Fifty Years Ago: Monday, 23rd August 1976
(Appleby Castle/Gosforth, Age 14:10)
I went out onto the roof of the South East Tower to sunbathe. It was directly above our flat, the children’s flat, so it felt almost like another room belonging to us, except there were no walls and from up there I could see for miles.
Across the courtyard was the great square mass of the twelfth-century keep; beyond the castle, the land opened out north towards the Pennine moors and High Cup Nick, east and south-east along the Eden Valley, and in the distance towards the Howgills. I lay there in my Speedos, trying to catch as much sun as I could. Sometimes, if I thought I was completely safe from being seen, I slipped them off altogether. I was careful. The whole point was that nobody should know.
Eventually it began getting cold and I went down for breakfast. Our kitchen was not part of the flat at all but on the other side of the Great Hall, beside the offices, so even getting breakfast meant crossing from our bit of the castle into the part where Dad’s working life went on. He had probably eaten long before me and was already in the Baron’s Study, behind his enormous desk covered in things he had accumulated. One window looked down towards the Eden and another onto the avenue of yew trees. He had put a feeder outside for the red squirrels and they would come right up to the window.
A cooked breakfast had been sent up for my brother, perhaps an omelette, but it was sitting there getting cold. I ate it. He would never know it had ever existed.
I listened to Radio One and read Second Foundation. I liked doing both at once. The music did not interrupt the reading; in some way it made it possible. A programme gave me a unit of time. I could put the radio on and disappear into Asimov for the length of the show, looking up for a record I liked and then dropping straight back into the book. There was the castle outside the window, Radio One coming out of the set, and somewhere else entirely there was the Second Foundation.
I assume Dad ran us over to Newcastle. He had business there, though moving us between Appleby and Gosforth was normal enough by then. We children passed backwards and forwards between our parents according to what each of them was doing. Mum might want to go down to Chipping Campden to see her boyfriend Barry. Dad might be in Manchester or London on business – or out with one of his girlfriends, various come to mind: doctor, barrister, dentists assistant… Somebody had to have us, or some of us, and the arrangements were continually being worked out.
Though 90 miles apart, the journey felt so routine that it was like going through a swing door.
At some point, either before leaving Appleby or after getting back to Gosforth, I rang Julie-Anne. Telephoning her was always pot luck. I never seemed to get her father. Her mum might answer, or her sister, or nobody at all. Julie-Anne was going swimming at three, so I arranged to see her there.
I met her crossing the road. Fifty years later I have no idea which road it was, though in my head I put us somewhere on Gosforth High Street, arriving from different directions and suddenly there she was.
We went swimming, probably at Gosforth Pool. We did some lengths, or widths, messed around, went off the springboard and generally treated swimming as something other than training.
There was that wonderful municipal swimming-pool notice telling us NO SMOKING, NO PETTING!, which inevitably made petting sound like an activity one might otherwise have considered. We were more frolicsome than romantic. In the baby pool we played crocodiles, lying almost flat in the shallow water and pulling ourselves along on our arms.
Julie-Anne and I did not particularly need to flirt. We were friends. That made being together easy. We could swim about for a bit, get out and talk, and then carry on talking afterwards without having to decide what any of it meant.
We took our time going back towards her house, chatting, laughing and telling each other stories. I had my racing bike and gave her a backer, Julie-Anne sitting on the saddle while I stood up and pedalled. It was probably not the most efficient way of transporting two people on a bicycle, but it was much more fun. We eventually headed into Newcastle because she was going to Central Station to see her sister off.
Somewhere along the way we met Mr and Mrs Quirke. They belonged to that web of adults who had always been around when my parents were together. I knew them as Aunty Shirley and Uncle Charles although they were not relations. They had been regulars at cocktails, dinner parties and bridge evenings, part of the grown-up social world in which all the parents knew one another and, just as importantly, knew all the children. They had children around our age and when I was ten or eleven I had even thought of their daughter as a sort of girlfriend.
Later Dad rang.
The question again was what was happening with us children. Mum was upset about the weekend. I did not want to go back to Appleby just because she was going away.
That was the part I disliked: the sense that I had to be in one place or the other according to the movements of the adults. Appleby could be extraordinary. I had a castle roof to sunbathe on, the keep outside my window, red squirrels looking into Dad’s study and half of the Eden Valley spread out below me. But it could also be boring. My friends were in Gosforth. Julie-Anne was in Gosforth. Things happened there without being arranged for me by anybody.
Mum may have been planning to go away with Barry. Their relationship was settling into something permanent by then. At first he had been introduced to us and had not stayed in the house; now he was simply Barry. They began going to France regularly and later to Spain, where he bought wine. He was an architect but had also been a wine merchant, so wine came with him as naturally as drawing boards and buildings.
There was also Oliver, the French boy, floating inexplicably between households. He had stayed with us at Appleby and in Gosforth and also, somehow, with a family in Bishop Auckland. I was never quite sure whose responsibility he was or why he was there. He came from a wealthy French family, was a year or two older than my brother and seemed bookish and preppy. We had nothing in common. He may have belonged to one of Dad’s business connections. Like so many things in the adult world, the arrangement existed and therefore we were expected to accept it.
What I wanted was much simpler. I wanted to know where my friends were and be able to go there. I did not want every weekend to become a negotiation over which parent had which children while the adults went off somewhere else.
That afternoon I had met Julie-Anne crossing a road, gone swimming, played crocodiles in the baby pool, laughed with her on the way home and carried her on the back of my racing bike.
That was where I wanted to be
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