Five-Year Diary. Sunday, 4th April 1976
Sleep in till 10. That’s momentous. I’ve filled the first four hours of the day already. I’ve cracked boredom! Sleep through. Better still, dream it well!
Usually, I’m up early, even in the holidays. But last night we stayed up late watching the Eurovision Song Contest.
The Library
I headed for the Gosforth library. The best you get when it comes to the cultural life on this side of Newcastle. And that’s not saying much.
In all likelihood, I had a bath.
I had breakfast. Bacon, eggs, toast and coffee? Scrabbled eggs? Beans on toast? Or just bran flakes – which I loved as much. Or on a cold morning, a bowl of porridge with a crust of melted brown sugar and a dollop of cream from the top of the milk bottle.
Cycling
I needed my bike. I’d find it in the garage, through the utility room, which I will forever remember as strewn with newspaper, scattered with eleven Black Labrador puppies my father once bred, trained, and sold as gun dogs. The newspapers are soaked with puppy urine, and little dog poos – the smell, the noise, the chaos and joy stick in your memory forever. I head out through a door into the garage. When I close the door, I remember how one of the puppies caught its tail. It broke a small bone and set with a distinct twitch, so we named her Twitchet.
The bright overhead neon lights reveal what to a six-year-old had been like entering a warehouse – a double garage, echoing slightly, the air cooler than the house.
The Garage
On the right as you come in are the light switches, and beside them the cupboard door under the stairs. A good spot in a game of hide and seek – behind a yet to be filled very large glass demijohn. Mum had turned one into a terrarium, which lived on the coffee table in the sitting room.
On the left, there’s a large aluminium coal bunker, rarely filled these days, as the only fire in the sitting room (what we kids call the adult sitting room, as a drummed-in reminder of who is allowed in there), with a wooden shelf above it. What’s up there? I can’t think.
In the opposite wall a rarely used back door to the rear of the house. Never used once the garage was opened. The back door was from the utility room – the tradesman’s entrance. Not scrupulously adhered to by Mum, but my father’s side of the family would certainly have been strict about it as wealthy tradespeople themselves who’d for two generations lived in some of the most substantial Gosforth ‘villas’ of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
North-facing, always in shade. It’s hardly ever used. There are usually things stacked against it—boxes, tools, something leaning there that makes opening it slightly awkward. There’s a window next to it, but it doesn’t let in much light. There is a tap set in the wall. Inside to protect it from frost. Accessed through the door. Watering was a rare summer task. We had no lack of rain. It’s 1976, we’ll see if there’s a change.
The walls are whitewashed. The floor is bare concrete.
And on the floor, at this spot, I think there are three concrete blocks with a diagonal slot cut into each one. You push the front wheel of the bike into them, and it stands upright on its own. Solid. Heavy. Permanent. We had just two. I rather think one of my father’s many builders’ merchants’ businesses supplied them to municipal buildings, such as schools, libraries and swimming pools. I don’t suppose he paid for them.
Along one wall runs a single line of hooks, set into a painted, thick plank of wood. It runs all the way towards the garage doors. Every garden tool hung here has its place, and the outline of each one has been painted on the wall. I remember Dad and Grandpa working on it together: Spade. Fork. Edging shears. Hedge cutters. Hoe. Even the Flymo, hanging up by its handles. It’s all been done properly—my father and grandfather together, years ago, like many tasks here and at our Beadnell cottage, which my grandfather had converted from a fisherman’s cottage to a family holiday home.
Below these tools sits the prized two-stroke lawnmower. This was my grandfather’s domain. He liked tinkering with it, checking the oil. It always ran beautifully. We were shown how it ran as children, and my brother and I couldn’t wait to get it out on the first dry day of spring to cut neat lines across the lawn.
Once there had been a pedal car and a pedal tractor.
There’s one car —Mum’s. Navy blue. An Austin Morris, I think. It sits to one side, leaving the second space empty. You can still see the old oil patch on the concrete where another car used to be. It doesn’t fade. The shade of a Rover, or a Jaguar – Dad’s car.
