Mountain Adolescence
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MOUNTAIN ADOLESCENCE Alan on far right, 1957 Alan Macfarlane 1 Contents Part One Two Worlds The Lakes Preface 5 Arriving Moving North 7 First experience of the Lakes 15 A Home in the Lakes 22 The place and the people 29 Money worries 38 Home Life Year by Year 1955 51 1956 76 1957 87 1958 107 1959 117 1960 123 Sedbergh School Introductory fragments 139 Thoughts on Sedbergh 141 A changing and developing boy 152 Memories and thoughts on Sedbergh 154 Underlying themes 155 A walk round Sedbergh in my memory 158 A tribal system of segmentation 163 Age and Age Sets 163 Asylums 165 Boundaries and borders 166 Class 167 Conflicts and quarrels 168 Power and prefects 169 Rules and the breaking of rules 171 Symbolic life – School Songs 172 Symbols of identity 173 The army and military training 174 Money worries 175 Before Oxford: April – September 178 2 Part Two Play Body A sound mind in a sound body 185 Perseverance 192 Play Play and interests 196 Football crazy 199 Organized sport and games 201 Team and oppositional games 207 Running, walking, caving and stalking 221 Individual pursuits 234 Fishing 251 Passion for fishing 253 Rock and Television 264 Relationships and Emotions Relationships and emotions 275 Important people in my life 275 My grandparents 279 Friendship 280 The role of animals in our life 282 Walking the dog 283 Romantic Love In search of love 292 Love 293 Early girl friends 295 Young love and the party scene 296 First love: spring and summer 1960 307 Spirit and soul Spirit 315 Religion and God 318 Religion and Jesus 320 The Protestant Ethic 330 Theology and religious opinions 332 Patterns and puzzles 342 3 PART ONE TWO WORLDS 4 LAKELAND LIFE Preface Lakeland Life is part of a series of books which describe my early life and education. Indian Infancy covers the years in India from my birth in December 1941 to my return to England in 1947. Dorset Days and Dragon Days (with Jamie Bruce Lockhart) covers our life from 1947 to 1954 in Dorset and 1955 at the Dragon School. Lakeland Life describes my home life in the Lake District from 1954 to 1960 and is paralleled by Sedbergh Schooldays, an account of my time at Sedbergh School in Yorkshire 1955-60. Later volumes will take the story on to Oxford University for six years and beyond. All of the volumes are principally based on contemporary documents, especially letters written by members of the family. This volume is based on several sets of letters, my mother’s to me and to my father (when she was away from him on home leave), my letters to my parents and my sister Fiona’s letters to my parents. It is also based on a number of short diaries and accounts I wrote at the time of travels and of my first love affair. There is hardly any of my own writing in the previous volumes, but from the age of fifteen I started to keep papers carefully and also to write with some kind of eye on the future. I also begin to remember this period of life more sharply, memory becoming much clearer from about the age of fourteen. I have not included many undocumented memories, relying mainly on what was written at the time in the attempt to see those changing years through the eyes of myself and my family in materials of the time. I have also refrained, at present, from much anthropological or other analysis of what was happening to me, though I may increase this at a later point when this part of the picture can be set within the larger story of my life before and after the Lakes. At present this is a set of field notes taken at the time, describing a small boy of thirteen turning into a young man of eighteen. I have not always been able to trace those whose letters I quote. Where this is the case I have usually just given the first name and a letter to shield their particular identity. I hope that if they recognize themselves they will get in touch and permit me to reveal their full identity at a future date. 5 ARRIVING 6 Moving North I have told the story of my earlier years in considerable detail in previous books – Indian Infancy, Dorset Days, Dragon Days, so I shall not repeat that account. Here I want to take the story forward from our move up to the Lake District in the autumn of 1954, when I was approaching my 13th birthday through to my leaving to read history at Oxford in autumn 1960. This covers the five years, 1955-60, when I went to Sedbergh, a boarding public school about thirty miles by road from our home in the