Five-Year Diary: Thursday, 1st April 1976
Woken by Mum with breakfast in bed, which instantly made me suspicious. It’s April Fool’s Day. The tray, the timing—something about it feels like a set-up, though she’s not really one for tricks. I look at it carefully before starting, half expecting salt in the tea or Mayo instead of butter.
The trick, in fact, is mine.
I’d taken two of the four pints of milk we get every morning. I hid them in the dog kennel just to see what would happen. Nothing elaborate.
Mum doesn’t notice straight away, so I point it out, and she goes to the phone to ring the milkman. Daily deliveries were just that. Routine like the postman and coal deliveries. I fetch the bottles.
I hover nearby, listening to it unfold. I feel that mixture of anticipation and a slight tightening. I wonder how far to let it go. She knows his name. Calls him Brian. Her tone is calm but firm.
I step in—before it goes too far. I hold up the missing milk bottles.
“I hid them! April Fool!”
She stops. A beat. Then, turns, somewhere between annoyance and relief, and then we both see it for what it is. April Fool’s Day. The whole thing collapses neatly. No real harm done, and we laugh it off.
Order restored. More or less.
Later, we head for the Nuffield Nursing Home near Moorfields.
I’m booked in for an X-ray. A year ago, I broke my left tibia and fibula in a skiing accident—badly enough to have it re-broken and spend months at home. This is a check on that. As we’re still half an hour short of midday, I’m slightly on edge—half expecting something back. Some sort of April Fool. I even wonder, briefly, if they might say something ridiculous at the Nuffield like they’ll have to amputate my leg, though I don’t suppose they’re allowed to joke about things like that.
Tennis next.
I’m rubbish at serves. The toss is never right, the timing off. Nothing clean. The coach watches, then points out my shoes. They’re wrong—cross-country running shoes, I think, not for tennis. At the Northumberland Tennis Club, that matters. The girl isn’t there. I’d been keeping an eye out for her. It is Thursday.
Back home, I work on my book. I say writing, but really I’m typing. Typing on a typewriter feels like it ought to mean something—as if that alone makes it proper. I’m doing an interstellar creation story.
I watch Pebble Mill at One, then carry on and finish a chapter. That matters—finishing it. But I hadn’t and never do. I have all nine versions of that first chapter somewhere. Typed up. Covered in corrections in red and blue biro. It makes me think of a long-playing vinyl record stuck in a groove because of the amount of wax crayon embedded in it – an earlier April Fool from my youth that went badly wrong. Like the time I removed the wipers from Dad’s car before driving us to school. He may not have noticed if it hadn’t started to rain. Fifty years on, I understand why, if anything was missing or broken or dismantled, it was assumed that I’d been up to my usual mischief.
Supper. Could have been anything—oxtail soup, steak and kidney pie, fish pie, lasagne. Chillcon carnene. Mum’s staples.
Then television.
Top of the Pops—Tony Blackburn. Abba (Fernando). Brotherhood of Man (yuk). The Beatles. Sailor with “Girls, Girls, Girls”. I decided this song is probably my favourite. Pan’s People—there’s always one slightly out of time, like a troop of elderly school girls. You’re supposed to have a favourite. I say they’re all too old.
Then ‘When the Boat Comes In’ with James Bolam, set on Tyneside in the 1920s. My grandfather would have been about that age.
And later a BBC2 play, ’14th July’, about Black lives in London in the 1920s. Slower. More serious. Feels like a different world again.
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