It smells faintly of oil and car wax. My grandfather kept the lawnmower and car in good order – that was his father’s job: head groom to mechanic and chauffeur, and how, as a boy, he had been introduced to engines, not horses.
I remember being barefoot in the garage, the concrete feeling sharply cold like standing on ice. I liked that feeling. So much so, I’d seek it out sometimes in the middle of the night. The cold felt natural in the dark, like standing on a mountain. With the lights on, the cold felt clinical. An odd boy, more than once, I stood there naked. By the light switch. Was the temperature actually different when the light was on, compared to when it was off? Was black cold warmer or cooler than white cold?
Opening the double-up-and-over garage doors required skill: there was a right way to insert and turn the key, the right pressure to give the handle, and the right point and way to push this vast cantilevered sale of wires and aluminium back so that the weights would take over and lift it away, up and back.
Bicycle clips for the flares to keep chain oil off them. A polar neck jumper and a Parka or a duffle coat.
Down our short drive outside the main entrance to Durseley, which used to be owned by Lord and Lady Sueter, then down our wooded lane, past the Rookery on the left, sticking of guano and alive with the cawing of crows, and past the lodge, and through the stone gateway onto the Great North Road. The sign “Private Road” is a neat sign to the constant round of burglars and chancers.
Once, I believe there had just been one house in Fencer Hill Park – Durseley, Gosforth’s very own Manderley. I’m guessing that Lord and Lady Viscountess Sueter bought what had been disused agricultural land at the turn of the 19th century, built their large, detached Victorian Manor House, and landscaped the area with specimen trees in the early 20th century.
They sold three plots south of the lane or drive in the 1930s, and three North East Villa-style houses were built. Two later to be subdivided by the time we arrived in the early 1960s. Here’s where our family’s connection begins.
When three further plots were sold in the early 1960s, they went to Mr Foster, Mr Vernon and Mrs Cowper. For a few years, the plot sold to Mrs Cowper was just a field. My brother and I played on the building site as the house went up. According to my father, the deeds stipulated that only a bungalow was permitted, and there was to be a specific distance between the house and our boundary line. Even as a child, I remembered details – I wasn’t writing anything down! I was slow to read and write. I had a couple of speech impediments too: pronunciations of THs and Rs – there was speech therapy at age 7 or 8.
There was a pedestrian crossing close to the bus stop. On the other side, an iconic stone-built bus shelter – still standing fifty years on. Build it right, and you build it to last.
Northern Rugby Club
I cycled past the entrance to the Northern Rugby Club, then a nursery called Westfield, I think, past the Three Mile Inn and onwards and upwards to the Greyhound Stadium, then across towards Gosforth Civic Hall, the library, and the swimming baths.
The Civic Hall always looks strange to me—like a giant concrete prefabricated pumpkin dropped in the middle of Gosforth. It all went in the sixties. I can almost remember it not being there. I remember going to the swimming pool with my brother when it opened: sharing a changing locker and a basket. The coloured rubber arm bands. The detritus in the footpath, the crowds, noise, light and signage.
The Library
The Insides of each library are different. I love to browse. They have their quirks, their collections, and their municipal hit list of the top fifty of a thing, I’m sure: reference books, fiction, factual, and themes. As long as I can find science fiction, a book on the history of art, and a manual on how to win a girl’s heart, I’ll be happy as a younger boy, morbid details fascinated. You can imagine it. A First World War or Second World War atrocity. I came away with a book of science fiction stories edited by Isaac Asimov. No art books, as they are all reference books. And I don’t have the nerve to ask the woman at the reception booth about my teenage love quest, in case she thinks I im a pervert. I’d have to stick with my grandfather’s advice for now. More of that another day.
I cycle back, mostly downhill, past the Territorial Army centre. I might stop at Ebletts for crisps and a Mars Bar, or call in on my grandparents. I can tell Grandpa about my girlfriend. He might get me to ask Gran, though, who was a girl my girlfriend’s age in 1917 – a huge amount has changed since then. I’d rather not scare her with the details of it.
Then on again—Brunton Lane, the Three Mile Garage, sometimes another chance for sweets. There’s a dragster parked up on a trolley somewhere along there, or there was. Just sitting there, belonging to another world and attracting anyone with a love of big engines or owning a camera.
