J F Vernon Blog

Diary: Write what I want to say. Mustn’t phone from home, too expensive. She’s out. Rings back. Missed out on most of what I wanted to say, make a date to meet on Friday at 10:30. Type about her and the party, about the skiing holiday too. Did the same for much of Tuesday. Shift posters, records and tuck box, couch, etc., back to my room. Write my diary. Go to party. No fun. Wet games. No J. 

My prompt responses

1. The unsent version

If I recall, fifty years on, success with writing a letter the day before may have had me write a second one and do the same thing—cycle over to hand-deliver it. I was keen. Waiting four or five days to see her again wouldn’t do. I brought our first date forward from Monday to Friday. This is what being sent off to boarding school does to you. You’re in a hurry.

2. The economics of silence

Mum had decided that calls out were too expensive. These were dial-up phones with a small padlock in the ‘0’ to prevent any dialling out. Her phone in her bedroom had no lock on it. With her OK we could phone from there.

3. The missed call gap

I’d have done that thing of checking my hair in the mirror before I made the call. I’d have got the nerves, then sat down on the side of Mum’s bed to use her bedside phone.

4. Saying less than you mean

Simply listening to her and answering her questions and responding with my own was enough. We were chatting. The harder questions would be about a date and future holidays when I would be off to stay with or holiday with my father. I’d be hoping beyond hopes that she would be permitted to come with me—at fourteen not likely. In fact she was thirteen.

5. The date as anchor

I’d successfully brought things forward. Come to think of it, I didn’t want the other boy to get in there. I worried he might take her out before I had a chance.

6. Writing about her instead of to her

I’d only got the typewriter for Christmas. There was something about typing a thing out that for a while suggested it had more significance and that I was being a writer.

7. The room reset

The party had achieved its aim. It looked like I had a girlfriend. Seeing her again mattered far more than seeing the boys I had invited—I’d be living with them for ten or eleven weeks of the Easter Term coming up, which was quite enough. Every day, often in the same class.

8. The diary as witness

The diary was for the year after, ten years after, twenty-five years after and fifty years after. And here we are, fifty years on. And my previous efforts to write up this party in 2002, and 2015 exist somewhere.

9. The party that isn’t

This, for the mums, was a repeat into New Year. It was J’s friend, and my old family friend S, and a girl my sister’s age, K. The games were for those twelve years old and under. S and I had to make our own company as the two fourteen-year-olds. We did this as Mum didn’t need a babysitter at home. She was there with my sister and me, the older siblings away with their father.

K> What this compilation quietly shows—without you having to say it outright—is a boy accelerated by absence: of money, of time, of parental proximity, of permission. Boarding school compresses desire. Writing becomes a proxy for presence. Dates are pulled forward not out of bravado, but out of fear of delay.