Fifty Years Ago: Saturday, 17th July 1976
Up at 4.45 a.m., wake up dead on time. A few moments later, someone comes around to wake us. How do I do that? The clock in my head.
I could wake on time without a clock. Even now, fifty years later, I still seem able to do it. Only recently I woke without giving it any thought, minutes before the Mexico versus England World Cup decider. Somewhere in my head there seems to be a mechanism quietly keeping count while I sleep.
I think I’d programmed myself young, when I was told what times I could and could not get up, before I had a clock of my own or could even read one. Somehow the instruction lodged itself deep inside me. I simply decided when I needed to wake and, more often than not, did.
Wash. Pack up. Dress in School Sunday Clothes. Tweed jacket, white shirt and tie, black trousers and black shoes.
This was the standard travelling uniform for Sedbergh boys. Whenever we travelled as part of the school, this was how we were expected to appear. Looking back, I am not sure it made us look older. It certainly made us stand out. People immediately recognised us as public school boys. The school travelled with us wherever we went.
Go to sleep again.
This was in the barracks at Okehampton Army Camp. They were not dormitories but proper barracks: individual wooden huts that probably dated back to the Second World War and perhaps even the era of National Service. There was something temporary and functional about them. They had housed generations of soldiers before us and now contained several dozen schoolboys on Army Camp.
Looking back, it seems faintly absurd that we were woken so early. All we really had to do was wash, get dressed and have breakfast. Once that was done there was time enough to lie down again.
I can still imagine the atmosphere. The half-light before dawn. The smell of timber, Blanco, damp uniforms and boot polish. Boys stirring reluctantly from sleep. The odd muttered conversation. Then silence again as some of us grabbed a few more minutes of rest before the journey home.
Then change into civvies.
That change mattered more than the clothes themselves.
I had a plain white T-shirt and flared jeans. I may have had my favourite denim jacket as well. Nothing remarkable, yet these clothes represented something entirely different from the uniform.
This was how I dressed at home. How I naturally dressed. The school clothes belonged to Sedbergh. The jeans belonged to me.
Perhaps there was a subtle element of display involved too. The boys I had spent weeks with in uniform suddenly saw another version of me. Not Cadet Foster. Not Schoolboy Foster. Just Robbie.
The denim jacket was not a fashion statement so much as a declaration of ordinary identity.
Breakfast.
In the car park for 6.20. Think will be late for station 7.10.
There were a few of us heading for Newcastle, including my brother.
We occupied overlapping worlds rather than the same one. By 1976 he and I were largely separate social beings. We moved among different friends and different age groups. Yet there was reassurance in knowing he was on the same journey north.
Looking back, I wonder what the school’s actual rules were regarding travel. We were only fourteen and sixteen. Today it might seem extraordinary. Then it felt perfectly normal. Get on the train. Change where necessary. Arrive home.
The expectation was that you would manage.
On train smoke one Morr cigarette and two Golden. Pretty terrible. Yuk!
Smoking was never really about enjoyment. The cigarettes themselves tasted awful.
Morr was my chosen brand because it seemed sophisticated. Or perhaps because I imagined it seemed sophisticated. The reality was less convincing.
What interested me was not the tobacco but the image. Smoking allowed a brief experiment with adulthood. A prop in the ongoing performance of becoming older.
Not for girls. There were none around.
More a way of saying, perhaps to myself as much as anyone else, that I was no longer a child.
Talk to sailors from the Ark Royal.
Looking back, I suspect this belonged to the same impulse.
I cannot remember the sailors at all. Not their faces, voices, uniforms or even where they were sitting. The conversation itself has vanished completely.
Yet I wrote it down.
Perhaps the important thing was not what they said but who they were. Sailors from the Ark Royal. Adult men attached to one of the most famous ships in Britain.
Talking to them may have felt like a small crossing of a boundary. The same boundary represented by the cigarette.
At fourteen, adulthood was still something observed from the outside. Every interaction with older people felt like a glimpse through the door.
Newcastle train late.
Good meal.
I cannot remember where I ate or what I ate. Yet the meal was worth recording.
Travel often improved food. School meals belonged to routine. Holiday meals belonged to freedom. The same plate somehow tasted different when term had ended.
Olympics.
The Montreal Olympics had just begun.
The swimming and athletics interested me most.
As a competitive swimmer, I followed the pool events closely. Yet athletics fascinated me too. Both represented the outer edge of human performance. The fastest. The strongest. The highest. The furthest.
The Olympics seemed to arrive from another world.
Montreal might as well have been on another planet. Different accents. Different countries. Different lives. Yet every evening those lives appeared in our sitting room through the television.
The Games also marked the beginning of summer.
Ahead lay the familiar division of my holidays. Part with Mum in Gosforth. Part with Dad at Appleby. A couple of weeks in Majorca. Time with Julie-Anne, who was now my girlfriend.
There would be books.
There would be drawing materials.
There would be long hours alone in my room.
There would be swimming.
And there would be the Olympics unfolding day after day on television.
The strange thing about being fourteen is that summer still felt endless. Not in the literal sense. I knew perfectly well it would end. But the weeks ahead seemed vast and spacious, full of possibilities that had not yet taken shape.
The train was carrying me north, away from Okehampton and Army Camp, away from barracks and uniforms and bugle calls.
Ahead lay Gosforth, Appleby, Majorca, Julie-Anne, books, drawing, swimming and the Olympics.
For the first time that morning, the summer really seemed to begin
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