Thursday, 11 November 1976
(Winder House, Sedbergh School
Age: 15 years)
German: There was some collective misbehaviour, with someone winding up the teacher. I kept out of it.
I should have been doing Art! Or History! Or Art History! Anything except German.
French: Full marks in prep. But that was only 5/5. Small wins, but a deserved one.
Geography: The test was quite easy. Yet I only got 11/20. It was on meteorology.
The weather fascinated me. The science behind it. The causes. The effects. How we lived by the climate we grew up under and the daily weather. There was so much to understand about it, and I wanted to know why things happened. I wanted to get my head around what caused the weather and what effects it had on everything else. And could it be controlled?
Physics: Test back, 19/20. Very good for me.
I liked a challenge. Physics could be difficult, but there was satisfaction in working through a problem and finding that I understood it. Nineteen out of twenty was a very good result, for me! My marks could be rubbish.
Combined Cadet Force: It went on till dark. We Did weapons training.
That’s the Army for you. Light or dark, wet or dry, cold or hot, you got on with it and followed commands. Weapons training meant handling rifles, learning how they worked, maintaining them and practising the correct positions.
Went to stores, where I then stayed to dodge drill practice.
I got chatting and managed to make it appear that I didn’t need to be somewhere else. It wasn’t so much the physical activity or the orders that I objected to. Marching about for the sake of marching about. If I could avoid it by staying in stores so much the better.
Practised flute.
It was something different to do. There was the pleasure of having a room of my own, even if it was only a music cubicle out in the yard.
Decided, reluctantly, to go swimming.
It was the thought of going off to the pool after a long day. Lessons, CCF, flute practice, and then swimming.
I Lost a race against Chris Allsop by a second.
It was 50 metres front crawl. I did 30.00 seconds and Chris did 29.00. Something like that. It brought back the same frustration of not being able to do the one sport I was good at consistently enough to become excellent. I could swim well and wanted to get better, but I didn’t have the consistent training I needed.
Prep: Divinity for tomorrow. A newspaper report on Naboth for the Rev. Harris.
Naboth’s vineyard was an interesting story. King Ahab wanted Naboth’s vineyard, but Naboth wouldn’t sell it because it was his ancestral inheritance. Jezebel arranged for Naboth to be falsely accused and killed, and Ahab took the vineyard.
There was rather more to it than simply another story from the Bible.
Property carried social obligations. Greed was a form of violence. Giving to the poor was an act of justice, not merely charity. And Naboth’s story was universal.
The same thing could happen wherever people with wealth and power wanted something that belonged to somebody else.
The Rev. Harris seemed to like my enthusiastic commitment to my stance on religion. What were the facts? What was human interpretation and invention?
That was what interested me. Not simply accepting what the Bible said, or what somebody said it meant, but asking what had happened, what could be established and how much had been added by the people telling the story. And why had they done so? What was there motivation?
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