Fifty Years Ago: Monday, 2 August 1976
(Gosforth, age 14 years 10 months)
My arms and shoulders were stiff from swimming.
I had breakfast, fed the cat and shut it in my bedroom, hiding it from Mum. My sister had been given it by someone with a litter. She was twelve and loved animals, but she must have known keeping it was impossible. Mum didn’t want a pet she would end up looking after. She had never kept pets as a child. During the war, her family kept rabbits to eat. We has dogs when Dad had been at home. Morag, the blacklabrador had a kennel at the back of the house. She was a gun dog. She had a litter of ten puppies.
Mum arrived at ten, just as Gran left and Joan, the cleaner, came in. Dad turned up soon afterwards with my brother and younger sister, bringing them back from Appleby. My older sister was living over there. Usually Dad would met Mum at Scotch Corner, so either he had business in Newcastle or was keen to hand two of his four children back. Mum had been in Warwickshire with her boyfriend.
My sister took the cat and returned it to wherever it had come from. I was glad. Cats killed garden birds.
I continued trying to write a book, probably Exordium, though if I became stuck I might start something else. Writing was like bouncing on the end of a springboard: have an idea, see whether it will fly, hit the water, climb out and try again. I typed whatever came into my head, corrected it in ink or pencil, then typed the whole thing again, usually reinventing it as I went. I could not leave it alone.
After lunch, I had a go driving my brother’s go-kart up and down Fencer Hill Park Drive. He had designed it himself and built it in the Project Centre at Sedbergh, no doubt discussing the plans with other people, particularly Grandpa. The two-stroke engine had come from our housemaster’s lawnmower after the mower developed some other mechanical fault.
The kart was like driving a lawnmower, only much closer to the ground. It had an accelerator and brakes and might have reached twenty miles an hour, which felt fast enough with the tarmac inches below you. My brother’s inventiveness and enthusiasm usually won people over, so taking it onto the private road and around the Gosforth Rugby Club car park did not seem to cause trouble.
I did not like the engine noise. I disliked any unexplained or unsanctioned noise, rather like Dad, who was extremely pernickety about it. Whether I had inherited this or merely learnt it from him, I could not have said.
Two younger boys came over to watch. My brother gave them a lecture about the mechanics, how he had made it and what speed it could do. They listened, though like everyone else they were probably waiting to ask for a go.
I was pleased for him. Cars were his passion. Before long, he would be buying second-hand ones, repairing them, enjoying them for a few months and then selling them at a profit. We had quite different interests. He built machines. I wrote stories and swam.
Then television.
I did my loosening-up exercises meticulously because I trained at this level too infrequently and felt at a disadvantage. The swim was hard: relentless pace and volume through a set lasting an hour or two.
Afterwards I had a hot bath with Badedas bath salts and Radio 1. There might be a book, coffee and biscuits. I stayed in until my fingers and toes crinkled. A bath was not merely washing. It was recovery, refuge and ceremony.
None of the coming and going seemed remarkable. We had adults around us, a roof over our heads and ample food. What we got up to was another matter. At Appleby, there might be staff or other adults in the house, but I do not recall any of us feeling responsible for the others. We each did our own thing.
When Mum went away, the labelled meals in the freezer were evidence of care: meatballs, bolognese sauce, chicken and sweetcorn, steak and kidney pie, oxtail soup. Joan might be asked to defrost them. Gran and Grandpa were nearby. The system worked, though it depended on children being more self-sufficient than anyone now might consider wise
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