Monday, 25th October 1976
Winder House, Sedbergh School, Cumbria
Age 15
I woke up early because of the morning light. The clocks had gone back, and the curtains over the dormitory windows were rubbish, virtually non-existent. A shard of early morning light was enough to wake me.
I revised Physics and had a bath.
The early morning was my golden hour for applying my mind, all the more so if I’d been fretting about a subject test the night before. I was coming to keep the evenings for writing essays and sorting out notes, and first thing in the morning for revision.
I thought Music was my first period. It was my second.
Having one period of Music each week meant that I missed a legitimate lesson. A teacher going through a topic with meticulous scrutiny, keeping to their schedule, wasn’t going to slow down for me. With something like Chemistry, this could mean missing a crucial insight into the processes from which I wasn’t going to be able to recover.
Geography:reading. Hardly something that required me to be in school! Presumably the teacher was off. We’d gone through several different Geography teachers since I’d arrived at Sedbergh in 1975, which didn’t help. Is this what my father was paying for? Unsupervised reading?
For Music, I practised Bach’s Sicilienne in G Minor on the flute.
Physics: the test seemed easy, but I couldn’t quite get the answers to some of the questions. A familiar conundrum: close, but not quite. And a teacher, for his reasons would not engage with me? What’s that about. I’d seek his attention and he repeatedly ignored me.
Double English: involved a ghost story and talk about grave digging.
Ghost stories got my attention! I’d had a history with them going back to Mowden Hall, my prep school in Northumberland. Dormitory Captains, as we called them, were boys aged twelve or thirteen supervising dormitories of boys aged nine to twelve. They could be called upon to tell a ghost story.
I’d been enthralled by these stories as a younger boy. The Green Mist and The Monkey’s Paw came to mind. Then, when I became a Dormitory Captain myself, I’d told these stories to the younger boys.
The talk about grave digging brought other things to mind. There was the history of grave robbing, and Shakespeare’s Hamlet — ‘Alas, poor Yorick!’ — with the gravedigger and the skull. And there was that dog in Edinburgh that apparently sat on its owner’s grave.
How much hard work would it take to dig a grave?
I’d spent hours digging trenches and wells around my den in the woods at Mowden Hall. I knew something about digging!
I had a letter from Julie-Anne with a Glacier Mint in it. Sweet!
Julie-Anne was my girlfriend back in Gosforth. I had a lovely girlfriend with blonde hair!
The Glacier Mint was a joke about being ‘sweet’. This was the closest we’d been to having a kiss. I could imagine a proper tongue-turning French kiss with that mint in my mouth :)
Rugby was Third League: Rugby 4. A good game, though we lost to Hart House.
Rugby was an obligation that Sedbergh was determined I’d buy into. Hart House was the house of my Chemistry teacher, Mr Barrett, and of a few friends from Gosforth who’d become serious about rugby. They were the ones to beat, but I wasn’t going to rise to that challenge.
Swimming was what I wanted to do. Someone should have been in my corner demanding that I be allowed to do swimming training. No one was.
Early morning training for swimmers? Nothing!
I’d already been through something similar at Mowden Hall, where an opportunity to train with a swimming club had been refused, despite my mother offering to provide the transport. Now, five years later, I was at Sedbergh, where rugby took precedence. As far as I was concerned, the provision for anyone serious about swimming was a sham.
Joan of Arc.
Robin Hood in France! Iconic. Instantly an attractive subject. How could this happen? What really happened?
A young woman leading armies, standing against the English and the Burgundian French, with a mission she believed in absolutely.
Never had I felt such shame as at Joan being condemned by the English to burn. Nor could I think of a greater example of the gross hypocrisy of Christianity.
Religion was the servant of those in power.
For Joan, her mission in life was transcendent. She constructed a belief around her experience. This was what it was to be human.
If only Shakespeare had written a play around Joan of Arc! Macbeth, but with Christianity. Youth versus the establishment. The vanquished against the conquerors, who were not just the English but the Burgundian French.
As if the English Channel didn’t exist.
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