Fifty years ago: Sunday, 6th June 1976
(Sedbergh School and Appleby, Age 14)
School Brass band practice first thing, before Chapel.
Chapel. I put 5p in the collection plate. The hymns were alright – as a former chorister, I tolerate a sing-along, and, mercifully, the sermon was short.
Dad drove down to take us out for the day. My brother had brought a friend. The two of them talked about exams, universities and degrees.
At Appleby, I changed clothes and helped my sister prepare a meal. Our stepmother had already left Dad and gone back to London. I had first met her four years earlier. They had only been married a couple of years, though already things seemed strained. Months earlier, I’d had an argument with her, and she’d announced she wasn’t going to stay. My sister had overheard Dad angrily saying she was “getting almost as much as our mum,” which struck me even then as strange arithmetic: two or three years of marriage somehow weighed against fifteen years and four children. Divorce, I was beginning to realise, seemed to turn relationships into negotiations.
Later, I escaped outside and managed some fly fishing on the Eden below Jubilee bridge and a bit of shooting with the .22 rifle — activities that felt like an escape of sorts, simpler and easier to understand than the antics of the adults around me. Dad was in tears at one point; never before witnessed and never again a lapse of the mask he wears.
Leave a Reply