Fifty Years Ago: Sunday, 18th July 1976
Fencer Hill Park, Gosforth
Age 14.9
Although I wanted to sleep in, I woke at 7.00 and got up.
I’ve always been an early riser, especially in summer. As a child I would often wake at four or five in the morning and lie there wondering whether to explore the house before everyone else was awake, then perhaps return to bed later. Once awake, though, I found it difficult to stay there. If I remained in bed too long, ideas began swilling around my head. I dwelt on things. I needed something to do. I needed to be up and at it.
I tidied my room and drawers and prepared my swimming stuff.
That was part of the routine of coming home after eleven weeks away at boarding school. I wanted to see what was where. Things changed while I was away. I was barely aware of it at the time, but they did. Although I had more or less stopped growing, clothes still disappeared and were replaced. Mum used my absence at school to clear things out. Anything that no longer fitted would go. Odd relics would vanish too. I remember a second-hand Trench coat with a bullet hole in it. Heading for school it was there, eleven weeks later it wasn’t. And wirh that passage of time I’d fog often of its existence.
Going through the drawers felt like taking ownership again. Re-establishing myself. Reclaiming territory.
The room itself was always tidy. Mum kept the house pristine, as Dad would have wanted it. Years earlier she had once said, “in case he comes back.” My brother, sister and I used to complain whenever we were told to clean up.
“Who are you expecting, the Queen?”
It became a family joke.
Even then I thought there was something slightly sad about it. The house often looked so neat it scarcely appeared lived in.
Grandpa Wilson took me to the Northumberland Baths to swim with the Newcastle Squad.
The journey was familiar. We drove out of Gosforth and down the Great North Road towards Newcastle, skirting the Town Moor before dropping between the Hancock Museum and the Civic Centre, then down John Dobson Street towards the City Hall, with the baths beside it.
Grandpa loved his grandchildren. He was always taking us somewhere or showing us how something worked. Unlike my father, he carried authority lightly. He was fatherly without being authoritarian. He would show us how to oil a bicycle chain, sharpen tools, run a lawnmower, cut wood or decorate a room. Whatever he was doing, we were invited to watch.
On journeys like this he often told stories of his own childhood. He had learnt to swim in the River Derwent at Shotley Bridge and spoke about riding the sluice down towards the paper mill. To me it sounded half adventurous and half impossible, like something from another age.
It costs 25p now!
The increase clearly registered because it found its way into the diary. Perhaps it had been only 10p a few months earlier. You paid cash at the door when you arrived. I was conscious of money, though we were fortunate compared with many families. We were not indulged, but there was usually a little pocket money from grandparents and relatives.
I had to swim hard just to keep up. I was the last in the lane.
The Newcastle Squad operated in a different world from the one I inhabited during term time. These swimmers trained most evenings, many trained in the mornings as well, and they did so all year round without interruption. At Sedbergh I was lucky to get four relatively short swims a week.
They were my age, older than me and almost invariably faster.
Being last in the lane was discouraging because I could see no obvious route back. Even if I trained hard all summer, all the gains would evaporate as soon as I returned to boarding school. The system itself seemed stacked against improvement. I was expected to compete with swimmers who were training continuously while my own training was repeatedly interrupted.
Looking back, I think this was one of the moments that quietly set in train my questioning of boarding school itself. The educational argument was one thing, but swimming made the comparison painfully visible. Had I remained at home, I would have been raised by my mother, my siblings and my grandparents. I would also have trained consistently. Home seemed, in almost every respect, the better place to be.
Among the swimmers was a family friend, a girl my own age. When we had been ten or eleven there had been a vague soft spot between us. By fourteen that had gone. She seemed impossibly grown up now, less like a schoolgirl and more like someone in her twenties. The gap between boys and girls often felt enormous at that age.
Lunch.
Watch films, listen to records, watch Montreal Olympics swimming.
Strangely, I remember almost nothing of the swimmers themselves. Montreal has largely disappeared from memory. The Olympics that captured my imagination were earlier. Mexico. Mark Spitz.
I had been seven years old then. By that age I was already training under Mr Tunstall at the RGS swimming pool. Mexico and Spitz gave swimming a glamour and significance that lodged itself permanently in my imagination. The dream began there.
Looking back now, I can see that much of the continuity I needed as a swimmer was broken when I was sent away to school. The ambition remained intact, but the structure needed to sustain it did not.
The contrast on this day feels striking. In the morning I was struggling at the back of a lane, working flat out simply to stay in touch. In the afternoon I was watching Olympic swimming on television.
The distance between those two worlds seemed vast.
Yet perhaps that distance was exactly what kept me going
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