Sunday 10th October 1976
(Winder House, Sedbergh School. Age 15).
I slept well, but I still had a sore throat. I carried on regardless.
Chapel.
After I did Chemistry prep.
Then I went swimming. The school pool was terribly modest, only four lanes and 25 metres long, and I had the far lane to myself. There was an older Sixth Former there whose best stroke was backstroke and who had done some research into swimming training. He timed me while I did 8 × 100m on 2:30:
1:25 / 1:23 / 1:20 / 1:28 / 1:25 / 1:17 / 1:10 / 1:19.
The generous interval meant they were quality swims rather than an aerobic set. It was me, the pace clock and the lane.
Then I did IM, but my throat was too bad. I could tell I was making myself worse — fatigue and general malaise rather than anything dramatic — so I stopped.
In return for him taking my times, I watched the Sixth Former practising his newfangled backstroke turn. It was called a bucket turn, or spin turn: he touched the wall on his back, threw his feet over or around and pivoted quickly off his hips. It looked very different from the sort of turn I was used to.
I washed my hair to get the chlorine out, used conditioner and changed.
Pirates of Penzance practice: this brought the possibility of seeing girls, which made doing something about my hair more important.
The rehearsal was disappointing. Fewer people were there than I expected. Some of the boys were away and there were no Casterton girls at all. There were some local girls, though, probably daughters of teachers or other school staff.
If there was a new female face, I spotted her.
First I had to like her. Then I had to judge whether she was too young or too old. Ideally she would be in my year. The most useful piece of intelligence was where she stood with O Levels: was she taking them this year, next year, or had she already done them and moved on to A Levels? That located her fairly precisely.
Then came the more difficult matter of whether to approach her, and how and when.
Mostly we sang.
I loved singing. I had been a chorister for five years and had learnt how to use my voice properly. I liked being able to control my voice and to sing in harmony. It was physical as well as musical. A pretty girl in the cast or chorus was a rare bonus.
But this particular rehearsal was all pretty dull.
Back at Winder I had toast and peanut butter. I could make toast either in the pantry or using one of the gas rings in the corridor by the studies.
I practised the flute, picking out music from The Pirates of Penzance. I did this all the time with music. The flute gave me the first note if I wanted to sing something, and then it gave me the tune. I could sight-read, but my fingers also seemed to know where to go to produce the note I wanted.
Supper.
I had a bath.
Then I did the Geography prep which I hadn’t done on Friday. I had mucked around during the Geography lesson itself, so I may not even have had adequate notes to work from and might have needed to borrow somebody else’s. That evening I had also been given three fags to do — chores handed down by a House prefect — so Geography had slipped.
There is a bracketed note beside the Geography entry in the original diary which I still cannot read confidently. It looks something like:
(Bew & med in niptclottes)?!
Or what about ‘brew and medicine in nightclothes?’
It may not describe the prep at all. I wonder whether it referred to a chapter or section in a book. For the moment, it remains undeciphered.
Then: Astronomy.
I had bought Patrick Moore’s The Amateur Astronomer with birthday money from my grandparents. The black cover showed the Moon, with its cratered edge picked out in yellow-green, and promised “The complete and indispensable guide for the amateur astronomer.”
I wanted to recognise the constellations and connect them with the Greek and Roman myths whose names filled the sky. But the interest quickly went further than identifying patterns of stars. There were the stars themselves, galaxies beyond them and the question of whether there was other life somewhere out there.
Being able to see the night sky would have helped. In the Howgills the weather was permanently overcast.
We watched Fawlty Towers. What we watched in Winder had to be the choice of the majority, but I was already a fan. I liked the entire pantomime farce of it.
It was easy enough to imagine what could happen to a hotel in the wrong hands. Mum stayed at the Barbon Inn when she came up to see us, though the real Barbon Inn was almost the opposite of Fawlty Towers: scrupulously genteel.
I then wrote up the last three days of my diary. I’d try to stay on top of it. Three days felt about as far as my memory could stretch before I risked missing something important. I’d reconstructed things off the top of my head: which lessons I had had, from timetable, what games I had done, post I may have received.
I wasn’t trying to reproduce every hour accurately. What mattered was getting down the noteworthy thing that had happened that day.
Roll call.
We had evening roll call in Winder. Some Houses apparently had morning roll call as well. Boys did run away, and would run away, so there was a practical reason for making sure everyone was still there.
My throat was still bad, so I inhaled steam over Vicks in hot water: a bowl of hot water, a scoop of Vicks VapoRub and a towel over my head. It was a common remedy.
And so to Bed.
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