Diary: I had slept well. We had cubicles.
It may have been Sunday, but that didn’t mean rest. In a boarding school, every day was a school day unless you were out on exeat or, in rare cases, sent home for bad behaviour.
My diary entry for the day is sparse. “Read a magazine,” it says. No details. Fifty years later, I smile at the coyness. Was I protecting myself in case someone found it? Had I got hold of a copy of Knave, or was it only a Sunday colour supplement? I can’t remember. The women in those magazines were women – old to my eyes and posed in a way that felt unromantic to a fourteen-year-old boy.
‘I listened to a cassette. Good.’
That’s all I wrote. I didn’t bother to note what was on it. In the back of my Five-Year Diary, though, I listed albums in and when I bought them: A Night at the Opera by Queen, Mamma Mia by ABBA, and I note, a couple of years later New Boots and Panties!! by Ian Dury. Who we saw live at the St John’s Ball, Oxford in 1984. Just saying! There was Bowie too. I remember paying a sixth former good money for a homemade cassette of David Bowie songs. It felt illicit and grown up. Perhaps that was what I was listening to that morning. “Life on Mars?” through foam headphones, lying on my narrow bed and staring at the pine boards of a cubicle no bigger than an accessible toilet, enjoying the kind of privacy that could be interrupted at any moment.
Breakfast. Wash. Do bed. Practice.
The order feels wrong now, but perhaps that was the point. Boarding school drilled sequences into us: strip the sheets, fold the blankets, pull tight hospital corners. Ritual first. Chapel after.
A boy from our house conducted the school brass band that morning. I was the flautist. He did well. I must have admired him, one of us taking charge of that motley crew: the rugby-playing saxophonist, the chubby trombonist, my friend on drums, which meant one drum and a cymbal. Authority, worn awkwardly but convincingly.
Chapel was “enjoyed more than usual.” I don’t know why. Perhaps the hymns were ones I knew from my time as a chorister, so I sang out and found a harmony line to make it interesting.
Swimming followed. Half the school was away, so we did lifesaving practice instead. Brick retrievals from the bottom of the pool. Towing a passive casualty. The sharp smell of chlorine and damp towels. I liked it because it had a purpose.
Then came a Sunday exeat. My brother and I were collected after church and driven to Appleby Castle. My father was probably still married to our first stepmother. The castle in winter surprisingly snug: thick stone walls, oak panelling, tapestries and shutters on the windows – and central heating. Gravel crunched under the tyres. Heavy Elizabethan doors closed behind you with a thud. The Great Hall was vast and historical, but we lived in smaller, domesticated corners of it: a kitchen to one side, a sitting room with a fire and a television in the corner. It was no bigger than the front room of an ordinary detached house. Our bedrooms high up in the attic. Nothing grand – that was for guests.
The diary reads: “Jo, Jane and Mark (B.S. nephew, etc. :), Jane (sis) got skin disease.” The abbreviations frustrate me now. B.S. might have meant my step mother’s sister? Or someone else entirely. At fourteen, I wrote things as if I would always remember the context. I didn’t. “Skin disease” was probably eczema or impetigo, something common and temporary, yet I described it as if it belonged in the Middle Ages. My immediate thought was leprosy. Facts without explanation. Memory was meant to supply the rest. It hasn’t.
Lunch was corn on the cob, pork and chocolate mousse. I doubt our stepmother cooked it. She wasn’t domesticated and made no secret of disliking us. More likely the cook, Mabel, had prepared it earlier and left it in the commercial refrigerator in the basement kitchen by the refractory.
I watched television in the afternoon. Something about the Second World War. Tobruk. Desert strategy. Maps with arrows sweeping across North Africa.
Afterwards I wandered the castle grounds. The small menagerie was expanding. I remember chasing a Reeves’s pheasant, its absurdly long tail trailing behind it, ornamental and faintly ridiculous. I can see myself running after it, half boy, half would-be squire, trying to flush something magnificent into flight. There were Shetland ponies, Soay sheep and Vietnamese pot-bellied pigs as well. The place felt both grand and improvised.
Back inside for the Top 20. The weekly chart anchored my Sundays for years. I’d sit close to the radio and use those two or three hours to read, learn lines or revise, letting the music mark time.
Dad probably drove us back in the evening. Appleby to Orton to Tebay, then down to the Kendal turn-off. He was still driving his Mercedes SLK, one of his favourite cars, which he hated giving up when FIH later decided to “Buy British.”
Ten months later, he took my brother and me skiing for Christmas. We crammed into that car with skis, clothes, even sheets and provisions for three weeks. By then the stepmother had gone. They separated at Easter or early summer. Another one bites the dust, as Freddie sang.
That night in February 1976, I came down with a cold.
Much of the school, teachers and boys, were off with something. Boys were being sent home ill.
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