Home.
Gardening
The lawn is patchy and swampy in places. I start aerating it, pushing a fork into the ground and levering it back and over, over and over. I’ve got Dad’s Reader’s Digest, The Gardening Year, open on the garden bench under the kitchen window.
Except we’re three weeks behind in Northumberland compared to RHWisleyly, Surr, ey which the maps are based on.
I’m wearing wellies. Using the tools Dad bought and left behind. A fork and a rusty, rotating aerator in the shed that has missed Grandpa’s attention. And there we go, the thought of my grandfather and the garden shed sparks two, no three memories: 1) helping construct it with Dad – watching and taping things with a small hammer at most, I guess, 2) Grandpa sitting on the brick wall as the sun came around the house painstakingly sharpening the saw teeth blades. This from a man who spent several years keeping a bayonet sharp in the trenches of the Somme and Passchendaele.
I’m wearing his wellies. I used a fork until it rusted up a rotating aerator. Since leaving six years previously. We’d spent a year or two in a rented cottage in Chollerford (no girlfriend present); a year in an apartment close to Victoria Station (I can find it on Google Maps); and then Applebly Castle, which was a PLC HQ, Conference Centre, and his home for the next 20 years. They had groundsmen. r him our less than an acre garden of the family home with its front and rear lawn, landscape trees planted in the late 19th century, grass bank and shaded problem area north of the house was now replaced with 35 acres of parkland, lawns and moats (dry until he found a way to fill them with water and aquatic birds) … and one third of a mile of a river. ve been about for times. My leg broke a year ago, coinciding with what may have been my first visit. went once walking. o probably six months ago: October 75, from School. o ristmas visit. I’lll see if I lay a boat this Easter – once he’s back from skiing again with my older brother and sister.
Do I think all of this in a flash, or a series of flashback moments? Does my mind give me stills of these or moving images? Does having a few photos help? In the ski resort, there is a large cupboard full of ski and apartment stuff from that era: a treasure trove of memories to hold, feel, sense, and smell. All this writing has me daydreaming. Is this a step towards hallucinations or self-hypnosis?
How come, at this moment, I recall as a boy wanting to know what grass tasted like, so I tore off some shoots and tried chewing? The rats and Guinea-pigs can.
And now, a crevasse splits my cerebellum apart, and my thoughts are flooded by the white Guinea-pig Gulliver who started it all. He became very fat, not our lovely grass, but she was pregnant. gift to my kid sister. He was rended, Oliver. He had two piglets. ot many for a Guinea pig. Even though they’re Guinea pigs, my sister called them Flopsy and Mopsy. Let me expand elsewhere. They were introduced to the world of Action Man and expected to train alongside him, with trips out in the Action Man Personnel carrier and into urban raid training on the doll’s house. I’d put them through one opening, and if they got out through a second, they were rewarded with a piece of carrot. The water slide and river training were their least favourite. thought they lived all my outings as when I came to get them out of their hut, they leapt into my arms – my sister stood behind to catch them, concerned that in their desperation to escape, they could break a leg. suggested Action Man para, chutes, and if we did this near an open upstairs window, we could see how far they could make it into the garden.
Meanwhile, it’s back to me and a soggy lawn. t’s slow work. Nothing really improves. Another Memory lt: it brings up worms, and with the worms come the blackbirds. Stand ba, back, nd one happily jumps in.
And here we go again. Is the medication I’m on affecting how my brain works? took a large dose of oral steroids this morning, which put a significant ping into my brain as well as opening up the airways. ‘ll check for con raxxxx on flying Guinea-pig visualisations and what to do with them.
My well-rehearsed memory recalls childhood songs sung to us by mum to help us sleep, to put us at ease when unwell, and simply when we asked to hear them.
Nobody Likes me
Everybody hates me
I’ll go into the garden and eat worms
Great big juicy ones
Short, fat,t stubby ones
See how the wiggle and squirm
Bite off their heads
And suck out their juice
And blood goes….. schlurp, schlurp, schlurp!
