Five-Year Diary: Monday, 5th April 1976
Lie in. Holiday hours.
Make a poached egg—something about doing that myself feels quietly competent, though I wouldn’t have said so at the time. It was cooked in an egg poacher. Four Teflon-covered cups in the tray, with toast.
Mum drives me over.
Tennis in Northumberland County.
Doubles. I am hopeless on serve—completely unreliable—and feel it. That familiar embarrassment. Others seem to have a mechanism I don’t. I retreat indoors to practice, as if repetition alone will solve it.
Dropped into town.
Drift. Eventually buy trousers at Peter Jones—after the usual indecision—and from the Kard Bar a Roger Dean poster and three cards. The poster represents my visual aesthetic, David Bowie for music.
Back home, I rearrange my room and put up pictures. Trying to make the space align with whatever version of myself I feel closest to that day.
Lunch.
Pebble Mill at One.
Helen comes over—second cousin. Softly spoken. Alder line. Ferguson line. Our shared great-grandfather is sitting quietly behind it all. My father is now running that world—expanding it, structuring it, turning it into something large and visible. I assume her father and my Mother are in the other room, talking in that steady adult way.
I don’t remember what Helen and I did. Only that she was gentle, and that nothing much passed between us.
When they leave, I play the flageolet along to ABBA—earnest, repetitive, trying to match something clean and bright.
I try to ring this girl.
The phone matters. In the 1970s, it wasn’t casual. Calls are timed and costed—local, long-distance, and evening rates. We have three: the hall, the kitchen, and my parents’ bedroom. The bedroom one is best—privacy, or as close as you get. The kitchen means being overheard; the hall is no better.
No answer.
Try again.
Watch television.
Try ringing again.
In between, I look up film times at the Gosforth Royalty. I act as if planning ahead will give the evening some structure.
Eventually, yes, she answers. I’m allowed over.
Wash hair. Tidy up. Presentable.
The cycle to Gosforth is hard—wind straight on, hands and shoulders aching, a dull headache building. But I know the route. I’d ridden it before, delivering a letter after meeting her at my party. I remember thinking I’d “won” her then. My friend David had put his arm around her. It was one of those territorial gestures boys made. They claimed something before it had even been offered. I had moved more carefully. Or thought I had.
This girl’s house is a bay-windowed Gosforth villa. We sit in the front room. She puts on records. She Reads Jackie. There is very little to catch hold of. Silences stretch—not awkward exactly, just empty. I find myself waiting for something to begin that never quite does. She’s too feminine for the middle of the road and the middle class. She is, after all, a ‘day girl’ like my sister – a boarding school gives you a piece of the world with boys as likely from Hong Kong or Rangoon as Hexham or Morpeth.
At the time, I tried to explain it. Graphology—my father’s interest, now briefly mine. I have her letters. I decide, with misplaced certainty, that her handwriting is “infantile,” and that this explains everything.
It doesn’t. But it gives me a way to feel I understand what I don’t.
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