Monday, 4th October 1976
(Winder House, Sedbergh School. Age 15.)
I was enjoying Monday lessons! Chemistry, English, Physics, Break, Geography and Biology made up the morning.
English: a general discussion on horror movies and TV advertising! I think this may have been Mr James was hoping to engage us rather than simply teach us, though perhaps he managed to do one through the other. Advertising gave us plenty to work with: the Hovis bike advert, the Smash Martians, Hamlet cigar photo-booth and Heineken ‘refreshing the parts other beers cannot reach’. Horror films meant Carrie and The Omen and on the lighter side Hammer House of Horror with Christopher Lee and Young Frankenstein.
Then I had to play House rugger. I got stuck into the scrum, where I was most useful, but it annoyed me that I was playing rugby instead of swimming training. Players were rotated and I was given a rest in the second half. It began to rain. Possibly the rain stopped play anyway: once the pitches became waterlogged and muddy there was the risk of destroying them.
I went swimming.
Chris Allsop and David Prescott were training and I joined them. David and I had swum together at Mowden, with one particularly unfortunate shared swimming experience. Before a House swimming gala we had both dived into the unheated outdoor pool without acclimatising. We managed about a length and a half before hauling ourselves out because we couldn’t breathe.
The swimming teacher reprimanded and punished us. In my case she accused me of having done it deliberately — she called premeditated sabotage! It wasn’t. I knew about cold-water shock, and I was asthmatic. David and I had simply both come up short against the cold.
I got a bit more training by having my books with me ready for late afternoon lessons.
Chemistry: I felt tired. Rugby and the swimming training had tired me out.
By then it was raining hard. A friend lent me his school raincoat for the walk back. It was a real kindness. He was in Hart House, close to the main school, while I still had to get all the way along Winder Lane to Winder.
I went to Choral Society. It was better than last week. The singing and harmonisation were better, and there were a few more teenage girls there — as in three!
We were singing classical favourites, including Fauré’s Cantique de Jean Racine and Handel’s Hallelujah Chorus from Messiah.
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