make it useful.
Much more interesting were keys.
The book demonstrated how you could separate a group of animals by asking one question after another. With the arthropods — dragonfly, spider, crab, centipede and millipede — it gave you the sequence. Wings or no wings. Not more than eight legs or more than eight. Not more than ten legs or more than ten. Each answer narrowed the possibilities until there was only one thing left.
That I liked. It had the logic of a puzzle, and immediately it seemed obvious that you could apply the method to almost anything.
The book used a horse-chestnut twig as an observation exercise. Horse chestnut seemed almost a cliché. I had had a lifetime of sticky horse-chestnut buds through nursery and primary school. I am not certain that Mr Milo Grey actually gave us twigs. He used the Nuffield book as a starting point rather than simply following it. We may still have been working with leaves. He may have put out collections of things for us to select from.
There was also a key involving six sorts of dog: fox terrier, golden labrador, golden retriever, black-and-tan dachshund, toy poodle and chihuahua. That would immediately have got us talking. Everybody with a dog wanted his own dog to count, or wanted to explain why the examples were wrong because his dog did not fit them. Colour alone was not enough because it could vary, so you had to look for more reliable differences: size, coat, proportions, shape.
Then there was the suggestion that you could classify the pupils in a class.
Boy or girl was the obvious first division.
That was not much use at Sedbergh.
We were all boys, virtually universally white Caucasian, and a remarkable number of us seemed to have blue eyes as well. Any suggestion of dividing us into boys and girls would have produced exactly the sort of comments you would expect from fourteen-year-old boys in an all-male boarding school. Someone would have nominated a boy who looked effeminate, or one of the younger-looking boys who had not yet caught up biologically with the rest of us. The scientific exercise would not have remained scientific for very long.
Then came measurement.
The book suggested measuring the length of the middle finger. We did, I think, manage to stick with the middle finger, though not before the inevitable giggling about what else ought to be measured instead and how exactly you would measure it. One boy pushed a wooden ruler down his trousers. Mr Grey saw it coming. Maps were issued (a punishment). There would also have been comments about what a large nose or large hands was supposed to signify. At fourteen this sort of thing required no encouragement.
Once we actually started measuring, though, it became ludicrously competitive. Who had the longest finger? Who had the largest hand? More importantly, did any of it tell us how tall we were eventually going to be? Height mattered. Would you make six feet or not?
That led into variation.
Continuous variation was something like height: everybody could be placed somewhere along a continuous range from very short to very tall. Discontinuous variation was different: something such as whether you could roll your tongue. You either could or you could not.
The graph of the heights of 1,347 ten-year-old girls introduced the bell curve. That caught my attention far more than the Latin names had. I liked the distribution, the concentration around the middle, the outliers at each end, and the idea that if you gathered another population you might get a slightly different curve. How had the statistics been collected? Why did the curve have that particular shape? Would it move over time?
Ten-year-old girls were not going to tell us much about ourselves. Measuring the entire Fourth Year at Sedbergh would have been far more interesting.
This was where Biology crossed into something I already enjoyed: observing differences, measuring them and trying to find a pattern. That suited me much better than memorising names. It was really the same sort of instinct as looking closely enough at something to draw it. If you stopped and drew a tree, you did not just see a tree for long. You began to see different lichens and mosses on the bark, different leaves, shapes and textures. The longer you looked, the more distinctions appeared.
We had done quite a lot of this sort of thing already at Mowden, so some of the chapter was going over material I had known for a couple of years. The difference now was that I could take it further.
In prep I made a key of leaves.
Leaves made more sense than sheep, although there would probably have been jokes that sheep were more common than people around Sedbergh. At least there were plenty of trees. I used visible characteristics — shape, margins, smooth or serrated edges, lobed or not — and kept dividing the leaves into smaller groups.
That was where I came unstuck.
I did a lot but did not finish it.
Instead of making a simple key that did the job, I would have increased the complexity. One distinction suggested another, then another. I would want the thing to work properly. The result was that I had done more than was required but still had not completed what was required.
It did not particularly worry me. I would finish it in prep, or in my own time.
That often meant putting considerably more time into a prep than was normally permitted. If I had used up the official prep period and still had not finished something to my satisfaction, there was another solution.
I got up early in the morning.
That was one of the advantages of being awake before everyone else. I could sit down with the unfinished work while the House was still quiet and push it on until it was done
French: had in prep. I made Shaw cross out some cheating. I still cannot recover exactly what he had done. Perhaps we were marking each other’s prep and I had spotted something then. Shaw was nearly nine months younger than me — about 14:2 to my 14:11 — which at that age could make him seem distinctly junior. Whatever he had done, I could not help interfering. Moral indignation got the better of me. It was awkward rather than triumphant. I made him cross it out, or at least tried to; he either complied or ignored me.
PE: I was there early. That is an odd detail to have recorded because the bell normally dictated when lessons ended. Perhaps I had been released early from something. Different boys had different schedules, so the movements between lessons could become confusing even though the timetable itself was fixed.
We did rugger practice in PE kit. Rugger was compulsory and unwanted, but I would get on with it and enjoy the exercise. I cannot reconstruct what this particular practice consisted of. Possibly ball handling.
Chemistry: I forgot my prep. I ran back to the House for it. It was in my locker in the middle common room.
The journey there and back took about eleven minutes: down School Hill, past Powell House, the Armoury and Chapel, onto Lupton Lane and then Winder Drive. I would have been in still worse trouble if I had not done the prep at all, so I went back for it. It was also a brief break in the routine. There would usually be some other boy going in the opposite direction or returning to his own House for much the same sort of reason.
We did Atomic Weights — periodic table and equations.
Lunch.
Cadets. Eddie lent me his cadet jumper because I had not packed mine. Mine was still at home. The jumper was army green, or perhaps racing green, with reinforced shoulder and elbow pads. Cadets were fairly lax, a lot of reluctant playing at soldiers, but you still had to be dressed in the right kit. Eddie had a spare and lent it to me. We helped each other out.
At some point there was Bridge over the River Kwai on television. The diary is rarely a strictly chronological account, and prep came before the film. Television was there to watch or ignore as you wished. I watched it. We liked war movies.
Perhaps a dozen boys would be watching, some in the four large leather armchairs that were more like something out of a gentlemen’s club, some on four ordinary table chairs, perhaps with a bench pulled across, and others on the floor.
Double Projects: I made a tray. It was a standard wooden tea-tray project in the Project Centre. We rotated through woodwork, metalwork, pottery and art, either as timetabled Projects or sometimes using the Centre in free time.
I did Shorthand in Disposals. I had been teaching myself from a book and was only about a week into seriously giving it a go. Disposals gave me a live test. Could I actually get down what was being said accurately and then read it back afterwards? While House announcements and fagging jobs were being handed out, I was trying to turn them into shorthand fast enough to keep up.
I then had a bath, although again that did not necessarily mean it was the very last thing I did that evening. It would have been after prep or after the film. There were six baths in the communal washroom on the ground floor, one boy in each bath. They were first come, first served; otherwise you waited until somebody got out.
It was a brief chance to relax.
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