Tuesday 21st of September 1976.
(Winder House, Sedbergh School. Age 15:11)
Maitland told me to watch my nip. Nip meant insolence, cheek, forgetting my place — which was ridiculous, because there was only about a month between us in age. He was a year above me at school and apparently that was enough. He swam, though I was a far better swimmer than he was, and he wasn’t particularly bright. Yet somehow the machinery of Sedbergh meant that he could tell me to remember my place.
There was also the snoring. I wrote that I had somehow “clouted” him to stop the snoring. Not the first time. I now how I could have done so without going into his cubicle. Perhaps I thumped the side of the cube until he stopped. Maybe what I meant was simply that I had clouted the problem — dealt with it somehow. I can’t reconstruct it any more exactly than that.
I had German rather than History. This was not because I preferred German. Quite the reverse. It was about keeping doors open. Mum was keen for me to become a doctor and I hadn’t rejected the idea myself, so I needed the sciences and apparently German fitted the route better than History.
History could wait.
This was slightly absurd because I knew I could have got an A in History and gone straight on into A Levels with it. I loved it. Yet somewhere I had picked up the idea that History wasn’t really a subject you could teach to younger people. I have no idea where that came from. At fourteen I could acquire these propositions and treat them as facts. So History, which eventually became one of the central subjects of my life, was put to one side in order not to close the door on medicine.
German was another matter. Languages depended on something I wasn’t getting from lists of vocabulary. I needed the full context of words and how they were actually used. I needed to be in the yard of a French school, picking up the comings and goings, hearing a word attached to somebody doing something, seeing how somebody else responded to it. I needed some emotional connection with it. Then I could remember it.
That was why Mr Poyet could sometimes get through to me. Brigitte Bardot could become French. France itself could become French. It didn’t have to be vocabulary detached from everything. We could have approached France through History or Geography in exactly the same way, because then the language belonged to a country, people and things that interested me.
Maths mattered differently. My pessimism about it meant I cared. Being good at Maths meant being somebody who could figure out a problem. It wasn’t simply another mark on another piece of paper. There was an idea of myself bound up in being able to work something out.
I had another letter from Julie-Anne.
Her rabbit was in it, and David Soul, and Jackie, and the yellow dress. I still have these letters. At the time I could apparently extract an enormous amount from them, including things that weren’t particularly generous.
My father had become interested in graphology and was very judgemental about handwriting. I picked this up too. A letter could apparently tell you somebody’s maturity, intelligence, confidence and almost anything else you cared to find in it. Looking at Julie-Anne’s letters I began judging not only what she wrote but the way she wrote it. There was something still childish about the handwriting — an immaturity, a lack of deft confidence — and I took that as evidence.
I was being an intellectual snob, although I certainly wouldn’t have called myself that then. Nor would I have sat down and decided that I was not a nice person. Those are attempts now to account for thoughts which were brutally private because they were written in a diary. At fourteen the thought was much simpler: I found some of this boring and I wanted something else.
I wanted a sharp academic mind. Not merely somebody who got good marks. Somebody who might surprise me. Somebody who read, who was interested and curious.
This was only a passing thought. I had invested plenty in Julie-Anne — presents, drawings, outings, being her boyfriend — and none of that suddenly disappeared because of a letter. But letters did expose another part of somebody. Away at boarding school, the relationship existed disproportionately on paper, and I was reading the paper very closely indeed.
The odd thing was that I could be ferociously judgemental about hierarchy while simultaneously responding very strongly to authority when it was given to me.
Give me authority and I’ll do anything.
I already knew this from Mowden. When I became a School Prefect there I had become ridiculously conscientious, overly scrupulous about doing the job properly. Some boys called that sort of behaviour being a “little Hitler”, and I hated the possibility of becoming that person again. I didn’t want to repeat it at Sedbergh. If I behaved like that often enough, perhaps it would stick.
Yet give me responsibility for something real and I immediately took it seriously.
Rugby was an example. As captain I was in the scrum, so that was what I led. There was something direct about that. I wasn’t standing outside ordering people about because I had been given a badge. I was inside the thing I was responsible for.
The school play was The Pirates of Penzance and I wanted a real part. What I meant by a real part was Frederic.
I was a tenor, unfortunately. I had been a chorister, so there was nothing surprising about having a higher voice, but Sedbergh had already made me more conscious of these things than I had been at Mowden. Voice, size, rugby, girls — they all acquired a masculine significance. Tenor did not sound sufficiently manly, even though Frederic was the part I wanted.
There were going to be girls from Casterton too, which should have made things more interesting, except that many of them were sisters of Sedbergh boys and seemed very like them. That was disappointing. I think I had imagined girls arriving from somewhere else entirely and instead found the same social world reproduced in female form.
Most of them seemed neutered to me: shy, unenergetic, cosseted, lacking individuality. Appearance, manner, accent, background — all of it seemed too familiar. What I wanted, though I probably couldn’t have defined it properly, was difference.
Then there was Confirmation.
I had no religious intention of being confirmed. Some boys I knew didn’t believe in God or Christianity either but were going through with it anyway, which seemed to me a peculiar kind of self-delusion.
There was, however, a Confirmation retreat, and some of my contemporaries had decided that one of its attractions might be getting drunk. This wasn’t intelligence passed down from worldly older boys. It was our own lot inventing possibilities and then half-believing them.
I was curious about the retreat. That was not the same thing as wanting to be confirmed.
If anything, the whole thing sharpened the distinction. I could be interested in Christianity, interested in what people believed, interested in what happened when a group of boys went away together under the banner of religion — and still not pretend to believe something merely because the school had provided a route for doing so.
There were several versions of me jostling about at once: the boy keeping medicine open while wanting History; the boy who disliked school hierarchy but became conscientious the moment he was given authority; the former chorister worrying that being a tenor wasn’t manly enough; the boyfriend examining a girl’s handwriting for evidence that she might not be interesting enough; the sceptic considering a Confirmation retreat without the slightest intention of being confirmed.
None of them seemed contradictory at the time. They were simply what I thought.
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