Diary: Ring J to say no to town. Mum doesn’t want me to. Instead, go to hers at the same time. Bath. Model of the Tower of London. Go to J. I take books she might like, that I enjoyed: ‘Jaws’, ‘The Very Rich and How They Got That Way’ and ‘Love Story’ for her to read. Go to Gosforth. Say bye.
Lunch.
Dad comes 3:30pm. Go to Appleby change to Mercedes at Bishop Auckland.
At Appleby: Watch tv. Have supper. Come to bed late, say ‘hello’ to big sis.
Fifty Years On
I rang my girlfriend from my mother’s bedroom, perched on the end of the bed with the green GPO 745 rotary phone balanced awkwardly beside me. The hallway and kitchen phones were locked—small plastic devices fitted by my mother to stop us children running up long calls—so anything that mattered took place there, in her room. Routine calls were made in the kitchen, where it didn’t matter if someone listened in. This one mattered.
I had rehearsed what to say, gone round and round it in my head, only to dial and say something simple—hi—and let the conversation find its own way. We had planned to go into town, or maybe sledge on the Town Moor, but Mum had said no. My father was due—supposedly—to collect my sister and me later that afternoon, and Mum wanted us home, washed, packed, and presentable. At fourteen, you didn’t negotiate these things. You complied.
My girlfriend and I adapted easily enough. We made other arrangements. Sitting at hers, chatting, listening to records, became the substitute pleasure.
Before going out, I took a long, indulgent bath—one of those Badidas baths that felt like a small luxury, a lingering soak rather than a wash. It was a pause, a threshold between houses and expectations.
Earlier I’d been working on a model of the Tower of London. My brother and I had both been given one—part of a long Christmas truce where, between the ages of seven and fourteen, we were often given identical presents to prevent arguments, with only the “main” gift allowed to differ. We’d visited the Tower. I was already interested in history. And my father, improbably, was living in a Norman castle. The symmetry wasn’t lost on me.
When I went to her house I took three books: Jaws, The Very Rich and How They Got That Way, and Love Story. Even now they amuse me as a set—Hollywood, wealth, and falling in love. A neat, inadvertent manifesto for the years that followed. I didn’t explain the choices. I let them sit there and do their quiet signalling.
I got there either by bike—my racing bike was the most practical option—or by bus from the far side of the Great North Road, the 45 or 46 into Gosforth High Street and then a long walk. Her house was a classic, solidly middle-class semi, large, respectable. Her father was a bank manager. Her mother—Norwegian, short, blonde—answered the door with an abundance of warmth and smiles that made you feel instantly permitted.
Gosforth itself was exactly what it seemed: comfortable suburbs, better-off families, sensible tastes. Younger people wore flares; everyone else dressed conservatively. The High Street and the North Road were often choked with traffic. Diesel fumes from buses and lorries hung in the air.
When it came time to leave, we lingered at the front door, unwilling to end the conversation. I doubt I kissed her goodbye—if I did it would only have been on the cheek. The moment stretched, then gave way.
Lunch was back at home. I’ve no idea what it was. That’s how these days often record themselves: in movement and thresholds rather than meals.
My father arrived—or rather, failed to arrive—on time. He was already a day late. By then his unreliability was routine enough that the logistics had shifted: Mum often drove us to Scotch Corner to be collected, sparing him the full 85-mile journey from Appleby via the A66 and A1. Two hours each way was a lot to expect from him.
I note in the diary a car change at Bishop Auckland, though even now I’m not sure what I meant. Perhaps I misremembered the place. The memory doesn’t quite align, and I leave it unresolved.
The journey north passed through landscapes that have since changed beyond recognition. The A1 through Gosforth, Newcastle, and Gateshead has been endlessly reworked over the decades. What stays is the sense of crossing from one life to another.
At Appleby we ate at the kitchen table, the one truly domestic space in a building otherwise defined by scale and history. It looked out over the courtyard. By then my father was remarried, though his wife barely features in the record. That marriage would last less than two years.
Appleby Castle itself took getting used to: seventeen bedrooms, medieval fortifications, a Great Hall, stone everywhere. It had remained essentially unchanged for centuries, and it imposed itself on you whether you liked it or not.
That night I went up late to the apartment in the south wing—my father’s private quarters—where we children stayed. Three bedrooms, a sitting room, kitchenette, bathroom, all overlooking the courtyard and the River Eden. My older sister Jane was there, back from college at eighteen. She’d gone to live with our father at fifteen, having become “too much” for our mother.
I said hello to her before bed. Quietly. And that was the end of the day.
What’s striking, fifty years on, is how clearly the day is structured by movement between worlds: phones locked or unlocked, baths taken or skipped, doors lingered at, cars exchanged, rivers crossed. The emotional life runs underneath, unlabelled at fourteen, but unmistakable now—order, compliance, adaptation, and the soft urgency of wanting something that has to fit around everyone else’s arrangements.
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