Thursday, 30 September 1976
(Winder House, Sedbergh School. Age 15).
German: got prep back. I had done well. That meant I had learnt something — or rather memorised something. Rote learning is not learning. It is a memory trick. It does not denote understanding. German was really a filler subject for one year: it was that or stick with Latin.
The whole arrangement seemed absurd. I already knew they would not accept Art as a subject. I should have been studying all three sciences, History and Geography, but I had to take Maths, English and two languages, and the expectation was that everyone did Latin. My choices did not fit their system. To take History I would have had to drop a science.
So doing well in German did not suddenly make German important.
French: I asked Mr Poyet if I could go to Music. It was a formality. I was comfortable asking him. The Music was my flute lesson, and that was simply how Music fitted in: by cutting across another class every week. It was not helpful if the lesson being missed was French, or indeed anything I could not afford to miss. By then the flute was another activity, though my interest in playing and reading music was still there.
There were quite a few things I was doing more from duty than conviction: German, Chemistry, Rugger, Orchestra, Brass Band.
Others still felt entirely mine: Geography, History, English, Art, Biology, Physics.
English: I did some English before breakfast and added to it in the lesson. If it involved writing, I would have been at my desk in Winder. It was most likely Great Expectations, finishing off an essay for Mr Mercer on themes or characters.
Geography: While taking notes I filled in the counties I had stayed in in my Philips Atlas. I had made a rule that a county only counted if I had stayed there for a night. Passing through by train or car did not count, though of course staying one night could still just mean passing through.
I shaded them lightly in pencil so the map underneath remained unchanged.
Ross-shire counted because of Loch Maree. Then there were Northumberland, Cumberland, Durham, Yorkshire, Westmorland, Lancashire, Cheshire, Lincolnshire, Middlesex, Hertfordshire, Berkshire, Oxfordshire, Buckinghamshire and Devon from Corps Camp.
Some places came from fishing and later sailing trips with Dad, others from second cousins and family friends with Mum, others from school trips.
The atlas sat on my shelf with a dictionary and a few other books, but the shading made it into something more personal. It became like a diary. I would look at the pattern of shaded counties and at what remained blank.
Much later I would cover almost every corner of the UK, including several counties in Northern Ireland and most of Scotland, with only some significant gaps along the western coast of Wales. But the impulse was already there. I wanted out of provincial northern England. London interested me. France interested me.
After Combined Cadet Force, which was routine, I went to the Grubber for sweets and crisps.
Chris Allsop was there at a table. He told me I was stupid not to be swimming.
That had an impact.
Swimming needed continuity, and Sedbergh had disrupted it. More generally, boarding school had redirected things I was naturally drawn to: fine art, performance, swimming, the freedom to pursue a multitude of subjects.
By then my determination to leave Sedbergh after O-levels was total. If necessary, I simply would not come back.
Chris understood swimming from the inside. There was value in being an athlete, in having a level of fitness generally superior to most others in the school. His comment did not feel like another instruction from above. It came from someone who knew.
I decided I would start making the effort again.
And I did. I settled back into training.
Wrote to Sephy.
By then our letters were about present-day school life rather than simply the Nevasa and “Wonderful Memories”. We may only have written once a term, perhaps three times a year, so each letter still mattered.
I was probably moaning about school.
The letters were a kind of diary written for somebody else: confiding disguised as romantic. I have never seen what I actually wrote, probably just as well. I imagine I took four sides of paper to say what I could have said in one.
But I wrote.
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