history 1

History 1

Of all the books I wrote in Fairburn, this is the only one which - give or take a few weeks - covers the entire time I was there. A whole two-and-a-bit years of methodically copying other people’s writing into a book I’d probably never look at again. Why did we copy things out of other people’s books? I don’t know - I talk about that a lot more cogently here - but we did. And the one clear mood memory that leaps out at me when I look at this stuff is absolute stultifying boredom. Unlike the other major subjects we tackled - mainly English and Topic, but also to an extent, Geography and Maths - in this one, I wasn’t encouraged to engage with the subject matter on a personal level or apply any original thought. And it’s obvious, looking through this book, that I didn’t enjoy it. There’s one lesson at most every week, maybe less, some of them quite short. Some pieces fade out halfway through. Sometimes the pencil changes halfway through a page, suggesting I dragged my heels, ran out of time and had to catch up the following week. I just didn’t find it interesting enough to pick up the pace. The result is though, it’s actually got a coherence that - apart from maybe Topic 1 - none of the other books have. There’s a section about prehistory, followed by a selection of pieces about Nelson, then the entire life story of Napoleon Bonaparte. It’s all about the past. It actually makes sense as the sort of thing you might learn at school, and especially, the sort of thing you might learn about in a History lesson. I don’t remember having any interest in History until some time in my late twenties. Now I’m older, it seems like one of the most exciting and important pastimes you can ever lose yourself in. But back then I hated it. I might have thought learning about cavemen would be fun, but several months of copying out stuff about stone age toolmaking put paid to that. My brain still glazes over when I think about Nelson. And I probably settled on Napoleon because no one else was using the Napoleon book that day. But there’s a certain joy in looking at this stuff - seeing how the handwriting develops, if only slightly; watching the artwork slowly improve over time. If you can call it improvement. Because some of these pictures are truly dreadful. I mean, shockingly bad, on a gut level. I wasn’t going to upload this book at first, thinking it just too dry to be interesting for anyone else to see, but genuinely, it’s the pictures that have convinced me. From the first wonky picture of a cave lion to that final half-arsed picture of Napoleon, via some truly abysmal attempts to draw animals and women, this truly is a cavalcade of bad artwork by a kid who’s out of his depth. As with most of the stuff here, I’m uploading this book bit by bit as I find the time to do so over a period of several years. Please bear with me as I slowly strap you into this slow-motion Historical car crash…

October 1979 - October 1981

People in the Old Stone Age >

People in the Old Stone Age Guy Fawkes People in the Old Stone Age: 2 People in the Old Stone Age: 3 The New Stone Age People of the Bronze Age The Story of Nelson: 1 The Story of Nelson: 2 The Story of Nelson: 3 Florence Nightingale The Story of Nelson: 4 The Story of Nelson: 5 The Story of Nelson: 6 The Story of Nelson: 7 Christopher Columbus: 1 Christopher Columbus: 2 The Soldier Napoleon Bonaparte Napoleon’s Mother The Queen of Spain The French Revolution The Surrender of Toulon Upon Return From Italy The Armed Revolt Josephine de Beauharnais The Thin Young Man The Little Corporal The Most Famous Man in France A Proposal About Egypt Master of France Weary of War Hero of the People Emperor at 34 Danger Across the Sea Wherever Wood Can Float An Empire in Decline