Five-year diary: I woke early, keen to get to Liptons, and spent most of my tuck money on biscuits. This is preliminaries to returning to boarding school. The dread builds.
Mum went off to the bank, though she was in one of her moods—tense, distracted, not really to be engaged with.
I went into town and dashed to the Kard Bar where I bought a brooch for Julie-Anne. It felt like a deliberate gesture—something that would register as generous. Not a birthday, not Christmas, but with my return to boarding school looming, it carried weight. A indication that I liked to think of us as something. I hoped she’d wear it.
Back home, we babysat, or I did. A girl from across the road was sent over —only eight—she came for lunch. I drew her as she sat watching kids TV in the afternoon.
Granny Vernon wasn’t in, I rang; and Mum disappeared out shopping again, leaving the house to drift.
Getting ready to go out became a performance. A bath, blow-drying, then the sunlamp. The disco look: Bee Gees hair, a lightened fringe, a suggestion of a tan—assembled from television, magazines, and each other. We were all constructing versions of ourselves.
I went round to Julie-Anne’s. There were hamsters, food, the usual domestic clutter, and we arranged to go and to see the film Earthquake with Charlton Heston, at the Royalty.
We didn’t sit in the notorious back row. We watched the film, mostly. But I for my arm around her and we cuddled. (no kissing).
She was pretty, talkative—but also guided by something I only dimly understood then. Her churchgoing mattered. It set a framework I hadn’t wished to register as a born-again atheist.
I stayed as long as I could, stretching the evening. I missed most of Berserk on ITV because of it.
Bed. Then a call to Jane to say good-night.
Fifty Years on.
Early adolescent intimacy often operates within unspoken boundary negotiation. We were fourteen. Nothing doing! The cues are present—the absence of escalation—but their meaning is only partially understood. Respect exists, but without a clear framework for interpreting limits beyond our age.
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