I go back inside. Um, hands me a large mug of tea and a freshly baked ginger snap. An expression in your face, maybe a glance at the guard,n and in a moment we are tuned and ready to sing … and as we go, the slurping helped by a piece of well-sunken ginger snap.
There’s a bird bath. It’s cast from lead, a water-baby sitting over a shell-like pond. clean out the wet leaves with my fingers and add fresh water. Fresh rainwater fr the wooden water-butt I helped Dad put up behind the garden shed may have added some bath toys, which bunged up the pipes or brought algae into the system. Had a way of cockin’ all my Dad’s plans and projects. But it wasn’t me in the heating drawer when he shagged his Secretary or under the bed when he did it with the wife of a family friend. And if he can be caught twice,e he had to have got away with it two dozen times or more. Was that it, an amateur that got him caught? I’m simply never coming home after work. Um always says his Mother’s is down the road, as he really. Perhaps they were planning a move on the board of Ferguson’s. He was across the road with the German teacher. ho are we to care or know? Fifty Years On?
Switch on the television.
And that’s more or less the rest of the day. Certainly, the next less- an-scintillating six hours of it. A memory rush.
Look, sliding in stocking feet on an often polished wooden floor, I leap across the play room and you catapult yourself like a chimpanzee travelling horizontally, leveraging power off the door frame, onto the corner of the corridor down the hall, a slide over to the door into the so-called ‘adults only sitting room’ and another reach and yank of the right arm and a controlled skid past the front door and corridor furnishings, brass lamp and telephone into the cloakroom. The kid goes through the door if it’s closed. Rashly into the door if the own occupant is a sibling and raise hell. Usually, you could make it to the wet patch by the loo as your zip comes down. If overheard, “shut the door” would follow. nd if no flush followed, “flush the loo”. There should really be a “wash your hands” bit in there. Or another time, I can recall the last time I used a potty, and the last time I wet the bed. Rather, think my ability to remember these events as real, and not discard either as a dream, is why I did neither ever again (unless drunk or hospitalised,d when unconsciousness is once again part of the reason or excuse – at least I’ve never mistaken the back of a Rediffusion rental TV as a urinal).
One programme runs into the next. Don’t decide to watch anything in particular. Just stay there. lued to it. Three channels—BBC1, BBC2, ITV. That’s all there is. There’s no remote. may choose t attach from the floor to optimise channel flicking.
I might start there, lying on my front, elbows down, looking up at the screen. abbing with a finger. lose enough t feel the static from. Usually, I’m squeezing my fingers to create a tiny hole in the light to isolate a few green, blue, and red pixels. You see, I know about light and colou ur Mum’s an art teacher, has an MA from the University of Durham. found her dissertation in a bundle of documents after she died. started to read and my eyes flooded with tears, then, as now. t was over this document that my parents apparently fell in love. Not one to string a logical set of words, Mother’s, my Mother’s, like me, would prefer to take a spiralling, disjointed route to the point she thought she wanted to make. Linguist wh, who, with A grades in History, French and Latin, my father had been offered a place at Cambridge. Mothers, however, insisted it was law at King’s College, Durham, or nowhere. nd so my parents met. Rather, they were introduced briefly. They were attending a rag review at the end of their second year at the Theatre Royal, where a London Hypnotist was performing. Ticket holders were randomly called to the Mothers’, my mother’s, from the stalls, my father, from the Royal Circle, as it happens. students all. t the end of the hijinks of having them do silly things alone, he randomly paired them up and kept the fun going . Having called them out of their trance, he then went along the line, saying what would become of each of them. And my Mother’s and my Mother’s are still strangers to each other, but for all I know, Jack and Jill, or Little Red Riding Hood and the Wolf under hypnosis, were then given a joint future fourfold. And this lovely couple will become husband and wife,” to the applause of the audience, the hypnotist said to the two naifs, “you’d better introduce each other… then adding, and fix a date!” “What? “To get married, Mother’s, my Mother’s. “No, addressing my father, “to go on a date.” If only the hypnotist had also handed them a business card and said he entertains at weddings too abd we’d have in the wedding film shot on colour 16mm by my Great Uncle Jim. he family story goes that eighteen years later, a er fifteen years of marriage four children, one miscarriage, and one horribly close to dying of meningitis (and me having my willing chopped off, another story for another time), and a child been abducted from the bath. Dad chasing a burglar down the road with a shotgun and so much more – they separated, then divorced. If ever two people felt they had been played like pawns, their lives were never their own to be as they wanted for long; it is they. More stories for another time.
