Sunday, 19 September 1976
(Winder House, Sedbergh School — age 14:11)
On teen dreams: I could dream myself a wake and give pause to dwell on it, or them; even drift in and out of semi-consciousness. To dream, to wake, to wonder.
Sunday meant the chance of a short lie-in, and I liked that half-conscious state where I floated in and out of sleep and could begin to recover scenes and events of a dream before they disappeared forever ‘like a fart in a breeze’. Dreams could be a joyous and mysterious journey into another world, almost as good as a trip to the movies. A good dream made my day; a bad dream unsettled me.
As usual, I had a good breakfast: cereal, cooked breakfast, toast, butter and marmalade, and a mug of tea or coffee. The lot. I was a growing lad, and Sedbergh did at least feed us well.
In prep I wrote up some notes about tarot. One of my enthusiasms.
Weekend prep: this meant: Music off. Television off. No table tennis, or heating up food on a ring, or taking a bath. We had to be at our desks, with House prefects supervising. Others we could read or write about whatever interested us – it meant quiet time, not necessarily school work.
Tarot matters: I had a tarot deck, the Rider-Waite version. I was learning how to give readings. It was all a bit dodge. Sort of make up it as you go along. Connect the card to the person. Plenty of boys were curious, so I did readings for a laugh, never for money. I was doing enough of them for a reputation to begin to grow.
I took tarot as seriously as flying my new stunt kite, going for a swim, or turning the pages of a porn mag: it was a fun way to have something to do for a half hour or more (or less). I knew there was nothing absolute about Tarot. My future was foretold by background, education and the contents of my head. I knew perfectly well that a reading required invention: looking at the person, knowing them better than they realised (I was observant even if o wasn’t always writing it down), then looking at the cards, making connections and constructing something plausible from ambiguous material.
Tarot had one piece of evidence in their favour that I could never dismiss.
Divorce: About six years earlier my older sister, then around thirteen and precocious with this sort of thing, had made a tarot deck from an article in a Sunday colour supplement. Cut out and backed with sticky backed plastic ( very Blue Peter). One day she was doing a reading in the playroom. Unusually, all of us children (an older brother, and a younger sister) were all there. Dad arrived from being away. Who knows where. He was often off somewhere dong something with someone. Mum and Dad came in and stood in the doorway. Dad never stepped fully into the room. He literally had one foot out of the door. He was the one who announced that he and mum were splitting up. We looked dumbfounded. He spelt it out – they’d not be living together anymore. One of us began to cry (not me); we all joined in. This flummoxed him. “I can’t stand this!” He said, and left.
At first we were left wondering whether somehow we were the reason he was going. Mum went off to speak to him but we heard the front door slam and a moment later his car – it was someone intent on going some where.
The tears drying up, my older sister turned back to the Tarot cards and turned over the next card of the reading she was doing. The cards were laid out on the playroom floor.
It was The Tower. The quasi-medieval image was foreboding.
She looked it up in the magazine: it shocking and unavoidable change, ‘old foundations suddenly breaking down’. My sister and I noticed the coincidence and kept it between ourselves. It created a new bond between us. Like we had this power of knowing what was going on in the world.
Six years on and by fourteen (nearly fifteen) we kids knew much more about what had gone on between Mum and Dad. Dad had been unfaithful to Mum. At least twice. As one of his close male friends (and family friends) said to me years later, his problem was that ‘he had an eye for the girls’. So late 1976 and had remarried, and separated again after being ditched by his second wife, and was now divorced again. This is how he carries on.
How my parents met: My parents, by the way, met when they were introduced on stage at the Theatre Royal in the early 1950s – by a hypnotist. At the end of whatever antics he’d had these young people do he walked over to my parents and said, ‘and you two will get married’. As they left the stage Dad asked Mum her name, where she lived. The family joke is that twenty odd years and four children later someone had clocked their fingers and the spell had been broken. Just saying.
The Tower had fitted all too well.
I still knew it was a coincidence. If anything, it showed how easily an event could be attached to whatever cards happened to turn up. Yet it remained sufficiently extraordinary that I could never entirely dismiss it either.
My older sister and I shared the interest, although I was the one who kept tarot going and developed it into something I could do: give a reading. Later my sister and I moved on to discussing dreams.
Chapel was crowded. Who knows why. I felt like I was in a crush in a giant telepherique. Not people with a common goal to ski a mountain slope, but a common requirement to sit down, get up, sit down, kneel, get up, sing, repeat, reply, announced, condemn, mutter, recant, cant, sing, listen, sit, listen, stand, sing – you get the picture. Indoctrination by another name.
