Fifty Years Ago: Saturday, 21st August 1976
Gosforth — Age 14:10
My brother had a bath. Big roll of drums! This was noteworthy as I then wanted to siphon the water to put on the garden.
I had become obsessive, or possessive, about whatever bathwater became available. I was on a mission to save the planet, and this was how to do it. There was a hosepipe ban because of the drought. The lawn was yellow, the ground concrete-hard. We had seen on TV that you could reuse bathwater and has it to water the garden. That and ‘share a bath’ or ‘have a bath with a friend’.
The bathroom was at the rear of the house. I pushed a hose out through the side window and dropped it down towards the back door, then sucked water through it, hoping not to get a gob full of soapy bathwater in my mouth, and rushed to lower the end into a metal watering can before the siphon stopped. After that, a bucket. The soapy used bathwater went on the roses and rhododendrons.
I bussed into Gosforth, alone. I waited outside the stone-built bus shelter on the Great North Road next to the Northern Rugbt Club. I M very rarely went inside it, even in the rain. It always smelled of piss.
Usually it was the yellow double-decker, though there was more choice to Gosforth High Street and I may have taken a red single-decker. For a period there was a ticket collector who came around; otherwise you bought the ticket from the driver. I think it cost something like 9p.
I’d been using this bus since I could walk, first with a nanny or au pair. I never once saw my parents on public transport. At some point my brother and I started taking the bus without an adult, possibly as young as seven and nine, to come home from school, if not to get there as well.
Up past the Greyhound Stadium, heading into Gosforth, past the Royalty Cinema and the Fire Station behind its stone-arch façade, the Victoria pub at the junction, Turners the photographic shop. There were two or three possible stops depending on what I wanted: Thorpe’s DIY store, Woolworths further along, opposite Boydells the toy shop.
I bought a couple of singles from Woolworths: Status Quo and Dr Hook.
There was a counter dedicated to the Singles and Album Charts. You couldn’t listen before buying them there. In record shops in town they had booths, or headphones, where you could listen first.
Dr Hook was A Little Bit More, which beautifully expressed my sentiment when it came to an idealised falling in love. Status Quo was Blue for You.
I never thought of myself as a Status Quo fan. In fact, if anyone from school had wanted to go through my records, I would probably have hidden Status Quo, Elvis Presley and the Carpenters. At school I was David Bowie, Elton John, Boston, Heart and Genesis. Status Quo and Dr Hook were private listening at home. Dr Hook was sentimentality.
Back home I listened to Radio One, then my records.
I knew all the Radio One voices: Noel Edmonds, Tony Blackburn, David Hamilton, Alan Freeman, Kid Jensen, Ed Stewart. On Sunday evenings I deliberately listened to the Chart Show, the Top 30 over two hours.
For records we had the family mono, a supposedly portable box with its own built-in speaker. It wasn’t that portable. It still had to be plugged into the mains. At some point I bought a rubbish second-hand Russian-made record deck of my own.
I had a record carrier that held perhaps thirty LPs. Singles were kept separately. I bought cassettes too. The singles could be stacked on the autochanger so that one dropped after another. A new single got played a few times, though neither of these became a particular earworm.
I couldn’t get a suntan as the sun went in and out, with constant periods of overcast, so I went under the sunlamp after a shower.
I lay on a sunlounger in the back garden in shorts or swimming trunks whenever the sun came out. The summer had already given me a better tan than usual. A tan made you look as though you’d been on a foreign holiday. It made you look athletic. I thought it made me more attractive to girls. My sister and I compared tan lines.
When the clouds kept coming over I gave up and used the sunlamp.
It was a freestanding ultraviolet lamp which I lifted onto Mum’s dressing table in her bedroom. I put on what were more or less blacked-out swimming goggles and sat in front of it, topless or in shorts, never for more than ten minutes.
I listened to Tom Lehrer records of Dad’s.
I didn’t remember which ones. I wasn’t particularly a fan. When Mum and Dad had been together they watched adult television later in the evening, when the sitting room — otherwise our playroom, the children’s sitting room and TV room — became theirs. They watched Saturday Night Live, which may have been where Tom Lehrer came into it.
Mum occasionally listened to classical records. Dad had some pop too, perhaps Sandie Shaw.
My older sister went out. I wanted to go swimming with her.
She was eighteen, nearly nineteen, and came and went more or less as she pleased. It was odd, and rare, to have her at home at all because she had been living with Dad in Appleby for a couple of years.
We would have gone to Gosforth Baths, by bus if there were two of us. If I went alone I would cycle.
I swam often. Not simply lengths. I sank, pushed off the bottom, turned and rolled around underwater. It was as close as I could get to artistic swimming. I loved the feel of water.
Instead I listened to a stack of singles, perhaps six of them dropping one after another on the autochanger, either in my bedroom above the kitchen or in the playroom.
I read Asimov’s Second Foundation.
It was a paperback. I may have been given the boxed Foundation Trilogy for Christmas. I enjoyed science and science fiction.
I could read while listening to music, though I had already worked out that it was easier if the music had no lyrics: Mike Oldfield, Sky, Jean-Michel Jarre.
Julie-Anne never rang back.
I must have phoned her. That was how it worked. If someone was in, you spoke to them. If they were out, you left a message and waited for them to ring back, or rang again later. We had three telephones in the house — kitchen, hall and Mum’s room — all landlines.
Julie-Anne and I had met at a party at my house over the Christmas holidays. It was now the summer holidays and we went on dates, perhaps once a week. During term we wrote to each other because I was away at boarding school. We thought of each other as boyfriend and girlfriend, though it was platonic.
Only the day before we had spoken for an hour on the phone.
In that respect she was my mate and my confidante. I liked the banter, sharing news, whispering sweet nothings, and no doubt I was charged up by listening to the likes of Dr Hook.
There were plenty of reasons why somebody didn’t ring back. She might have been away with her family, visiting relatives, out with friends. I recognised that. You rang once, left a message and got on with your life.
But we were getting towards the end of the summer holidays. She had been away with her family and now she was home. She was around.
Being a boarding school boy, I was keen to do as much as possible in the few weeks left.
I would keep reading Foundation, listening to chart singles, going for a swim, speaking to Julie-Anne.
But that night, Julie-Anne never rang back.
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