57418 school news_Layout 1 03/07/2015 11:18 Page 1
issue nineteen TRINITY TERM 2015
SherborneNews SPORT
NEW TRADITIONS
MUSIC
LEADERSHIP
Comment BY PETER WATTS DEPUTY HEAD PASTORAL Term time was always frantic, often noisy and occasionally bedlam so I always looked forward to those first few hours of silence once the boys had left at the end of the School year; a chance to walk around the house without the questions, the boys chasing each other and the nagging feeling that somewhere some boy was up to something!
There’s no such thing as ghosts...
However, it was never quite silent. A pragmatic scientist like me should be able to ascribe the moans and sighs of an empty boarding house on the first day of a long holiday to the building settling or to the central heating winding down but...how could that explain the glimpse down a dark corridor of a rushing shadowy figure or the snatch of a whispered conversation just around the corner? Ghosts? Probably not‌ Spirits? Umm, probably not... Something less defined perhaps that describes how a building made from wood and stone can seem to take on the life of those who have lived in it. For boarding houses are places where life, with all of its challenges, successes and failures, is lived. And for all of the deliciousness of those first few hours of calm, I actually much preferred the wet Wednesday February evenings and the banter in the dormitory and the study bedrooms.
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Like any community there are the sad times to survive such as deaths (from pets, through to grandparents, parents and even, most poignantly of all for unrelated boys, the death of a boy still at School or just left), expulsions and the failures associated with public exams and university application.
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