Fifty Years Ago: Monday, 19th July 1976
A year ago I had my large walking plaster off and a short walking plaster put on. I’d broken my leg skiing four months earlier.
I know this because I’m writing in a Collins Five Year Diary and can see exactly what happened on this day the year before. Getting the large plaster off had been a major event. The thing had run from my crotch right down to my toes. When it finally came off, my leg looked ridiculous. There was hardly any muscle left on it and it was covered in thick black hair. It hardly looked like my leg at all. More like a chimp on starvation rations.
I can still remember being in the orthopaedic wing at the RVI while they cut it off. The electric circular saw was terrifying. The noise alone made me tense up. I was convinced it would slip and cut into me. The surgeon saw no reason to put me under a general anaesthetic, so I sat there while the blade chewed through the plaster. Afterwards came the strange sight of a leg that had been hidden away for months.
Back to today: Monday, 19th July 1976.
I spent the morning in my room doing it up, creating it into a space I could spend time in.
The room was small and sat above the kitchen at the top of the stairs. It was part of a 1960s house designed by an architect who usually worked on warehouses and office buildings: a friend and business colleaguenof my fathers of course. Maybe that showed. It wasn’t designed by somebody who understood people. It lacked character. The spaces rarely felt private. It was more of a chicken coop.
As you stepped through the door from the landing, the room was a simple rectangular box. Everything was white. The walls were white. The woodwork was white. The carpet was a practical rough-woven dark green. It always felt clean, but also impersonal. Too clean and tidy. Not uninhabitable but vaccant.
My single bed stood immediately to the left against the wall. Lying there with the door slightly ajar, I could watch activity on the landing outside. I remember doing exactly that as a much younger child, hoping for a glimpse of Santa Claus.
Beside the bed stood a mahogany bedside cabinet with three drawers and a lamp. In the top drawer I kept my Collins Five Year Diary. Writing up the day was the last thing I did before turning out the light. Even then I knew I was writing for a future self. Not somebody fifty years older, but somebody perhaps a year or two ahead of me who might want to reflect ok jie things had progressed over the years.
The structure of the diary required a succinct, cryptic even bullet point approach to entries. Each day only had five lines on one side of an A5 sheet. Each page also contained five separate sections, one for each year. As each year passed, I could see what I had been doing on the same day the year before. That was how I knew about the plaster. In retrospect, reflecting on the passing week and longer entries would have been more valuable.
Had I bought the diary with a book voucher from Christmas 1974 to start the year in 1975? That sounds about right. I’m certain it wasn’t a gift.
Usually I wrote the diary first and then read before going to sleep.
At the end of the bed, beneath the window, stood my Habitat desk. It had two drawers and a long shelf underneath that was perfect for art pads, rulers and unfinished projects. Above it were Spur Steel adjustable shelves.
The bookshelves held what I came tonthjnk of as ‘the contents of my brain : Dictionaries (one English, one French) stood alongside books by Nigel Calder, Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke. There might have been Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable by then, one of those books that could be opened at random and explored for an hour also a Roget’s Thesaurus. I returned repeatedly to Foundation and Empire and Profiles of the Future. Somewhere on the shelves there was probably a Chris Bonington book about Everest too. And much more besides.
The desk itself was always tidy. Pens, pencils, rulers, scraps of paper, sketches and half-finished ideas could all be tucked away. I never did homework at home because boarding school took care of that through Prep. Instead, this was where I drew, copied illustrations from anatomy books, wrote stories and experimented with poetry and garden designs.
One of the most important objects in the room was my portable manual typewriter. It had been a Christmas present seven months earlier. It was a Corona. It was sturdy and reliable. I was teaching myself touch typing and had a small booklet of exercises to work through. I liked the physicality of typing. The sharp impact of the keys, the bell at the end of a line and the sweep of the carriage return made writing feel purposeful and professional. It felt closer somehow to being a real writer. As if those typed out pages had more credibility than something handwritten.
On the opposite side of the room stood a fitted wardrobe with hanging space for jackets, trousers and shirts, and shelves for underpants, T shirts and socks, and an upper section for towels and blankets. Everything had its place.
