Mum’s hairdresser’s was called something like “Bye-Bye.” It wasn’t really a barber’s. They cut my hair because I was always there with her. I flicked through magazines and got bored. They gave me something “trendy,” whatever that meant. A good cut, I thought. A bit too rock and roll for Mum. It’s 1976.
Stopped at Gran’s on the way back. Lemonade in the sitting room. Talk, though I can’t remember what about. Probably how well her great-nephew, my age, was doing. Grandpa looked at my bike and raised the seat a notch, saying I’d grown again. It always felt like progress, even if I couldn’t see it.
Their front room was mid-decoration—sheets down, furniture shifted, that smell of paint somewhere between fresh and faintly sickly. Everything is in transition.
Back home, Mum fussed over my haircut, wondering what Dad would think, as if it might still matter. They’d been divorced for four years. He’d probably say he was paying for us to be properly turned out—clothed, trimmed, presentable.
Pebble Mill at One.
Did some typing—slow, deliberate, trying not to look down. A sci-fi idea: a rock group so famous they end up running everything. It didn’t seem impossible.
Rang Kate—my “girl who is a friend”—to say goodbye before the end of the holidays. Slightly formal, as these calls always are. You never quite say what you mean, just circle it.
Tried Dad’s office. His PA said he was running late.
Mum drove my sister and me all the way to Scotch Corner for the handover. There was talk of Dad chasing an M.G. along the A66. He was in a Mercedes sports car. He could have. He didn’t.
The castle swimming pool was empty.
Not just any pool—an outdoor heated one set in the medieval courtyard, drained for cleaning. Surrounded by stone, overlooked by the Keep.
Appleby Castle is a 12th-century castle, built over a Roman fort. You could walk from one age into another without really noticing.
There’s a Roman well in the basement, off a corridor near the carport. I liked to stand and look down into it—dark, deep, with no bottom to see. I lowered a torch on a piece of string for a better look. Whoops. Dropped it.
And the long-drop lavatory off what was called the Baron’s Study—a proper medieval stone chute. Cold on the bum. I used it whenever I could. It became a habit. A private marker of arrival.
Television in the sitting room off the Great Hall.
Play for Today: Double Deuce. Slightly spooky—one of those intellectually demanding, slightly opaque BBC dramas Mum insisted were essential viewing. More atmosphere than plot, and all the more unsettling for it. I didn’t fully understand it, but I knew it mattered, which was reason enough to sit through every minute.
Hard to follow, but you felt you should watch it.
Bed in the attic—the “children’s apartment.” Two bedrooms, two beds in each. A kitchenette, bathroom, WC. A large sitting room looked down into the courtyard, and from the turret windows you could see south across the moat and up the River Eden towards the North Yorkshire Moors
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