Sunday, 26 September 1976
(Sedbergh — age 14:11, the day before my fifteenth birthday)
I woke at 8.15 and went for a bath. My brother was there.
I did German prep.
All before breakfast.
At Chapel I took ‘one p’ for the collection because I had no other change. I was accounting for myself really, excusing myself to the Chapel fairies if they were watching. I doubt I normally gave much more. Ten pence would have been generous.
Dad was waiting afterwards in the yard or at the end of Winder Lane in his distinctive gold-coloured Mercedes SLC – that fact he didn’t drive a family car I found falling. The first thing her did on divorcing Mum was replace the Rover Saloon for a Triumph Stag, as if he were now the bachelor he’d always wanted to be. We generally went out together, my brother and I.
Leaving Sedbergh was mentioned. Nothing was imminent. My brother still had his A Levels to finish and I had my O Levels, so the possible break was 1978. I didn’t know then that my brother too had been complaining about Sedbergh, had wanted to leave and had got nowhere. That emerged later.
For now I was only exploring the idea, formulating something, considering the options. Simply disliking Sedbergh was not enough. If I wanted to leave, I needed a firm alternative and would have to justify it.
I’d been boarding since 1970. Six years was a lifetime. Even remembering being a day boy, living at home with both parents together, was becoming difficult.
The family of six had fragmented. My older sister was mostly away, first at sixth form abroad and now at university, or with her boyfriend – somewhere. My brother and I spent term time at Sedbergh and, ostensibly, divided the holidays between Gosforth and Appleby. My younger sister was mostly in Gosforth, but sometimes with grandparents or friends if Mum was away, and often at Appleby in the holidays. We had separate existences with each parent, while their own lives shifted around us. I later called us the ‘splat’ generation. Our family had been like a balloon full of water dropped from a great height; we were now scattered in bits across England.
Dad believed in the boarding-school system because it was what he’d done. It set you up for life: exam results, university, behaviour, social status.
But I had begun to wonder whether its claims were well founded or even relevant.
Dad would scrutinise buying a car or employing somebody, yet somehow the school raising his sons escaped the same scrutiny. Sedbergh was not simply educating us. It was raising us, and that meant having to conform. There were too many people, boys and teachers I did not like or rate, and too little space in which to be yourself.
Art was the clearest example. It was categorically rejected as a subject and designated a hobby.
We were tethered, even at weekends. We couldn’t go out only until a certain time and then had to be back. A school bell rings, a boy jumps, and a rugby ball hits you in the face. That’s how I sum it up.
It was as though the place owned us.
Sedbergh could feel like a sentence to endure – a posh prison for boys.
Newcastle RGS represented something else, although nothing had been arranged and the idea would go quiet again for another year. I knew the Royal Grammar School already. I’d trained in its pool as a younger boy and been back for inter-school galas. Mum had been at the girls’ school opposite. Boys from Mowden had gone there rather than continue through the boarding-school system.
They were still themselves. They’d not been thrown into the street and gone all Geordie. That was the dynamic. We were from Tyneside, but were expected to behave and speak like toffs.
If I left Sedbergh, I imagined living at home. RGS was the school that made sense if that happened. And beyond school there would be a life.
There were girls, of course, but not only girls. There was acting with the youth theatre; club swimming rather than simply school swimming; art; guitar and singing; my music.
Sedbergh offered a drizzle of these things, a few drops of each, barely a tease, a sneeze of it, during what were supposed to be my most formative and creative years.
We had been studying, or had recently studied, Henry IV Part One. Prince Hal could throw off loose behaviour and later reveal his better self. I understood the attraction of that idea. But I could not simply set aside the years I was actually living and assume some future version of me would redeem them.
Dad only seemed worried about leaving when he got here. Reaching Sedbergh seemed to make the issue real again.
From Sedbergh, getting out meant escaping the surrounding, barricading hills towards the M6, the road tethering the southern Lakes to the north. We went east at Tebay, through Orton and on towards Appleby.
At Appleby Castle we skirted the curtain walls and the flooded moats, divided into enclosures for different kinds of swan, passed through the main gate and followed the meandering drive through the park to the fifteenth-century gatehouse. Then over the gravel, around to the entrance, up the steps and through the massive Elizabethan doors into the Great Hall.
After that we dispersed.
Dad went into his sitting room and study. My brother and I went all the way up to the top floor. We each had a bedroom and the whole sitting room was ours to use as a study.
At weekends Appleby could be almost monastic.
My mind and body were my own there. I could think uninterrupted by bells, boys or balls. I could put into my body what I chose rather than what was prescribed.
I drank, smoked and watched TV.
I could help myself to a can of Carlsberg. One now and then was never a problem. The lager was a softener, calming and pleasant, and above all mine to choose.
The cigarette was different. That was an affectation. I rarely smoked and never regularly.
I went around the ponds with a cigarette lit.
The Tarot card readings were coming true.
I had done a reading for myself. Judgment had appeared, and the Wheel of Fortune. I knew enough of the conventional meanings for the correspondence to feel uncanny.
But I also understood the trick.
You could keep dealing out the cards and keep finding your existence given some mythological rectitude. There was a self-fulfilling element. The cards could suggest a direction, but I remained the agent who could make the reading come true or not.
It was another kind of storytelling, another way of escaping the mundane and imposing some shape on it.
Tomorrow I would be fifteen.
That mattered.
I was not simply thinking about leaving Sedbergh because I disliked it. Time was running out to know what it was to live at home before becoming an adult.
I had thought Dad would be the one I needed to persuade. What he said made me think Mum might be the greater obstacle. I had imagined her simply at home, waiting for the school term to end. She was not. She was single and increasingly spending time in Warwickshire. She had a life of her own.
Any plan I made had to be feasible within the lives both my parents were actually living.
RGS still contained too many unknowns. Perhaps that was part of its attraction. It was less a destination than a grand railway station, with several destinations made possible.
But something had changed that day.
The idea had been shared instantly rejected.
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