The window looked west across the garden. It had once formed part of the grounds of Lord and Lady Suiter that had been planted in the 1930s. It was now dense with mature trees. Conifers, cherry trees and plum trees obscured much of the view. Below were flowerbeds with roses, rhododendrons and hostas. Beyond them stood a single large bungsllpe.
There wasn’t much horizon visible from the room. No dramatic sunsets. The trees enclosed the view and made the garden feel self-contained.
There was history in the room too. I’d occupied it since my brother and I stopped sharing a bedroom. By now it was unquestionably mine, yet because I spent most of the year away at boarding school it didn’t entirely feel much like home. It felt preserved. Waiting for me. A room that remained largely unchanged while I was absent.
As I tidied and rearranged things, Genesis, Bowie and Abba played on the record player.
The walls carried Roger Dean posters attached with Blu-Tack or loops of Sellotape. Some of them fascinated me. The floating islands. The dragons. The strange badger-like creatures with impossibly long ears. Alongside them were Bowie posters.
Together they formed a landscape of possibilities. Dean’s worlds existed somewhere between fantasy and science fiction, while Bowie was from another planet entirely and dangerously androgenous.
The house had underfloor heating and metal air vents between rooms. Sound travelled surprisingly well through them. If I put my ear close enough to one, I could often make out conversations taking place elsewhere in the house.
As children my brother and I had discovered another use for the vents. His room was the mirror image of mine next door. When we were confined to our bedrooms for some misdemeanour or another, we’d lie on the floor and talk to each other through the vents. The architecture had accidentally provided its own communication system.
Mum and I went into town for clothes. She was still responsible for what in wore. Dad insisted that my brother and I we were smart when we went to stay with him.
I was dragged around every shop you can imagine: Bainbridge, Fenwick, Isaac Walton, Burtond and Marcus Price come to mind.
I tried on a denim jacket which was too big.
I liked it anyway. Either Mum exchanged it for a smaller size or found another one because I know there is a photograph from that summer of Mum and me at either Tynemouth or Whitley Bay and I’m wearing a denim jacket.
I got two posters from the Kardbar: something that looked like a jet and a another with a space capsule.
By then my brother and I had moved on from Airfix kits, balsa wood models and visits to the Model Shop. The Kardbar and Marcus Price had become our destinations instead. That seemed significant.
The Kardbar, tucked away in the Handyside Arcade, felt like a doorway into another world. Looking back, the posters weren’t really about aircraft or spacecraft. They were about escape.
Dad came in the evening. He’d changed his Triumph Stag for a golden Mercedes SLK sportscar.
Mum knew he was coming. We usually didn’t. By then we’d learned not to make a big thing of it. He would arrive and talk with Mum about family matters. My big sister was a handful; would my younger sister go to boarding school when she turned 13? Their conversations usually took place in the adults’ sitting room, a room we children rarely entered unless invited.
I persuaded myself to go swimming.
Reading the entry now, I suspect that if I went swimming, I probably cycled up to the Regent Centre and swam lengths at Gosforth Swimming Pool rather than travelling into Newcastle.
Part of me was slipping into the life I might have lived had I never gone away to boarding school. Most local schools were still in term. The boys I knew from Gosforth were continuing with their ordinary routines. For a few hours I could imagine belonging to that world too.
Swimming represented a path not taken. Had I remained at home, I would probably have trained year-round with the club. Instead I spent most of the year at a school with little interest in competitive swimming. The swimmer I might have become existed only in glimpses during the holidays.
I watched the Olympics.
The person everyone seemed to be talking about was Nadia Comăneci. Even at fourteen I understood that something extraordinary was happening. She appeared impossibly composed and precise, performing with a confidence that captivated audiences everywhere.
The swimming and athletics interested me, but not in quite the same way. By then I already understood the practical limitations of my own circumstances. Olympic swimmers trained relentlessly. My own ambitions had to fit around a school that offered little opportunity to pursue them properly.
Looking back, what strikes me most about the day is how many forms of escape surrounded me.
The Roger Dean posters. The books by Asimov, Clarke and Calder. The typewriter. The garden. The swimming pool. The Olympics on TV. Even the Five Year Diary itself transporting me to 1975.
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