Fifty Years Ago: Wednesday, 25th August 1976
(Gosforth, Age 14:10)
Bright again, after a breakfast of poached eggs, I have a bath. I save the water for the garden. I siphoned it out through the bathroom window, as I do every day.
The bath was only about three inches deep. That was what baths had become that summer. Three inches of water, full of soap by the time I had finished with it, and not a drop to be wasted afterwards. I put a rubber hose into it and siphoned the water out through the bathroom window and down into the garden. I had been doing this for a couple of weeks now.
The garden needed everything it could get. The lawn wasn’t really a lawn any more. It was hard like concrete, yellow and baked, with cracks opening through it. The whole country seemed to have dried out in the summer drought, but by then the extraordinary had become ordinary. You had a shallow bath. You didn’t pull the plug. You put a rubber tube through the window and gave the garden the soapy water.
Mum told me that Mr Quirke had rung the water company and we could now use a hose to water the garden. I guess the drought is over.
Mr and Mrs Quirke weren’t neighbours, though they belonged to that category of people who hardly needed explaining within the family. They were close family friends, so Mr Quirke was Uncle Charles and Mrs Quirke was Aunty Shirley, just as other close family friends became Uncle this and Aunty that whether they were related to us or not.
I rang Aunty Shirley (Mrs Quirke) for some history books.
Why I wanted the history books I didn’t record. There must have been a reason. I was on holiday, so perhaps I was reading something or pursuing some subject of my own, but all I gave myself was some history books, as though I could never possibly forget what I meant.
Sunbathe.
I lay on the sunlounger in the back garden, in Speedos, continuing what had become another routine of that long bright summer. I was joined by Joker our pet Dutch Hare (don’t call him a rabbit!). There wasn’t much grass left beneath me worth calling grass, only the baked garden and the sun above it.
Lunch.
Lunch at home was quite likely to have emerged from the deep freeze rather than from any elaborate preparation: risotto, spaghetti, perhaps a cold soup. I don’t remember salads featuring much. There would be something Mum had cooked previously and frozen, brought back into existence for another meal.
Go to Granny Vs.
Granny V lived in a 1960s bungalow on a large plot at the Race Course end of Melton Park. The front garden had an impressive floral display maintained by a gardener I never once met. He dug boarders and cut the lawn all year long.
The front door was all glass and opened into a modest hallway with rooms leading off it. Straight ahead was the kitchen; to the right was the sitting room. In the niche between those entrances stood the spinning wheel, dark wood, oak I guessed, solid and sturdy, with its foot pedal. It was one of those objects that belonged so completely to the house that I hardly thought of it as remarkable.
Granny V herself still carried something of the woman she had been during the Second World War. Her dress sense, hairstyle and makeup all seemed rooted in that period. She had presence, a woman of substance, and the house reflected that same mixture of permanence and accumulation.
There were several smells at once. Cigarette smoke was part of it. So were the dogs, their hair and body odour, even the occasional smell of their urine. Indoors and outdoors seemed to meet in the air of the place: smoke, animals, flowers, cooking and furniture.
Her Benson & Hedges came in gold packets. Smoking indoors was simply normal. It belonged to the room in the same way as the furniture and ornaments did.
The dogs were Queen, the black Labrador, and Scamp, the Yorkshire terrier. They were part of the household rather than pets placed to one side. Their presence registered everywhere: movement, hair, smell, the expectation that one or both would be nearby.
There was also the glass cabinet, free-standing and almost like a small telephone box, upright and narrow with shelves inside. It held ornaments and knick-knacks, the sort of collection accumulated over years: glass ornaments from a trip to Venice, dolls in traditional dress from Madeira, origami figures made by my older sister, a pottery mug made by my brother a school and figurines.
The music box had a ballerina. I could wind it up and set it going, and it played one of those instantly recognisable classical tunes that later seemed to belong to ice-cream vans. I cannot now name the tune, but I can still place the sound.
Granny collected Green Shield stamps. They were kept in an album, close to the catalogue, part of another 1970s domestic ritual: save the stamps, fill the pages, look through the catalogue and imagine what they might eventually become.
She drank tea. I would more likely have had squash. We ate two figure Kit-Kat biscuits.
Conversation followed familiar lines. She would ask what I had been up to. She would tell me about the floral display in the front garden, the birds visiting the feeder in the back garden, or one of her recent cruises, to Madeira or the Norwegian fjords. These were not grand announcements so much as the things that made up her world and therefore became part of mine.
The back garden was long and carefully kept. The lawn was cut with visible tramlines. At the far end, the garden was crossed by a stream contained by a deep trench held in place with flagstones. A stream, rarely more than a trickle, ran through a stone-sided culvert in the bottom.
As boys, my brother and I lowered ourselves into the stream and had tramped about in it, building dams and breaking them again. Beyond it lay Newcastle Racecourse and the Golf Club, so the garden seemed to lead out into a larger landscape.
I don’t remember how long I stayed that particular visit; possibly an hour – starting in sitting room first, then a saunter across the back-garden. a visit always ended with her kitchen and her kitchen drawer full of sweats: a pick out a couple of items before leaving: polo mints and fruit pastels perhaps.
