Different Days

Different Days is a description by Jamie Bruce Lockhart of his home life in the 1940s and early 1950s. It provides a background for a companion volume Dragon Days, a study of life as boarders at the Dragon School, Oxford, at the turn of the 1950s undertaken jointly with Cambridge anthropologist Alan Macfarlane and based on an almost complete set of their letters home, including those of Jamie's late brother Sandy, Lord Bruce Lockhart, Kt, OBE (1942 - 2008). The author comes from a...
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Different Days is a description by Jamie Bruce Lockhart of his home life in the 1940s and early 1950s. It provides a background for a companion volume Dragon Days, a study of life as boarders at the Dragon School, Oxford, at the turn of the 1950s undertaken jointly with Cambridge anthropologist Alan Macfarlane and based on an almost complete set of their letters home, including those of Jamie's late brother Sandy, Lord Bruce Lockhart, Kt, OBE (1942 - 2008). The author comes from a family with strong traditions of service in teaching, medicine and the church. His early life has two contrasting centres of gravity, one in the northern Bruce Lockharts of his paternal kin, the other in the clerical Hones of his mother's family. Jamie describes these two sets of relatives and their points of origin before giving an account of his infancy and migratory life as a child from 1941 to 1945. With his father absent abroad Jamie was effectively brought up by a single mother in Oxford through to 1948. His parents then went together to post-war Germany where Jamie spent a year at school followed by holidays from the Dragon until 1951. Holidays in Scotland, America and Sedbergh are remembered vividly, as are the regular weekend visits throughout his Dragon days to Bishop and Mrs Hone in North Oxford. The family moved in late 1953 to a new home at Herons March in Surrey, with its magical lake and beloved wolfhound.