Fifty Years Ago, Thursday 29 July 1976
I slept until 10.00 and had two poached eggs on toast for breakfast
Afterwards I soaked in Dad’s enormous round bath. We called it the “roundie” or sometimes the “four-poster bath”. It had come from one of FIH’s subsidiaries and remained unsold. Frankly, it was absurd. It was a huge oval bath with a framework at each corner supporting shower fittings and curtains. It took an age to fill and must have used at least twice, perhaps three times, the water of a normal bath. Even in 1976 that seemed faintly ridiculous. It was the sort of thing a hotel designer might dream up and everyone else would quietly ignore.
I played bar billiards today. I reckon I could get quite good at it with practice.
The table was in the management training centre at the Castle. FIH ran courses there for its own managers and for outside firms too, including managers from Greggs. There was a small common room or snug with the bar billiards table, where Dad taught me how to play and where we sometimes played against each other. Afterwards I practised on my own.
The training centre was a curious mixture of centuries. At one end of the lecture room, opposite the original Norman Gate, there was a dartboard fixed against a sixteenth-century door leading onto the courtyard. There was also a folding table tennis table. For the more adventurous there was a sauna and showers, though the sauna took about an hour to heat up. There was even an outdoor heated swimming pool. Looking back, it was all rather odd: management training courses taking place inside a medieval castle, with executives discussing sales figures and personnel matters within sight of Norman stonework and Tudor doors.
I had intended to go home. When I told Dad I was going back to Mum’s in Newcastle, he said she was away. I said I would stay and rang Granny.
In the end I went home anyway.
I was bored at Appleby. I had no friends there and no siblings. A castle, grounds, rare-breed cattle and sheep, ducks and geese don’t make up for it. We were undoubtedly fortunate, but we also had a home in Gosforth where there was more going on. Dad did not seem particularly bothered whether I stayed or went. I may have said Grandpa would look in while Mum was away.
Part of me also wanted to get back to swimming training, which I couldn’t do at Appleby. By this stage I was still clinging on to the idea of myself as a swimmer. I knew that if I wanted to remain competitive I needed to train. Missing sessions was never entirely comfortable.
I got the train from Appleby to Carlisle, and then from Carlisle across to Newcastle, then a bus to Polwarth Drive. A No.45.
Looking back, I do not think this was really about Appleby itself. I have always run with my enthusiasms. I could be intensely interested in a place, a hobby or a person one week and restless for something else the next. Perhaps that is what this entry captures. Not dissatisfaction exactly, but the impatience of being fifteen. A castle could feel ordinary if there was nobody there to share it with, while an ordinary suburban house in Gosforth could seem full of possibility because friends, swimming and the next adventure were all within reach
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