Gran’s house had its own geography and its own permanent cast of objects and smells: the glass front door, the dark spinning wheel, the gold Benson & Hedges packet, Queen and Scamp, the ballerina music box, Green Shield stamps, tea and squash, the long striped lawn and the stream at the bottom where my brother and I had once made dams. At fourteen, I assumed it would be there indefinitely.
Go swimming. I don’t stay long.
I went to Gosforth Pool, but swimming there during the holidays wasn’t much use if I wanted to swim properly. It was difficult to do lengths. The pool belonged to everybody during the holidays: children splashing about, people getting in the way, bodies moving across whatever line I wanted to follow. So I don’t stay long.
Go to the corner shop, Ebletts, on the way home. More swears or crisps, perhaps a copy of Look and Learn, or a comic.
I had to Change.
We did something or went somewhere that evening. I have no recollection what or where or why.
The Quirkes are going!
Something had been arranged with them. The exclamation mark suggests that their going mattered. Perhaps it altered what I thought the evening was going to be; perhaps I was pleased. The diary doesn’t say. I expected myself to remember.
Ring Julie-Anne.
Julie-Anne had entered my life through Nicky Quirke about eight months earlier. Nicky was my age, though in many respects she seemed much more mature than I was. She lived near Julie-Anne and had introduced us, but after that introduction I rarely saw the two of them together. Julie-Anne and I had become sweethearts of a kind, sufficiently so that people knew about us.
Nicky herself had once occupied a much stranger position in my imagination.
When we were eleven or twelve, our parents were family friends and therefore Nicky and I were thrown together. The adults did things together, so we did things together. That was more or less the whole relationship. There wasn’t a beginning to it, so there could hardly have been an ending. I never went on a date with her. I didn’t have feelings for her. Yet I wrote to her from boarding school, and for a year or two I had turned her into a kind of private superstition.
If I rolled a dice I would say, give me a six and I’ll marry Nicky!
And bizarrely I thought it worked more often than not.
Later I changed the wish.
Give me a six and I’ll become an actor.
The telephone I used to ring Julie-Anne might have been the one in the hallway, though there were phones in the kitchen and Mum’s room as well. Telephones belonged to rooms then. You couldn’t disappear with one. A call was something made within the geography of the house, potentially within earshot of whoever else happened to be there.
The Quirkes sit near us. So where are we? The Theatre Royal? the Odean Cinema? A meal out?
Perhaps it was even a dinner party at the Quirkes’. Perhaps Julie-Anne was there, alone or with her family. Whatever it was, several strands of my life appear to have crossed in the same place: the Quirkes, their daughter Nicky and, somehow, Julie-Anne.
Lift back from Quirkes.
Uncle Charles would have driven. Again, I didn’t say where we had been or exactly where he brought us back from. I didn’t need to.
‘Get pain’.
That was less mysterious to me than it looks now. I was used to getting sudden physical reactions if I ate the wrong thing. Certain foods could produce pain without much warning, so Get pain required no diagnosis or explanation in the diary. It happened. I knew what it meant.
I felt a bit embarrassed for Nicky Quirke—my old girlfriend.
Calling Nicky my old girlfriend made the relationship sound considerably more substantial than it ever was. We had been children of family friends who had been put together because the adults were together. There had been no romance to finish because there had never really been one to begin with.
Yet that evening I felt awkward.
Probably nobody else did.
Nicky had introduced me to Julie-Anne. Nicky was Julie-Anne’s neighbour. Julie-Anne and I were now known to be sweethearts of a kind. Somehow, with the three connections coming together, I felt a bit embarrassed for Nicky, as though a relationship that had existed mostly because our parents had once placed us beside each other might still require some acknowledgement.
It was one of those webs the adults had created without necessarily intending to. The Quirkes were not relations but were Uncle Charles and Aunty Shirley. Nicky had been the girl I was supposed to be attached to before I understood what being attached to a girl might mean. She had then introduced me to Julie-Anne, who did mean something different. Granny V belonged to another part of the same landscape. Gosforth Pool, Ebletts, our house, the Quirkes’ house, family friendships, parents and children all joined together.
I was still prepared to be one of the threads in that weave.
But the weave had already torn.
My parents had divorced. Dad had first moved to Chollerford, then spent a year in London, and now he was at Appleby in Cumbria. If my life had once been woven into his tapestry, that part of it was becoming greyed. There was Gosforth with Mum, the familiar streets and people and houses; and there was Appleby, increasingly another life altogether.
Perhaps that was why these networks still mattered so much. They were structures which had been there before I began thinking about them. Aunty Shirley remained Aunty Shirley even though she wasn’t my aunt. Nicky could remain my old girlfriend even though she had never properly been my girlfriend. Granny V’s spinning wheel remained beside the door. Her music-box ballerina still turned. Ebletts was still on the way home from the swimming pool.
Even when the larger pattern had begun to come apart, all the smaller threads still seemed to be exactly where I had left them.
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