Fifty Years Ago: Wednesday, 18th August 1976
(Gosforth, Age 14:10)
Sleep till 9:20. Mum calls me down for breakfast. Mum gets fed up with us being in bed after a while.She then goes out.
I type stories to music. Ommadawn. Mike Oldfield. I love the flute and penny whistle tunes. I could play those.
I am using my Smith-Corona typewriter, a birthday present. The stories usually have a male teenage protagonist running off with a girl. Come to think of it, we had done something similar with my first and excellent English teacher at Mowden Hall Prep School. Mr Aldridge played a piece of classical music and we had to write down what came to mind.
Running off with a girl is not entirely fiction either. At Beadnell, when I was seven or eight, the girl next door — I’ll call her Mary McCartney — and I took off through the sand dunes about a mile away on what became our own rites-of-passage adventure. Input flowers and marram grass in her hair. We got married by swallowing a cod liver oil pill each.
Then there was Kimberly Henderson, marginally older than me. I collected crisp packets from purchases at the Caravan Shop until I had enough tokens for a plastic ring. We were doing all right until I offered her the ring to show that we were engaged. At eight or nine she was taller than me. She moved on to my older brother (ten years later). I still felt aggrieved.
And then there was Big Jane, big only because she was older than my sister Jane. I think she was fifteen or sixteen. She babysat. I would happily spend the day wrapped around her leg. I don’t recall being much higher than her thigh.
Back to the present day, 1976 that is. My brother says we’re going to Beadnell. This coincidence is uncanny. Both Mum and I are thinking about the same thing. Misty at first.
We’ll eat in Bambugh, then head back to Beadnell for a walk.
Mum does this from time to time, a trip down memory lane for all of us. We have film footage from our great-uncle of her swimming off the harbour wall. She’d spent holidays in Beadnell staying with her uncle and cousins, with trips to Bamburgh, tea at the Copper Kettle tea rooms, and visits to the Grace Darling Museum and church. We had done it as children with our grandparents too.
Bamburgh is something we did with grandparents mostly.
Places have closed. People are holidaying in Spain these days. We have done that ourselves by now. In 1973 and 1974 we stayed in a neighbour’s flat in Paguera, Majorca.
Before that, Beadnell had been the centre of summer.
We had stayed in Rose Cottage. I remember the smell of the chemical spray Dad put on the climbing rose by the front door. The pondering tick-tock of the grandfather clock, with its lead weights, key and pendulum. The smell of natural jute on the flagstone floors. Orange nasturtiums in the flowerbed running along the front of the house and the pretty ice plant, mesembryanthemum, opening in the sunshine. Butterflies, bees and snails. Making daisy chains. A clump of rhubarb in the back garden.
From the east, the smell of salt and seaweed. From the south-west, the smell of marram grass and sand. And the sound of the foghorn from the Farne Islands lighthouse. The flash of its light at night. The ebb and flow of the tide.
There were three bedrooms. Mum and Dad had the large double bed and I had a single bed in the same room, apparently so Muk could get to me before I wet the bed. I remember consciously the last time I did that, possibly when I was six or seven.
The back bedroom had two bunk beds. Daughters and grandmothers: all could fit in.
The front bedroom had two single beds for my grandfather and older brother, although my brother and I once turned it into a rock museum for our fossils.
Rose Cottage had been converted from a fisherman’s cottage into a family holiday home, with my grandfather instrumental in the conversion.
Dad sold it when our parents separated. It had been purchased in his name and Mum had no say in the matter. She said that more than once after our trips to Beadnell ended almost overnight.
I think our last proper summer there was 1970. In 1971 we stayed for a bit in a cousin’s caravan outside Scarborough and a week at our great-uncle’s Beadnell house. In 1972 we rented a cottage in Beadnell for a week or two. Then we went to Paguera in Majorca in 1973 and 1974. Each time for a couple of weeks I think. In 1975 it was Appleby and home. The same in 1976 and from then on. We made our own plans.
We went onto the beach at Beadnell. we met a friend of my brothers from Mowden our prep school. We ended up playing football with several Sedbergh boys too. It reminded me how much we had missed by no longer having a holiday cottage here in Beadnell.
Families with the money to send their boys away to boarding school also have cottages or caravans here. There is not necessarily much of a hierarchy between the two. Plenty of the most well-off Gosforth families have caravans rather than cottages.
Finding boys from school here shows the continuing depth of our connection with Beadnell, where we learnt to sail, learnt to ride, played in the sand dunes and rock pools.
My early childhood was Beadnell. The football is competitive and spontaneous: shirts for goalposts, bare feet, swimming trunks. I am crap.I have always been crap at football.
At my first school, when teams were chosen, I was invariably the last to be picked and then put in goal with any other rubbish player. I was terrible at kicking or catching anything round. Football and cricket both defeated me. I became OK at tennis and good at squash and table tennis, but anything involving a round ball being kicked or thrown was another matter.
Not once did Dad ever kick or throw a ball around with us as children.
Golf perhaps. Shooting once or twice. Fly fishing. But we were not part of the shooting and fishing fraternity either.
We go for a swim. I find it very cold. Swimming in the North Sea is fundamentally different from swimming in a pool. Swimming in the Mediterranean is different again. Lake swimming and river swimming are different again.
I can swim, but I do not mix well with cold water. I don’t know why. My lungs feel as though they freeze.
Better to return and rekindle the memories than not return at all.
Home for evening Swimming training at the City Baths. I’m too late for the juniors.
That is tinged with sadness. Had I not been sent away to boarding school, I would have been a regular at this club since the age of ten. I had been with Mr Tunstall in the RGS pool from the age of seven. He was strict and demanding. All I remember doing is kicking backwards and forwards across the pool.
Boarding school made it impossible to train with the frequency and consistency competitive swimming requires.
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