Fifty years ago: Saturday, 28th March 1976
Five-Year Diary: Saturday, 28th March 1976
I woke at 2:30am to the aftermath of something familiar. Another boy’s bed had been stripped—mattress dumped on top, no bottom sheet, everything left for him to sort out. The sort of thing done by the same two Lower Sixth form culprits. Not spectacularly violent, but persistently nasty. Petty humiliations. Name-calling, small torments, the kind that wear you down if you’re on the wrong side of them. I could pick out the bullies in a lineup to this day.
There had been worse. One boy came back from choir or orchestra to find his entire bed hoisted up and balanced across the wooden stalls of his cube. He shouted, called them idiots, but then climbed up and got into it. What else was there to do? His older brother, in the dorm above, didn’t intervene. None of us did. If a prefect had seen it, they’d likely have laughed and told others to help get it down.
That was the system. Things happened. You endured them. You didn’t escalate. Nothing was ever reported to the House Master. Boys would fight, and fists would be used in anger, resulting in broken fingers and dislocated joints. I called it a posh prison for a reason; it felt that way amongst the inmates. A few escaped over the wall. A lot of us left early.
By six, the Newcastle group of us were up—packing, tidying, getting ready to leave. There was a quiet efficiency to it. No lingering. Homeward bound. We had a rendezvous with a coach from Gosforth. The nob-end of Newcastle.
I hauled my trunk down to the library car park for collection. That’s where the Newcastle coach would be. Private hire. Always slightly unreliable, always ours.
I thought I’d start the holidays properly—with a bath. Hot water, clean, a kind of reset. But the water was cold. Even that small comfort wasn’t available.
We had an early breakfast. Routine still held, even on departure day.
One of the older boys was in trouble with Matron. I can’t remember why. Strange what sticks and what doesn’t. He was in my brother’s year. I liked him—intelligent, thoughtful, someone you could actually talk to, not like the others who filled the place with noise but not much else. I wish I’d asked him about it years later. I could have done.
The coach was late. Then it detoured around Chester-le-Street. None of this surprised anyone. This was simply how it worked.
I’d bought Mum chocolates. For her birthday? Mother’s Day? Possibly both. I’d missed them. That mattered.
At Granny’s, there were sweets from the kitchen drawer and a pound note—green, substantial, worth something then. A ritual exchange. Predictable, comforting.
At home, I did some typing. Not homework. Something else. I think of it now as jazz typing—improvised, half-formed ideas spilling out. A science-fiction thread: a pop group whose songs save the world, then corrupt it, then destroy each other until one remains and everything is broken again. Grand, absurd, unfinished. But it had movement. It had stakes. It had me in it.
The telephone was locked. Mum controlled access. Calls had to be negotiated. Permission granted or withheld. I had a girl I might have called a girlfriend. We went for coffee at Gregg’s, saw films, and visited the White City in Whitley Bay. Ordinary things, but not easily accessed. Even contact requires a structure.
Years later, after my father died, I learned something else about the White City. The plasterwork inside the dome had been done by my great-grandfather’s firm, William Ferguson. The place I thought I was discovering as a teenager had already, quietly, been part of my inheritance.
I made a maze for the hamster out of toilet roll holders and cardboard boxes. An elaborate system. Practice, perhaps, for when it escaped and disappeared into the heating ducts for three weeks. It would.
My older brother went skiing to La Plagne with Dad and my older sister. And our stepmother (MK1), there were to be two more. I didn’t. A year earlier, I’d smashed my leg skiing.
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