Saturday, 25th September 1976
(Winder House, Sedbergh School. Age 14:11).
Break: I expected post but didn’t get any. Usually checking the post was routine, but this was different. My birthday was on Monday and I had hoped for cards — from Dad, from Julie-Anne, perhaps from other friends.
Birthdays at boarding school felt diminished
When Mum gave me my Collins Five Year Diary in early 1975, I went through the calendars circling my birthday. So many of them would fall in term time. If it landed on a Saturday or Sunday there was at least a chance I might see a parent, usually Mum.
My birthday in 1975 had been on a Saturday, only a few weeks into my first term at Sedbergh, and she had come over and taken my brother and me out for the afternoon. This year it was Monday. Dad might not even remember to send a card. He had never come to one of my childhood birthdays at home.
It fed into the larger feeling I sometimes had about boarding school: posh boy prison. Being away could feel less like privilege than punishment.
Saturday was still a school day, with lessons in the morning. After breakfast I revised German and History for tests: textbooks, exercise books, handwritten notes, vocabulary lists, cards — whatever I had.
Congregation Practice: All those who had auditioned for The Pirates of Penzance stayed behind afterwards and were briefed, but we still weren’t given parts. There was some excitement about that. I had auditioned for the chorus. Frederick would have been a long shot, it was never going to happen; a senior boy would get the part. I didn’t care that much anyway. The Pirates of Penzance was hardly rock and roll.
I was doing it to break the routine, to have something else to do, perhaps meet a nice girl from Casterton, and certainly to meet boys from other Houses. Ben Cradock was one of them. It may simply have been that we were among comparatively few Fourth Formers involved which led us to gravitate towards each other and become friends – with Fifth Formers concentrating on O Levels and many of the others older.
Ben was handsome, with something heroic about him. At the time I rather vainly liked to think of myself as one of the ‘good-looking people’. I wasn’t the only person who gravitated towards or away from others partly because of how they looked and behaved. School had its nerds, loners and oddballs, several of them in the chorus line of Pirates. With girls around there were certainly boys you did and did not particularly want to be associated with.
I think I liked the idea that Ben and I looked good together. Not romantically. Cool. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. More importantly, it was friendship by choice rather than forced acquaintance.
That mattered to me. I was peripatetic in both senses: forever moving between Northumberland and Cumbria, and socially moving between groups of people. I had acquaintances scattered about, male and female – I preferred to avoid belonging to a clique.
Squash: with Pills. He was competitive and companionable. Things had levelled out between us since prep school. I had stopped wanting the authority I had once sought at Mowden. There, everyone had a number and the number meant something; it marked seniority and reinforced the pecking order.
I loathed the idea of a pecking order. I didn’t want to climb it.
That was another reason not to feel any particular ambition to stay on into the senior school and become a prefect. I would happily have been a ghost: not stand out, mind my own business, avoid the attention of bullies and troublemakers. That was hardly consistent with my personality, but it was what I wanted from school.
Squash suited Pills too. He could be properly competitive at it, which was brilliant for him after being sidelined as not much cop at rugby or cricket. Given enough choice, time and encouragement, I thought, everyone ought to be able to find something they were good at.
I went to the Grubber.
There were sweets, some for now and some for the tuck box, but it was also somewhere to meet people. Not everyone at Sedbergh crossed everyone else’s path. There were boys from other years and Houses whom you might hardly see anywhere else. The Grubber was a bit like a café or shop on a coach-station forecourt: people passed through it. If I had struck up a friendship with someone in Geography, we might pick it up there. Being old and physically a young adult, albeit a gangly one, I often gravitated towards boys in the year above.
I practised flute.
There was a bit of free time on Saturdays, but only in pieces.
After supper I played fives with Matthew Marshall. I’d only very rarely played fives before at Mowden and I didn’t really like it. It was so different to squash — no racket, a different ball, different movement, and I was a beginner again at something when squash already felt natural. I lost. Mike had the reach, he was tall 6ft 3 inches. And he’d played before. I’d need to buy gloves. Couldn’t be bothered. Winder had squash courts close enough to the House to make it an easy choice.
Later I drew.
I lived to draw. Mum was an artist and had instilled the habit in me to ‘keep my hand in’. I could draw a still life, some random object, anything really, because the point was to keep doing it.
So that was how the day ended.
Draw.
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