Tuesday, 12th October 1976
(Winder House, Sedbergh School. Age 15).
German: dull. I could hardly remember ever describing German as anything else.
I’d slept badly because of the rain. Heavy, constant rain was the norm. The drain from the roof ran down the side of Winder House beside the window where I slept, and the constant gurgling and swallowing kept me awake.
M. C. Pendall had woken me as well, yelling, “Vernon!” from behind his own cube somewhere else in the dormitory. Who knows why? A bad dream. Not a good one I hope. I fancy him about as much as a bag of crisps full of dog poo and sand.
Pendall was in the year above. He’d been around since my first term. He was a swimmer, and I’d played squash with him, so generally we rubbed along just fine. Occasionally, though, he liked to pull rank and remind me that whatever else might be true, he was senior to me.
He was one of those people I would never have had as a friend outside school. Winder produced plenty of them: characters and acquaintances thrown together by like a disaster-movie cast. Think the Poseidon Adventure cast list okayed by Boys from public-school House roster. You didn’t choose them. They were simply there.
I tended to judge people partly by what they could do. What can you do? How good are you at it? Pendall was not much of a swimmer in my estimation, and I thought he had the brain the size of a sparrow. Yet, because he was a year above me, seniority could still trump everything else.
Lessons were good. By “good” I suppose I mean enjoyable and purposeful. I’d probably learnt something.
Then there was rugger.
We played a ‘wet’ game, kicking about in the rain and mud. I was almost always in the scrum. By now I have no interest in rugby, so there was little reason to describe the game beyond recording that it had occupied ninety minutes of my day without my having any say in it.
Afterwards I had to get the mud off, probably back at Winder.
I had something to eat before swimming.
Then I swam 6,000 metres, beating all previous records! This was the achievement of the day.
It had been a challenge set by Mr Stuart and must have taken around two hours.
Training was extraordinarily bare by later standards. We had extra kit: no fins, no paddles or no pullbouy. There weren’t even lane ropes. It was essentially swimming, or kicking, to a poolside pace clock and whatever session Mr Stuart had set us.
I couldn’t recover the sets themselves, but 6,000 metres was volume: 240 lengths of a 25-metre pool.
What appealed to me was the settling into the rhythm. Once I was into a long uninterrupted swim I could keep it going. I enjoyed the karma of that kind of swimming. Perhaps I was already beginning to think of myself as a distance swimmer.
Preps were mostly revision.
There was a constant round of tests, and revision was simply part of school life. Prep had to be done during a set period, though; it wasn’t a question of carrying on until everything was finished. Other prescribed activities took up the evening as well, so I didn’t have time to do most of it.
I hoped I didn’t get a test.
The consequence would simply have been doing badly. Though in German and Chemistry I could do badly whether I had revised or not.
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