(Gosforth, Age 14)
Five-Year Diary: I fed the rabbit first thing, then went swimming.
Grandpa had my trunks and watched from the balcony—a proud grandparent, keeping an eye on things. The pool was busy, properly busy, full of noise and bodies and chlorine. It felt like a good swim.
Grandpa told me how he’d learnt to swim in the River Derwent, by the papermill sluice at Shotley Bridge. It sounded dangerous, —proper river swimming, not lanes and lifeguards.
We stopped at Granny’s afterwards, and he talked about the First World War again. A machine-gunner corporal, decorated, and still—years later—holding onto the story of being reprimanded by Montgomery for a dirty machine-gun bolt.
I didn’t just listen. I stored it. I had already begun, without quite knowing it, to become his archivist—checking, corroborating, wanting the facts to stand up. His memory was extraordinary. Precise. Detailed. It demanded to be taken seriously.
Back home, Mum and my brotherhad gone to Scotch Corner to meet Dad—our “Checkpoint Charlie.” We’d get out of one car and into the other. No ceremony, just a transfer. It was how holidays were divided, how lives were managed. We didn’t like it. We had to live with it.
The dishwasher man was in, working on the ancient machine mounted above the sink. The house felt half domestic, half serviced—something being maintained rather than lived in.
I went back to my efforts at writing a novel, starting again, more neatly this time. I liked the act of it—thinking independently, inventing something, gathering the words. Typing it up made it feel real, even if it didn’t work. Not then. Not ever.
There was a letter from the R.G.S. I wanted to go there after O-levels. Other schools—Millfield, Winchester—had been suggested. But I wanted something else: a return home, the specifics of a fourth A-level – Art. A life that I might finally feel like my own after nine years away at boarding school.
Later I went into town for typewriter paper, a ribbon, and a poster—equipment, really. Props for the idea of being a writer.
Then back home: typing, television, and Elvira Madigan. The kind of story I wanted to tell. Then, as now.
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