But after a bit, the carpet gets to me. That smell—dusty, slightly stale—you end up breathing it in, and I can’t stick with that for long. e and carpets and their contents (house dust mites
So I shift.
Either onto my back with a cushion, if the sofa’s already taken, or half on my side, angled towards the set. lose enough still to reach it.
There’s no remote. You have to manage it yourself. Three channels. If not holding, you flick between them.
From the floor, you don’t get up each time. You edge forward—just a small scuttle—and use your foot. g toe on the button, a quick press, then back again. You’re quite good at it. Accurate. I need to look.
BBC1. BC2. ITV
Six o’clock news on BBC1. proper part of the evening. normal voices, headlines, the local bit. I’m not really attaching it, just letting it run.
Quarter past over to ITV.
New Faces. one act after another. singer trying too hard, a comedian with a thing for laughs that don’t quite come, someone doing impressions. t’s uneven. You watch to see if the next one might be better. ometimes it s, mostly it isn’t.
Seven o’clock—Celebrity Squar.
Nine faces in boxes, all trying to be funny. home is. Some aren’t. You get the joke before the answer half the time. lick between hat and BBC1, not settling on either. t’s all a bit thin.
At some point, it occurs to me that I could be doin’ something else. Writing my own story. hat sits there for a moment.
I go and get the rabbit from the outside dog kennel.
I remember the dog kennel site being chosen. This is for a pedigree Black Labrador. ID Ferguson men come in to create and slab the base. Probably. T’s professionally done. But putting up the frame? Proba yandsomeone from the shoot. I’m guessing he was a gun and set up a shoot with his shooting friend, MD of Price Waterhouse, Newcastle and my eventual step-father, some 25 years hence from this memory. See how memories scroll together like rides of colour in columns of marble. Here, twists and turns are fixed, but we can only experience them as smoky swirls, and if we dare, do as I’m doing, you may make them hold still for a moment – but did you get them in the right place? All of them?
All Creatures Great and Small
A gentle drama set in 1930s Yorkshire, following a young vet learning his trade among farmers, animals, and strong local characters.
Easy to settle into—warm, episodic, and quietly absorbing without demanding much of you.
The Onedin Line
A more serious period drama about a driven 19th-century shipowner building his business through risk, ambition, and strained relationships.
Heavier in tone, with ongoing storylines—you have to follow it, but it carries you once you’re in.
The Graduate
A quiet, unsettling film about a recent graduate drifting into an affair and then something more complicated, without quite understanding any of it.
Sharper and more adult than anything else on that evening—dialogue and silences doing as much as the plot.
If something came on that hinted at human intimacy, a drama of its own would unfold on the sofa. Then Mum doesn’t think it’s suitable; she leans over and tries to cover your eyes, though she keeps watching herself. If my younger sister is in the room. He covers my sister’s eyes. His hand never quite blocks it properly. Usually,y she’ll be asleep, so I guess we turn the sound down when any naughty ones are on. We get to watch, snuggle, worry, and cringe.
At some point in the evening I knew is I’d had enough TV and should be writing my own story.
But I can’t get going with it today. don’t know if I’ve tied myself in knots with the plot, or if it just isn’t working, or if I’ve lost interest. t feels easier to leave it. o think of something else instead. Something better. Something new.
BBC1 news.
And then it’s finished anyway.
After that, there’s nothing to watch. The screen empties out. Here’s a trade test card, and sometimes an awful tone designed to wake anyone who’s fallen asleep in front of a TV, which will shortly burst into flames if you don’t get up to turn it off.
That’s it.
And that’s when it comes.
The feeling that I’ve watched the whole evening through. everything. nd still not done anything. lued to the tv. oggle-eyed. Within a decade, I’m making good money, looking at multiple TV screens, as video productions are edited piece by piece into finished shows. t’s not all a waste of time.
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