WEDNESDAY 11th OCTOBER

Raven has come up with a novel solution to the wig problem. He suggests that I powder my own hair! No mention has yet been made of how I will get the stuff out afterwards!

Rehearsals: First and second year girls have been drafted in to do some dancing (oh god, little girls in leotards, the ban of my theatrical life at GHS!) and there will be offering from several other years in the form of poetry readings and the like. This is pretty much par for the course where Gaynesford is concerned where a bad idea has what little life left in it hammered into the ground by performers with no skill working an audience with no interest. Continuing my personal tradition for coming on stage and delivering bloody stupid lines, my script (such as it is) gives me the opening line “I have come to listen to my music!” Raven’s talcum powder idea doesn't really work, having dusted my hair with the stuff, I know look like a ghost from 'A Christmas Carol' Added to which wherever I go I leave a fine trail of powder in my wake. We open on Friday, fortunately we close on Friday as well. Hang on, Friday? Friday 13th – oh shit!

Editors note: As readers will have concluded Drama was one of the few fields in which Gaynesford was acknowledged as being excellent. In past years there had been a series of ever more ambitious productions, culminating in a version of "My Fair Lady" Click here for film clip (1964) which had been acclaimed as both professionally produced and a entertainment success. This was in no small way due to a core of pupils who were both interested in drama and exceptionally good at it, most notably, Stuart and Diane. (Cook was very clear that he did not regard himself as a skilled actor but rather it was something he found was fun and required very little effort on his part.) Despite the evident opportunities for prestige and PR, there had been no real attempts to bring younger pupils into this core group1 and with the inevitable winnowing of the end of the Fifth Year, the drama group had been badly depleted.

This should not have been a problem, but with a confidence which, based on the resources, beggars belief, Pat Graham was already laying plans for the most complicated production yet. A full performance of South Pacific.

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Excepts from South Pacific - the non-Gaynesford version.

Meanwhile, Cook's diary records his growing skills as a social engineer. skill which years later would stand him in good stead in the arena of local politics when he ran as the local councillor for the very ward that Gaynesford had been located in but for now came to fore in yet another run in with the motivated Ms Piner.