Lakes. It is a story set in an expansive period in British history, when the authorities of the ten post-war years was giving way to the ‘you have never had it so good’ era proclaimed by the Prime Minister Harold Macmillan. It was a turning point in popular culture with skiffle, rock and Teddy boys, as well as in higher literature and drama with ‘kitchen sink’ and the Angry Young Men. And it was a period when I grew by a foot, put on weight and passed through puberty. I was born in Shillong, Assam on 20 December 1941, where my father had joined the army from the tea plantation where he was working. He remained as a plantation manager throughout the period of this volume, so my parents were away for most of these years. The family had originally returned to England in England in April 1947, that is my father Donald, my mother Iris, my sister Fiona (born in April 1944) and sister Anne (born in June 1946). After a summer in Oxford and a winter on the Dorset coast we had moved o a rented house near Broadstone in Dorset in January 1948. There I had gone to kindergarten and my mother and Anne left me and Fiona in October 1948 with my mother’s parents, Will and Violet. During the next seven years before going to Sedbergh my parents came on leave two times and I visited Assam for one winter holidays. My main companions during this period were my sister Fiona and my young uncle Robert, born in 1933 and hence only eight years older than me and already at Sedbergh school, In September 1950 I went to the Dragon, a boarding preparatory school in north Oxford. I was a middling level student at the school. I was anxious and unsmiling for the first half of my time there, but was happy and a successful sportsman by the end. I was noted for my tenacity and reached the stream below scholarship level by the end. I was then accepted for entry at the school where my mother’s three bothers had gone. * One constant source of financial anxiety was housing. As a retired Lieutenant Colonel in the Indian Army, it might have been thought that my grandparents would not have found it too difficult to buy a house. This might especially be the case since they could share the costs with my parents whose children they were looking after. Renting a house was expensive and non-cumulative. The rent for ‘By the Way’ at Broadstone, for example, was £16 a month, and this was clearly very cheap, presumably because it was owned by ‘Aunt Nell’. In comparison, for the much smaller house in Broadstone the rent had been £30 a month and the house in the lakes was £20 a month. So quite early on my grandparents made efforts to find a house to purchase, a few details of their search being recorded in my grandfather’s diary. They were not above trying to find a Council House and the Diary in February and March notes this. On February 17 ‘Lambert … told us about how he got his council house’ and the next day 7 ‘Looked at Council Houses in Broadstone’. On 10th March ‘Went to Poole Borough Offices about getting a house’ and on the next day ‘Sent application for Council House’. There is no further reference to this attempt, so it clearly failed. The Council may well have thought that with the pressure on these highly subsidised houses for the poor a retired Colonel did not have the strongest case. My life might have been very different if they had succeeded – what I would have said at the Dragon if I had been going home to a Council House I do not know. In the following year, 1953, there are various clues to the fact that they were searching elsewhere. On 22nd August my grandfather noted ‘Meet Richard at Blandford and see houses at Haselbury Bryan’. This was the village where their son Billy’s recently married wife’s parents lived. Nothing seems to have available and on September 8 he notes ‘Went to see cottage near Somerton’. Then on 17 September he notes ‘Went in Richard’s car to Haythorn cottage Haythorn Common Nr Holton Mrs Goldsmith and liked it Phoned to Fox Agents’. On 21st ‘Went with Surveyor of Tweedale and Riley to see Haythorn Cottage’ and two days later ‘Macaulays take V and Robert to Haythorn Cottage’. It looks as if some sort of purchase almost occurred as on 26th he noted V[iolet] and D’Angibaus [neighbours] sold Haythorn Cottage’ but two days later on 28th ‘Cry off Haythorn’ and the following day they are hunting again, visiting their in-laws at Haselbury again and being met by their daughter-in-law Julia: ‘Julia meets us at Yeovil and takes us to houses for sale’.