Fifty Years Ago: Tuesday, 24th August 1976
(Gosforth, Age 14:10
Breakfast was 9ish. Then I started work.
It must have been schoolwork, though why I was doing schoolwork in the middle of August I couldn’t now have said. Perhaps we’d been given something to complete over the holidays. Whatever it was, I didn’t much. It didn’t appeal.
The collage did.
I had cuttings from magazines spread around me, probably things I’d taken from Mum’s discarded copies of Vogue, Cosmopolitan or whatever else she bought. I had an old collage as well, though that probably meant less a finished collage than a collection of things I’d already cut out and hadn’t yet got round to sticking down. Faces, bodies, clothes, colours, advertisements, bits of other people’s imagined lives. I could move them about until they made something new.
Then I started on a collage which included an old one. Then I started to write about a person in it.
Something I saw had set me off.
There had been one particular image, or perhaps a whole article, that stayed in my head: one of those future humans pieces from a weekend colour supplement, explaining what people might eventually look like after generations of different races mixing and the climate becoming warmer. The future, according to this, appeared to consist of something like the people from The Trigon Empire: bald-headed Scandinavians with tans.
I liked the idea enormously.
They had a sort of Roman look to them. Bronze skin. Hardly any clothes. Bodies that belonged somewhere permanently hot and bright, rather than Newcastle upon Tyne. One of the figures was making some kind of salute, which was slightly disconcerting because I couldn’t tell whether it was supposed to be Roman or Nazi. But it was the appearance that caught me. The bronze tan. The almost classical body. A person transformed by sun into something more interesting than ordinary pale English flesh.
So I wrote about someone in the collage.
I did this until 12:30.
I liked giving myself times like that. If I had decided I was going to work until half past twelve, I kept going until half past twelve. It didn’t necessarily matter whether I was bored. In fact I could be extremely bored and still carry on because stopping before the time felt somehow wrong. Equally, I might keep going when what I really needed was a break. There was satisfaction in reaching the number I had set myself.
At half past twelve I stopped.
Then I sunbathed.
That mattered. A lot.
My birthday suit was the one I wore every day and I didn’t like it looking pasty white and pimply. A tan improved things. It made the body I had look more like the body I wanted. There was probably something of those bronzed future humans in it too, though I wouldn’t have put it that way. The sun seemed capable of finishing the job nature hadn’t yet completed.
Lucy Quirke is here. My kid sister wore a bikini.
Lucy was one of my sister’s friends and the Quirkes had been family friends for as long as any of us could remember. Lucy was also memorable for once seeing a boy doing a standing-up wee and announcing something along the lines of, That looks handy. I want one.
My sister was hardly unfamiliar with what boys looked like. She had two brothers.
But seeing my kid sister in a bikini registered. She was twelve years and nine months old and I still thought of her largely as a tomboy. I wasn’t used to noticing a feminine side to her at all. A bikini made that suddenly difficult not to notice. She was still my kid sister, except that she was also becoming something else.
Perhaps all of us were.
I go swimming.
It would have been Gosforth Swimming Baths. Mum may have driven the three of us there — my sister, Lucy and me — and arranged to collect us an hour later. I couldn’t remember whether they swam with me or whether I went in separately. Swimming itself needed no explanation in the diary. It was what I did.
Talk.
One word.
I couldn’t remember who I talked to or what we talked about, only that it was apparently worth putting down.
Then came ride back, though even that may not have meant riding a bicycle. It could just as easily have meant the ride back in Mum’s car. I could picture us coming home and Mum turning into the drive just as the Quirkes arrived to collect Lucy.
Nearly crash into the Quirkes as they leave.
Or perhaps as they were about to leave.
Instead they stayed.
They had come to fetch their daughter and somehow this became lunch, or a meal, because the Quirkes weren’t merely the parents of one of my sister’s friends. They were Mum’s friends too, family friends from almost as far back as I could remember.
Stay for a meal.
And this was where my mood changed.
Sulk and be aggravated for a bit.
I could feel exactly what that meant even if I couldn’t reconstruct every word spoken around the table. I had had my day arranged. There was the collage. There was the person I had started writing about. There were things I wanted to get on with. Suddenly other people were there and I was required to behave differently.
I had to be sociable.
I had to make polite conversation.
Worse, I might be expected to occupy their older daughter, who was my age, as though because we were both fourteen we therefore needed to entertain one another.
That sort of thing aggravated me enormously.
It wasn’t simply boredom. It was the feeling that somebody else had taken control of my time. I had known what I was going to do and suddenly I wasn’t doing it. Plans had been changed without my choosing to change them. I could become tense quite quickly when that happened, a mixture of anxiety and frustration building up inside me while everybody else probably thought I was merely sulking.
Which I was.
But sulking was what it looked like from the outside.
Inside, everything had been knocked out of place.
And there was something else I wanted to discuss.
I wanted to talk about the brace.
The brace had become a talking point in my own head, even if I hadn’t managed to turn it into one with anybody else.
What I wanted to know, perhaps, was extraordinarily simple.
Did a boy with a brace get to kiss?
I was fourteen years and ten months old and there seemed to be things I ought to know by now without having any idea how one was supposed to find them out. A brace wasn’t simply metal attached to teeth. Once girls mattered, anything attached to your face acquired other possibilities. Did it get in the way? Would a girl mind? Could you hurt somebody? Did people laugh? Did you take it out? Was there something everybody else already knew that I hadn’t been told?
Perhaps I had wanted to ask the older Quirke girl. Perhaps I had wanted to ask somebody else entirely. Perhaps Talk and the brace belonged together. The diary doesn’t say.
I only knew that I wanted to talk about it and, apparently, didn’t.
The whole day seemed to move between versions of bodies. The strange bronzed man from the future in my collage. My own body lying in the sun because I didn’t want it pasty white and pimply. My tomboy kid sister unexpectedly in a bikini. Girls at the swimming baths. A brace in my mouth and the unanswered possibility of kissing.
My body and soul were walking a tightrope between who I was and what I might become.
Perhaps not even walking.
Perhaps I was more like a spider on a tightrope, all arms and legs and concentration, feeling every vibration through the thread, not quite knowing what was waiting at the other end but carrying on towards it anyway
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