Shoes

Lots more trivial little incidents today to set my puerile mind racing and my heart thudding. Claire came in to the common room towards the end of the first period. She was in a flighty mood and I asked here where she had been first period. “Why? Did you miss me?” I didn’t know how to react to that. Duncan told me that Tony went up to Deborah’s on Saturday; not a word from her as he told everyone. By this time he and Jeremy were really getting on my wick, so I spent much of period two on my own in the common room reading a newspaper. In History I had to grovel to Mr. Ingham about Friday, and he told me that we’d be given the test either tomorrow or Wednesday. We are still on Stalin and his preparations for the Communist Party purges of the ‘thirties. Nothing much doing all day, and the last period passed in utter and absolute boredom.

After school I stopped behind with Jeremy, Tommy and Richard and we devised a calendar showing dummy dates for the magazine that we can duplicate and give to the members of the Editorial Committee. Immediately afterwards, at ten-to-four, I went into Easterby with £18 to buy some new shoes but my predictable lack of confidence and pathetic worries about peoples' opinions meant that although I looked at six or seven different shoe shops, I only tried on one pair (they were too narrow), and I came home empty handed.

In the evening I watched “The Troubles” about the aftermath of Bloody Friday in the early ‘seventies. One bit really shocked me: bodies, wrapped incongruously in sacking, humped about by soldiers. I was horrified at this – a soldier shoveling up pieces of quivering, raw human flesh with a spade, emptying them into a plastic bag. I felt cold inside.