Five-Year Diary. 7th April 1976. Appleby
Up at 8. Breakfast in the refectory—the kitchen deep in the base of the castle, a few steps down from the Norman Great Hall and the original portcullis gate looking over the ford across the Wden.
Stone floors, white washed walls, rush matting – a constant warmth, and the smell of cooking from the kitchens beyond.
The castle cook Mable offered me a boiled egg. I made some toast.
I was meant to be making myself useful. Holiday work. My brother and I were set to paint the black metal fencing that ran across the estate—along the drive, around the curtain walls and moat, and down through the woods towards the River Eden and Jubilee Bridge. It was endless. Strip with a metal brush, smooth with wire wool, then paint. We barely made a dent.
Mr Parkinson came by and gave us Mars Bars. No comment.
Dad was somewhere in the Great Hall.
Our stepmother was out.
Lunch back in the refectory. I had a pint.
More scraping and rubbing the metal fences until four. It was a satisfying thing to be doing; you saw the results. Several layers of old paint and rust had to come off first.
Then a change of tone—we were handed a .22 rifle and told to shoot rooks. We were both good shots: a combination of Dad’s excellent training (he won at Bisley in his day), and the school rifle range at Sedbergh. I knew how to breathe when shooting; and knew how to site a target and squeeze the trigger. Dad was very safety conscious too – about beijg certain where the bullet was headed and whar was behind the target not just in front of it.
It was a cull, to protect the rare breed birds being Dad was now raising in the aviaries and moat ponds. Practical. Unremarked.
After that: table tennis, played Abba, dank cans of cider lifted from the cellar.
I gave my younger sister a table-tennis lesson.
Up in the sitting room off the Great Hall we watched ‘Survivors’, ‘Artmanship’, the Australian-Western ‘Luke’s Kingdom’.
By night I felt sick in the throat. Beer, cider, paint fumes—some combination of the three.
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