Monday, 27th September 1976
Winder House, Sedbergh School — Age 15
I got up early as usual, with a bit of a headache, and continued my German prep — vocabulary, translation, grammar, written exercises, whatever needed doing.
It was my fifteenth birthday.
Nothing whatsoever marked it out at Sedbergh. Anything birthday-like had arrived in dribs and drabs over the previous couple of weeks — cards, money and presents before term or through the post.
At Mowden my birthdays had still been celebrated: From eight to thirteen, Mum made a different chocolate cake and brought it to school for the evening meal, with candles: an aeroplane twice, a Spitfire, then a castle, a car and a ship. There was a birthday table. At Sedbergh we were supposed to have grown out of such things. At least that was the case in Winder House. I resented that.
The year before, my birthday had fallen on a Saturday and Mum had come over and taken my brother and I out. She used to stay at the Barbon Inn. We had an afternoon walk, then a fancy evening meal before being taken back to school. This year there was nothing like that. It’s a Monday afterall.
I got a parcel from Aunty Kate: How Things Work, Volume II. I had been given Volume I for Christmas. They were hefty paperbacks, hundreds of things explained with a page of line diagrams facing a page of text showing how each thing was put together and worked. They were genuinely fascinating to browse.
Granny V sent fudge. I ate most of it.
There were a couple of birthday cards, one from my godfather Uncle Bill and one from my younger sister. Mum and Dad’s presents came separately, though I cannot now remember what they were.
Lessons were good to a degree. Trouble-free was good enough though Mr Wood meanly mapped me for forgetting my maths notebook. The notebook was carefully kept because that was how lessons worked: you copied material down accurately and depended on those notes for prep and revision. It was necessary and indispensable.
A map was a standard punishment. You had to draw and colour a country, label six rivers and twenty-five towns, then hand it in to be checked before it was destroyed. You did it in your precious free time. The pointlessness was simply accepted as part of the punishment.
There was a system to it. Boys recommended Japan and most of us copied the same established layout: the same convenient country, much the same rivers, much the same towns. Once you had done Japan before, you knew how to do it again.
It felt particularly mean because it was my birthday. I kept that to myself. I do not know whether Mr Wood even knew.
There was no house rugger, so I went swimming. I had known since I was ten that swimming was my sport, but at Sedbergh House rugger trumped swimming whenever the House decided it needed me. I resented that too. It summed up public school rather neatly: you had to do what they needed. You never came first.
The swim was proper training at pace. I have no idea now what the set was, only that it was what I would later recognise as anaerobic work.
I didn’t really enjoy it. But hard.
I finished preps early, though that did not mean I was free. I still had to sit silently at my desk in the Middle Common Room. I can see the plain, polished pine desktop and myself thumbing through How Things Work, Volume II, moving from one diagram to the next.
Then Choral Society.
Mary was absent.
Seeing her would have been enough. I didn’t need to speak to her. I was girl crazy, and she was the most familiar representative in almost entirely male world.
Birthdays made me conscious of time passing. Keeping a five-year diary probably sharpened that: the same date came round again, one entry above another. Fifteen felt different from fourteen — mid-teens rather than young teens, closer to sixteen than twelve.
But the day itself had been German prep, fudge, lessons, a map, swimming training, sitting silently at my desk and Mary not being there.
Another year over.
Dull.
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