Tuesday 28th September 1976
(Winder House, Sedbergh School. Age 15)
I slept until the ten-minute bell before House breakfast. Then consciousness: a new day begins.
I am fifteen. For years I have asked, “Am I a big boy now?” By fifteen, I’m no longer asking Mum. In any case I’ve been away at boarding school for the last seven years so I’ve mostly put this question to myself in the washroom mirror – I think this morning the answer is ‘yes’.
I got a card from Sephy. I was very pleased.
We’d met on the S S Nevasa when we were twelve and a half and thought ourselves much more grown up than we were. We held hands, looked into each other’s eyes and fell in love. By fifteen we were penpals, that was all, but I kept her letters. I might glance at the envelopes over the weeks. They were a reminder that there had once been someone “out there for me”, and that there could be again.
Her card was more conventional than those earliest letters. I had written to her earlier in the term and had probably been fishing for a birthday card. I often did that. It felt nice to be remembered.
German: dull. I had no interest in German.
French: getting worse, which was different. I wanted French to work. My surname is Vernon; I thought of Norman ancestry rather than French ancestry, but there had been trips to France and I liked French history. I wanted to engage with the language. Effort or no effort, though, I could not tune into the way it was being taught. There was no enquiry, no curiosity, no achievable challenge.
Biology: went to sleep.
Not quite. I struggled to stay awake, resting my head in my hands, then putting a hand over my eyes and hoping I would not be spotted. I suspect I was unwell.
English: good. We were doing Richard III and I took Richmond’s part for the end. Those most eager to have a part tended to get one, and I had one rival: Harrison, my old acquaintance from Mowden and fellow chorister. We competed for the best roles.
Richmond was a good one. He had the best lines and lots of them.
Shakespeare had a spell over me. I liked the pleasure of speaking the lines aloud, though the method of reading a play round the class rather defeated itself. Once I had a decent part, I spent the rest of the lesson several pages ahead, checking my next speech and sometimes putting pencil marks on my lines so that I would read them properly when my turn came. I was therefore not following the play and ostensibly did not know what was going on. It would have been quicker to read it on my own, and less boring for everyone else.
Still, Richmond got lines like:
“God and our good cause fight on our side;
The prayers of holy saints and wrongèd souls,
Like high-reared bulwarks, stand before our faces.”
Maths: Functions. I had my notebook. I’d forgotten the Maths notebook yesterday and had been given a map as a punishment for it — on my birthday. This time I’d remembered it.
Post in Winder was left on the windowsill-like shelf beside the House pantry and you went there to see what had arrived.
At lunch I got three more birthday cards.
One was from Tracy. Who was she? I genuinely didn’t know then and I don’t know now. Perhaps a girl working in the House kitchen. Perhaps a Casterton girl. Perhaps someone connected with the SS Nevasa. I would have checked the handwriting and the postmark, probably asked around. Sedbergh? Kirkby Lonsdale? Edinburgh might have suggested one of the girls I had met on the ship.
There was no birthday card from my younger sister.
That mattered because we normally went to some trouble to remember each other’s birthdays. At boarding school, cards from outside mattered. They were proof that someone elsewhere was thinking about you.
Perhaps hers would arrive the following day.
There was thunder – the final breaking of the great drought of 1976. The weather m was so awful that it got me thinking – was the world changing?
One of my favourite books was Nigel Calder’s The Weather Machine. I was fascinated by human effects on climate and by the idea that one day we might even control the weather. So the thought of the world’s climate changing was not simply worrying. It was exciting and scientifically interesting too.
I liked change: novelty of any kind, drama, a challenge, a problem or dilemma to face.
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