Diary: mess about. Give pigs clean water. Have a bath. Dig in boat house. Watch tv. Dad gets in at 10.20. Spend a lot of time with Eenie (the big board) who was being held in a small pen near the chickens. Took a long time filling his trough and then chasing and catching Banties in the store but I watching pucer.
KAI:
We’re back at Appleby Castle, January 1976. Not as a postcard, but as a working landscape: pens, smells, cold air, taps, walls, fences.
The vomiting now makes complete sense — not as drama, but as consequence.
Alcohol the day before, an empty or guarded fridge, Weetabix economy, physical exertion, cold, and the particular ammoniac tang of chickens and pigs. Add adolescence — the constitution you name — and the body does what bodies do when no one is really supervising.
The imagined place of puking is telling: a tree, fence, or wall — something solid, indifferent, reliable. Not a bucket. Not indoors. Somewhere shame can drain away into soil and stone. You rinse your face at an outdoor tap. No audience. No sympathy expected. You rejoin the day.
That’s a very specific emotional ecology: mild neglect, self-sufficiency, and an assumption that discomfort is not worth mentioning.
The bath as migration, not hygiene
What follows is not “having a bath.” It’s crossing territory.
The castle gives you choice, secrecy, scale. You and your siblings move laterally through architecture like feral aristocrats: servants’ passages, landings, unoccupied rooms. Bathing becomes both restoration and exploration.
The contrast matters: the children’s bathroom is suburban, small, unused — symbolic more than practical the grand baths are borrowed, expansive, half-illicit, chosen because no adults are present
The “roundie” bath especially reads as a kind of private lido: slow to fill, indulgent, excessive. Water as abundance after scarcity. Heat after cold. Stillness after running.
That sequence — puke → rinse → migrate → immerse — is a self-designed care routine in the absence of carers.
Why the father’s arrival time matters
You answer this quietly, but decisively.
Logging “Dad gets in at 10.20” is not about him coming home. It’s about how long he wasn’t there.
The household composition you list is stark when you spell it out: one older sibling largely gone one brother half-vanished into engines and unsanctioned freedom two younger children effectively managing themselves in a castle.
No stepmother. No stocked kitchen. No adult rhythm except absence measured by clocks.
In that context, animals step forward.
The early menagerie — ponies, sheep, pigs — isn’t just eccentricity. It creates structure. Chores, pay, purpose, physicality. You name this plainly: you welcomed the work. It anchored you.
That’s why Eenie gets a name and your father gets a timestamp. One is present. The other is logged.
What this diary entry now contains (whether it meant to or not)
Without embellishing, this single page now holds: a working estate, not a childhood fantasy mild neglect disguised as independence bodily limits quietly breached and managed animals as companions, responsibilities, and emotional ballast architecture as playground, refuge, and conspirator timekeeping as a way of noticing absence without complaint
The fourteen-year-old didn’t write these themes. He didn’t have to. He recorded the data and trusted the future to decode it.
And you have.
What’s striking is that nothing here is melodramatic. There’s no bitterness. Just competence under thin supervision. That tone — practical, unindignant, bodily — is something you may want to preserve in the voice of the later writing. It’s honest in a way polish would ruin.
This wasn’t a bad day. It was a managed one.
From 50 years on
I was fourteen, visiting a place that felt like a cross between a museum, office, visitor centre and divided home – a self-contained world, governed by its own rules, rhythms and sounds.
The day was spent largely outside, messing about in the grounds. January in Cumbria meant frost and snow which stiffened fingers and a dampness that worked its way into everything. There were animals to tend. I gave the Vietnamese pigs clean water, hauling buckets to troughs that iced over easily. The smell of pigs and chickens hung in the air — sharp, sour, unmistakable.
We were mostly fending for ourselves by then. Our stepmother had left some months earlier, and our visits to Dad were irregular. The kitchen was rarely stocked with children in mind. We might have had bowls of Weetabix all day. Anything that looked like it was Dad’s food we learned to leave alone. He would notice if it had gone, and he would be angry.
To reach the kitchen we had to cross from the Baron’s Wing over the Great Hall, or sneak across the secret servants passage above and down the back. After the weekend there were a dozen office staff in the corridor along from our kitchen and domestic staff in to clean.
I’d been drinking the day before — four cans of Heineken or Carlsberg, which sounds absurd now, but didn’t then. I helped myself to a key in the kitchen and went down to the cellar to help myself.
At 10.20am we heard Dad’s car arrive. He was the only one allowed to park in the courtyard, and the sound of it pulling in was unmistakable. He would park in front of the Baron’s Wing, come in through the side door of the southern tower. He worked from home, so his vast study probably got his attention before he came looking for us. immediately turn to tasks — animals to check, things to be done. He’d have called on an internal phone to the top apartment; he never came up.
The animals were his constant. What began as a rare breeds project felt, in those early years, more like a personal menagerie. The moats got water ducks, swans and geese. There were Shetland ponies, Soay sheep, and Vietnamese pigs. He had an eccentric streak that expressed itself most easily through animals. He raised a goose by hand and swam with it in the swimming pool set into the courtyard — a pool long since buried under concrete. He kept a pet roe deer. He fed a family of red squirrels from the window of his study. He had a cockatoo and tried to teach it to talk. It learned one phrase only: him calling my name when he expected me for dinner and I was dawdling. “Jonathan!”
The castle had at least six bathrooms. The small suburban one assigned to the children was rarely used. With no guests staying, we crossed over the top of the Great Hall via the servants’ passage and back stairs to choose something grander. Perhaps the Tapestry Room, with its four-poster beds and large bright bath looking out over the River Eden. Or in the Baron’s Wing a huge oval bath in the centre of a room overlooking the courtyard — the one we called the “roundie.” It took an age to fill and felt more like a plunge pool than a bath. Bathing there was an indulgence that would include a session on the exercise bike and the sun-bed.
I watched TV afterwards. This most likely in Dads sitting room off the Great Hall with his collection of paintings and an upright piano – though we could watch TV in the Great Hall, of the huge fire had been lit; or in the chapel.
In the evening we may have eaten out at the Royal Oak. Dad never cooked. If we ate at the castle, the cook, Mabel, would be called in to provide something solid and reliable. Meals appeared that way — by arrangement, not routine.
I welcomed chores. I was paid to chop nettles, dig out the boathouse, paint metal fences around the grounds.
Looking back now, fifty years on, I can see that this was an evolving space: its history went back to a Roman Well (in the carport), a Saxon Church and latterly the Norman Conquest, let alone invasions from Scotland and the English Civil War.
There was a working Victorian kitchen garden, a falconer and birds-of-prey rescue centre, groundsmen, a café, a visitor centre, recreation ground and parking.
The castle would open to the public from Easter until the end of the summer holidays. But in 1976 it was still rough-edged, half-feral, running on animals, children, and momentum.
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