(Appleby Castle. Age 14)
Five-year diary revisited.
Up early
Breakfast in the Castle Refectory in the basement by the original Norman Great Hall, entrance gates, and portloetcullis. There is a long, monastic wooden table that took about 12. On a side table, there are breakfast choices: cereals or bread. We make our own tea or coffee. Mabel, the cook, will prepare a booked breakfast: she offers. Mabel lives in the courtyard cottage; she used to work for the Lowthers.
My sisters aren’t up yet.
We all sleep in the ‘children’s apartment’ on the top of the Baron’s Tower. There are two bedrooms, each with two beds and the sitting room. Very modest, very two-up, two-down in room size and decor. At some point, the sitting room overlooking the courtyard gets a double mattress on the floor. For now, I wonder if one of us is sleeping across the other side of the Great Hall, in one of the many guest rooms. Or Nick and I are together in one room, and Joanna is with Jane. This could be when another bed appears in the sitting room.
The Castle is a warren of different spaces, functions and eras. The private wing isn’t entirely set aside, as it includes Dad’s work office, and the basement is the functional core of the castle’s kitchens and refectory. We have our own kitchen, but it is a standalone pantry and kitchen, and sometimes a shared space on the other side of the Castle. You learn about some odd hidden spaces: a real long drop stone lavatory off the Barron’s Study and a toilet behind what otherwise looks like a shutter in a stairwell window. And more besides. There are plenty of places to hide.
I’ve got a holiday job in the grounds. I’m working on the cattle grid in front of the 15th-century gatehouse. Scrape off the old paint and rust, apply an undercoat, then paint black.
We need help retrieving an old metal wheelbarrow that long ago found its way beneath the cattle grid.
Lunch
My older brother and sister go to Penrith – with Dad, I assume, as our stepmother had left.
I play table tennis with my younger sister. The table and a dart board are in what we know as the lecture room – it’s the long, wide, low space beneath the Great Hall.
I go back to painting the estate fences.
A local arrives down the river in a canoe. He came down from the ford at Jubilee Bridge. An odd thing to know that ‘we’, as in the Castle ‘own’ both sides of the river. It strikes me as odd to own a rover at all. What kind of entity is it? You can’t own the water passing between the banks. If you do, at what point is it and is it not ‘yours’?
The term ‘local’ sounds derogatory. It was from Sedbergh and used to differentiate between those who lived in the town and those who came in from outside.
We make a fire in the rookery, make a hide, and shoot rooks. The intention wasn’t to destroy the rookery – there’s bad luck in that, just to reduce the numbers as Dad is putting several bird enclosures up around the grounds and by the river for his expanding breeding programme for geese, ducks, and swans – the rooks take the eggs and chicks.
There was a guest for dinner. In all likelihood, work-related: a pensions investor, someone Dad wanted to consider for the board of FIH, or the owner of a business they were going to acquire, or perhaps someone from the Rare Breeds Survival Trust. I didn’t ask and didn’t note it down.
Bath – rarely in the everyday bath in a corner room on the top floor – more likely one of the more intriguing guest bathrooms on the other side of the Great Hall.
T.V.
Bed.
My older sister had friends over. Girls from Appleby Grammar, I think. She’s been living here for a couple of years
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