I got chatting between all the up, down, sit, repeat and sing with Harrison, another Mowden boy and, like me, a former chorister. Better still, head choristers. We had, across the nave, lead the choir. Like a conductor. We had kept time and indicated a change of volume or tone with our hands. A form of signalling. Here our ‘choir master’ by another name was brilliant. She’d given us boys agency to lead the choir: set the pace and tone and volume. It was magical that. The rise and fall of the human voice. Especially a choir of boys.
There were plenty of old Mowden boys at Sedbergh, although we did not form one great friendship group. Boarding school threw you in with whoever happened to be around you, mostly boys in your year, including people you might never otherwise have chosen as friends or even become acquainted with.
Being choristers gave Harrison and me another shared past. At Mowden the choir had led morning assembly and might perform a verse. There were regular rehearsals, Sunday services in red cassocks and ruffs, the annual Christmas Carol Service with readings, and the Tynedale Festival. We had spent years learning the routines.
By Sedbergh I had exhausted my interest in them.
Harrison and I chatted between the formal bits of the service. Neither of us had anything to do with the Sedbergh choir.
Belief and disbelief: My belief had been failing since I was twelve or younger. Scripture classes had left me confused about where mythology ended and supposed fact began. In Latin there were gods and myths. In History there were things presented as evidence. Where, then, did the Bible stories belong?
Darwinism mattered. Revolution mattered. The Big Bang mattered. These were facts. Turning water into wine sounded like a magic show or a myth. A man had not been executed on a cross and then come back to life because it could not have happened. If I wanted gods, I preferred the Vikings, the Greeks or the Hindus.
I was an atheist, and said so.
There were boys with blind faith in the Church, although not many. There were boys who categorically did not believe in any god in any of his or her forms, also not many. Most simply went along with it. It was part of the middle-class conveyor belt we were on. Confirmation was one more stage in the process, helped along by presents and the prospect of a weekend retreat in which people could get drunk.
It seemed particularly odd that we were considered old enough to decide whether or not we wanted to be confirmed, but not old enough to decide whether we wanted to attend Chapel.
Kite Time: Afterwards I flew my Peter Powell stunt kite. Sedbergh supplied plenty of wind. I was getting it to do loops, dives and figures of eight, and sometimes there were people watching. It was great fun. Childish? So what! I was out on the margins of cricket pitch. Then it got tangled, around the Chapel steeple. God was messing with me. He could have just used lighting.
After lunch I went straight back to flying it. To prove a point. This time I was on a rugby pitch. Of course it ended up wrapped around the posts. For a few weeks I was intensely interested in the thing and wanted to master it. eventually I damaged or broke the struts and that was more or less the end of it.
Squash: I played squash with Pills, another Mowden boy and another former chorister and accomplished soloist. We played squash often. Squash was becoming increasingly important to me, even as an alternative to swimming. There was no teacher standing over us. It was just us: intense competition, developing skill, trying to be sharp.
We would warm up and then play a game. If we had the time and energy, one game became best of three, or five, or more.
Swim time: After that we had a ‘house bathing slot.’ Bathing as in pool time. It was a free session – not many boys bothered unless Waterpolo was involved. I could simply enjoy being in the water for the sake of it – that was enough. I could take a deep breath, sink into the deep end and turn spirals underwater for a minute and be content.
Underwater I could wonder at the meaning of existence.
Who was I? What was I doing here?
I had been asking myself questions like that since I was seven or eight. They made me open to ideas but suspicious of dogma. I didn’t want to be told what to believe. I wanted to find out for myself. I could ‘t trust something merely because an adult, a school, a church or a textbook asserted it.
We were told that God existed and that his only son died on the cross for us. You were also told in Physics about Newton’s Laws of Motion.
They were not, to me, the same kind of claim. Belief is not the same as reality.
At supper I ate well. Boarding school had its advantages: there was plenty of food.
More squash: Later I played squash yet again, this time with Alex. Pills had been a warm-up. Alex and I were more closely matched, which made it seriously competitive. We also played at home.
Then I had a bath. We. Six tubs in a washroom. Drained (or not), next boy in. Mug of tea on the tiles.
I did my German prep in reading prep. It had to be done at some stage.
It had been a good day at school: dreams, breakfast, tarot, Chapel, kite, squash, swimming, supper, bath, diary, German. I moved from one thing to another all day.
I wrote my diary. By then I had written it every night for eighteen months. If missed a day something felt unfinished and I made the day up one or two nights later.
I was thinking for myself and gaining the confidence to speak my mind and be my own person. I could feel, see and understand that I was growing up.
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