Fifty Years Ago. Sunday, 27th June 1976

I slept very badly. It was too hot. The summer of 1976 was determined to reinvent Cumbria. Usually wet and windy, it feels more like Southern Spain or Turkey. I was used to sleeping in socks and my dressing gown for warmth; these nights I sleep on top of the bed in my pj bottoms.

I learned that my father’s second wife had left.

It feels absurd now that we spent so little time with our parents that we barely noticed how their lives were going. Dad had remarried and was now separating again in what felt like only a few years. It was only a few years! About four and a half, to be exact.

I had first met her when I was ten. My grandmother took me to London for one of her special trips with each grandchild when they reached that age. Much to my grandmother’s fury, I was introduced to my father’s girlfriend. “They” took me to Madame Tussauds and the London Planetarium. She was on her best behaviour then. That changed once they were married.

The separation did not come entirely as a surprise. My sister had overheard arguments about money. My father’s horror, apparently, was the thought that a woman he had been married to for only a few years might receive almost as much as his first wife, who had spent eighteen years with him and borne him four children.

Even so, hearing that she had gone left me wondering whether Mum and Dad might somehow get back together.

It was a long-held and absurd hope – wishful thinking. They had already been separated for five or six years, but some part of me still imagined it might happen.

I had a soak in a cold, shallow bath and washed my hair. I am letting it grow longer now that I no longer have the Mowden Matron checking its length and demanding a military short back and sides whenever it touched my collar.

I wonder why schools have these rules?

To keep the “young masters” looking just like that?

Number II Band practice before Chapel. The band consists mainly of brass instruments, though there are flutes and a drummer as well. It is conducted by a former military bandsman and everything is done properly.

I wrote to Julie-Anne.

My letters were always long. School, swimming, music, the heatwave, whatever was on my mind. I suspect I wrote about all of it.

Chapel. Very good hymns.

I noticed Mr Cookfield, my old Mowden headmaster, sitting at the back.

After Chapel, Dad picked me up for a Sunday Exeat.

My brother stayed behind to revise for his O Levels. It will be my turn in two years’ time.

In the back of the car were two geese.

The geese were destined for Appleby Castle Rare Breeds Centre, one of Dad’s many projects. Looking back, two geese in the back of the car hardly seemed remarkable. On another occasion we had three muntjac deer back there.

Back at the Castle, I swam in the heated outdoor pool in the courtyard. Dad showed me the new heating system. Water was pumped onto the roof and passed through lengths of black rubber matting where the sun heated it before it returned to the pool.

I thought it ingenious. It worked!

The setting was extraordinary, though I barely appreciated it how unique it was anywhere in the world. At one end of the courtyard stood a twelfth-century stone keep, we are surrounded by a high stone fifteenth-century curtain wall with an ornate gatehouse, and behind us is the old Norman Hall, much altered during the seventeenth century. Yet in the middle sat a thoroughly modern 1960s outdoor swimming pool, twenty metres long, painted California blue, and surrounded by paving stones and set within a rectangle of carefully cut grass.

Later I flew my Powell stunt kite.

Dad did a number of fatherly things with me as a boy. Flying a kite. Fly-fishing. Shooting. Archery. Golf. Polishing shoes. Cleaning a shotgun. Collecting fine wine. Collecting Victorian realist paintings. Bird watching. He was never the sort of father to kick a football around for hours, but there were activities that he enjoyed sharing.

My sister had a friend staying.

We had a modest lunch, something the cook Mabel had left prepared for us. Dad was never one for cooking. He allowed me a can of McEwan’s.

What strikes me now is what we did not discuss.

Nobody mentioned my stepmother.

Not once.

She had rubbed us all up the wrong way and had shared secrets with us that children probably ought not to have known.

Yet now she had gone.

She has made me cry on more than one occasion. Even Dad seemed overwhelmed by the mess he had created. I do not remember a specific occasion when he cried, only the sense that he had got himself into a terrible tangle and could see no easy way out of it.

The whole thing felt wrong.

Adults’ lives were supposed to be stable. Yet here was Dad splitting up from our second stepmother. Two more would follow. Meanwhile Mum was tentatively introducing us to her boyfriend on those increasingly rare occasions when I was home.

As a child I had imagined that adults knew what they were doing.

Increasingly, the evidence suggested otherwise.