Friday, 1st October 1976
(Winder House, Sedbergh School. Age 15).
I revised French and English in bed before breakfast.
I had always woken early, typically at about six, and in summer far earlier. When my brain jumps into action I wanted to be up and at it. My bed was beneath a large window. This was Cumbria, the South Lakes, on the first morning of October, so whether there was enough daylight at six I don’t know. If there wasn’t, I used a torch.
I was never stopped. Sometimes I knew other boys were awake too, but we ignored each other. It was as quiet as a library should be. I liked that.
Nobody taught us how to revise.
I don’t think I did it particularly well. Looking over notes was just that — looking over notes. Testing myself was better. Otherwise I underlined things, added notes to my notes and picked out the important bits, using pads of lined A4 paper. At least I was actively doing something.
I wrote up my diary since Wednesday: that’s two days.
I had to do it from memory. Perhaps that was better. After two or three days I remembered what mattered rather than recording every piece of ephemera. I was record keeping. That was all. And I had ‘bished it’.
Bish = standard schoolboy language: you made a bish, or bished something, when you made a mistake or messed it up.
I had tied my brain into a calendar knot.
1976 was a leap year. Sunday 28th September 1975 therefore became Tuesday 28th September 1976. Somewhere in working this out I misread the previous year’s entry as Sunday 1976, rather than Sunday 1975, and initially wrote in Monday, which was my birthday, the 27th.
Then I thought I’d wrote something twice. I wrote up Monday 27th September 1976 twice where I should have been writing up Wednesday 29th September 1976 has vanished – Forever.
It is the one inadvertent hole in an otherwise unbroken run of daily entries from September 1975 to September 1978. Less like a missing tooth, more like a snagged thread in a Persian carpet.
Wednesday 29th September 1976 – lost like a fart in the wind.
Not quite lost, perhaps. There was still the timetable. Detective work could recover the structure of the day: Geography, Double Biology, French, PE, Cadet Corps and Double Projects. I could even establish that it was cool, overcast and very wet, with heavy downpours. But that isn’t a diary. That’s reconstruction. What I noticed that day and what mattered has gone.
It was remarkably easy at boarding school to forget what day of the week it was because most days were governed by the timetable. Only Sunday was different enough to reset the clock: Sunday best clothes, chapel, no lessons though not necessarily no prep, letters home but no post, freedom of a kind while still tethered to the House, meals and finally evening House Assembly.
Divinity prep was very short. Thank God. Perhaps the prep was to pray for inspiration.
Divinity suited me rather well. There were no tests, no exam and the prep was always light. My kind of learning: exploratory. I could engage with the subject without having to learn stuff.
I could get on with other revisions.
Confirmation class was OK.
‘OK’ being about as enthusiastic as I could manage. I was an unwilling participant in something I didn’t believe in. Most things at Sedbergh were compulsory, but Maths, Physics or History at least had a comprehensible destination: knowledge, tests, an O-level certificate. Confirmation required something quite different.
Assent.
Study Christianity, certainly. Profess belief, absolutely not. I could only profess disbelief.
The odd thing was that Confirmation Class itself was gentile. It took place in a large Edwardian town house, in what had become the Music School. Harris may have commandeered a large sitting room. We sat around, had tea and biscuits and were allowed to contemplate the meaning of life. Girls would have been the stock answer.
Sedbergh was traditional and Anglican. Chapel, services and preparation for Confirmation were built into school life. We had Good News for Modern Man and John Young’s The Case Against Christ to read. The latter was supposed to make the case for Christianity, but every argument seemed to me to reveal that there wasn’t a case to be made. I tore it apart like a bull terrier puppy with a pair of slippers.
The problem with Confirmation was that I didn’t believe in God, the Bible or the prophet Jesus. Yet here I was in a room with boys I knew well, most of whom had never expressed any particular Christian belief.
There were inducements though. Confirmation might produce cash or a watch. One boy said he’d get a car! Some parents and godparents stuck with the traditional Bible or crucifix. None of that tempted me. Though £50 might have done it. That was getting towards a low-budget electric guitar and amp, or a Yamaha acoustic. But then I’d have to live with the hypocrisy of it. I’d have got Confirmed to save me from being burned at the stake, but this is 1976 not 1476.
There was also talk of the three-day Confirmation retreat turning into a piss-up.
That put me off even more.
Too many people didn’t weren’t taking it seriously, or they asked questions they were expected to ask.
Feckless sheep. Intellectually vacuous.
It was both things that irritated me: boys professing belief because it was expected of them, with rewards at the end, and their failure even to challenge what they were being asked to profess. There were stock answers and supplication: what a teacher might aptly have described as leaving your brain at the door.
We had a Church leaflet about Confirmation which largely told us what we were required to believe and how we should ask questions. I remember nothing about its appearance, only its inability to persuade me with platitudes and absolutes that didn’t add up.
Doubt seemed permissible provided it was the right sort of doubt and eventually produced the prescribed answer.
It reminded me of the CCF.
Square bashing.
You did exactly as you were told. The Church appeared to be doing the same thing with your mind: this is what you’ll believe. No ifs or buts.
I couldn’t square that with Maths or Physics or History. I couldn’t accept being told something was fact because somebody said it was true.
And yet I enjoyed Divinity. I was good at it. There was some irony in being top of Divinity while being a devout atheist. The more I was told believe, the more I developed arguments to shore up my disbelief.
I was taking an interest in anthropology, different communities and the ways people organised themselves. Though I’d rarely enjoyed Latin per se, its myths and gods had always fascinated me — their stories. I was learning about Hinduism, Mayan tribes and Native Americans. I browsed libraries and bookshops, read magazines and watched television. Things such as Chariots of the Gods? fed the curiosity, as did Victorian fairy tales.
Human beings seemed extraordinarily good at producing gods, prophets, stories and systems of belief.
Christianity was one of them.
I asked Harris about modern Christian Religion.
I wasn’t simply asking whether Christianity was relevant to contemporary life. I was interested in modern religion and morality, but also in Christianity’s diminishing significance over the millennia and whether it would inevitably fizzle out. The anthropological and psychological role of spirituality was one thing; the invention of gods and prophets was another.
Harris ‘seemed worried’ the exact words written in my diary.
The emotional range of the Reverend Harris was subtle. He had a way of saying nothing and quietly watching what was said and done, and what our behaviour revealed. Perhaps he was thinking. Perhaps he was in a trance. Perhaps his expression meant something. There could be a sort of has it come to this? look about him. Maybe he was dismayed at the lot of us.
If he had a look I could describe it was like the Mona Lisa with a pensive scowl. But Harris was a bald bloke in a dark suit who wore a V necked sweater and a dog collar.
But he didn’t close me down.
That was what made Harris different. In an institution structured around compliance, I was free with him to rebel, repent, explain myself or not.
Perhaps that was why he got under my skin like no other teacher. If he had simply told me I was wrong, I could have rejected him along with everything else. Instead, he listened.
He made me think.
Perhaps he was being Jesus-like and I was the Roman soldier goading the prophet. Harris liked role play and took the role of martyr very well.
I was an interloper in Confirmation class. I had no place there. I was like a butcher at a vegan picnic.
The devil himself.
Provocateur I didn’t mind.
Had I stayed much longer, I might have started persuading the others to do the right thing and drop out.
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