Fifty Years Ago: Thursday, 26th August 1976
(Gosforth, Age 14:10)
I was asleep, but Mum brought me a poached egg on toast; she wanted me up. It meant time to get my arse out of bed and look like I cared to be alive. I get that.
Eggs every day sounded right: boiled, fried, poached, scrambled, in an omelette.
Breakfast and eggs went a long way back. Maybe I could remember breakfast at the playroom table. Meal times with Dad as a child had felt worse than being at school: sit up straight, use your fork correctly, don’t put your knife in the butter and the jam.
Dad had been gone for six years by then; yet I’m still noticing his absence, little did he know; little did he care. He lived ninety miles away in Appleby.
When he walked out, he said goodbyes and took next to nothing with him. What’s that about? That Christmas he stayed over on Christmas Eve (in the guest bedroom).
That was it. He barely ever crossed the threshold again.
He was too good at letting go of the past: Books, records, clothes, papers, garden tools—everything stayed. Not the 8mm film projector or the dozens of family films. Not the carefully sorted box of photographic slides. It was all left behind as if the emotional trauma had been so huge that everything had been lost in a fire or an earthquake. He was turning his back. Dropping that problem and moving on.
Before that, as a child, I thought Dad, like Mum, had been up early to put up a wooden water butt or hang a rope ladder. He liked to break a raw egg into a pint of milk and then down it in one.
Back to the moment, this day: Now Mum was in a panic to get my brother on the bus to Beadnell, my sister to Appleby, and herself down south. That’s what our family had become. Everything was fragmented. Where was our older sister? Instead of caring about the family divorced had made it ‘everyone for themselves’. And so it was.
It was like being a gerbil in a cage.
The others were here and there, getting ready, or not, in their own way. Surely my younger sister needed more help. Had she got plenty of knickers, a spare pair of jeans, something ‘nice’ in case Dad took her out, or they had a fancy dinner at Appleby—as well as her riding gear?
My brother would have been left to put his own stuff together until Mum stepped in to object. A car mag, spare grundies and a razor was not enough for a week with the Mackasys in Beadnell.
We each got up and got ready at a different pace and for different destinations.
No wonder I stayed in bed. I was out of the way. I could get lost in a book on anatomy of meteorology or astronomy or gastronomy.
These trips were never for long.
We had overnight bags, not luggage. My brother was sixteen and eight months, only months away from driving. His Gosforth friends were in Beadnell, and I imagined he was staying with one of them. My sister was twelve and nine months. Her best friends were the Shetland ponies at Appleby with Dad.
I’d not want to go. Therein lies the problem. My insistence on staying in Gosforth had to be accommodated.
Our older sister, eighteen and nine months, was abroad in Canada—or elsewhere, I didn’t recall. She’d been living at Appleby for a couple of years.
I was staying at home for a while because I had a dentist appointment, I wanted to see my sweetheart Julie-Anne, and I wanted to go to swimming training with the Newcastle Club.
I could be my own best company.
I liked to be able to do my own thing. I could be lonely, but that wasn’t any different when everyone was around.
Was I considered OK in the house on my own as I approached fifteen? Apparently so. I wasn’t going to throw a party. Gran and Grandpa were half a mile away. They weren’t going to stay. There were neighbours across the road. Did I need a babysitter? Apparently not. Phew.
I imagined I stayed well out of everything while they were getting ready, in my room.
Mum asked me to “tidy up”and then went. She had to get to Warwickshire. The “tidy up” was to do with Joan the daily cleaner coming – she was coming to clean not to put our things away. Evethijf we had left (what she hadn’t thrown out on our absence at boarding school), had to be in its allocated drawer, or cupboard or shelf space.
Then everybody had gone – they wwees somewhere else. I was somewhere here.
Girlfriend Talk
I had this theory, or feeling, that I was incomplete without a girlfriend. It had to be a girl. This wasn’t a sexual thing, not at fourteen. It was a gender thing.
Get this. Think of how just One colour painted alone on a sheet of paper looks to how it acquires new qualities when a second colour was painted alongside it.
To me Julie-Anne was a sandy yellow to my pale navy blue. Julie-Anne was fair and blue-eyed. Mum’s colour for us boys was Navy blue, though I would have preferred something more Mediterranean in tone (turquoise) than the North Sea had I a choice. At fourteen I laegelly wore what I was told to wear. And often, as if we were twins, my brother and I wore the very same clothes. We even got the same hair cut. So much for individualty.
Let’s visualise.
Girls added another dimension to the world, and a girl could make me feel complete. I always felt something was missing, that I had been born to be a couple.
I didn’t do male friends. Not a mate. I couldn’t be ‘one of the lads’.
That didn’t mean I didn’t have friends at school. The problem was having friends at school who I only ever saw at school, in the school setting. Almost all of them had been lost to other boarding schools from the age of thirteen. It felt as if such relationships weren’t worth investing in.
My brother had been my ‘mate’ for the best part of the first ten years of my life.
I drew a map of the Appleby area.
My head was often contemplating the past. With Appleby there was every opportunity and good reason to wonder what it had been like over the previous millennia: from a Roman camp on the steep bank above the ford, to an expanding settlement in the hook of the river and the castle as it expanded under the Normans and generations of aristocrats.
I was time-travelling in my imagination.
I’d seen a relief model at Mowden Hall School and had the idea of making one myself. Each contour line on an OS map gave you another layer and, when glued together, you got a 3D layout. Hardboard or sheets of polystyrene perhaps.
I felt it allowed you to see things differently: the steepness of a bank, the natural curve of a path around a hill, the flow of watercourses, why houses and bridges would appear in one place or another.
It was historical and geographical.
I had a bath.
A bath was far more than somewhere to wash. It was a sanctuary. It was nudity. It was a place where the world would melt, and ideas form. It was a luxury, and a rare treat compared with the communal, open-plan bathrooms at boarding school.
I let ideas form.
I encouraged it.
At my age I could see how my body was forming and changing. Muscle. Hair and hairs. Tan and tan lines. Spots. Frown or laughter lines. The backs of my hands.
At school, comparisons with other boys were unavoidable: physical maturity, bodily hair, whether he shaved or not. Here there was no comparison required.
Grandpa and Gran came around.
Grandpa spent most of his time outdoors unless decorating or sitting in the rocking chair in the playroom. Gran made herself at home in the kitchen.
I watered the garden.
Could we now use a hose? Maybe we could. Had there still been a drought and official water restrictions in effect, I would have kept to the regulation of three inches in the bath.
The garden was dense with mature landscaping trees planted around the turn of the century, when Fencer Hill Park had been a lodge and one large manor house. The land had been sold off in plots of a little under an acre each, so detached houses now ran the length of the drive on either side, but the old planting remained.
There were trees everywhere.
I started shifting stuff around in my room.
There was something cathartic about rearranging the furniture. It was like I was rearranging the contents of my mind. A change was as good as a rest and all that.
I took the bed sheets off to wash.
I’d been stripping my bed and doing hospital corners since I was eight. That was part and parcel of being a boarding school boy. At home I could do domestic chores.
I had to have hospital corners.
We had a utility room at the back door: a washing machine, a dryer and a drying rack.
Lunch.
Gran had cooked, or heated food Mum had left. Mum would prepare multiple dishes before going away for a week and put everything labelled into the freezer in the utility room.
Afterwards I put my bed by the window.
It was an unusual place to put it, but it made it feel like I was staying somewhere new.
The bed took almost the width of the room and sat under the white-painted double-glazed Crittall windows. It was a temporary affair. It made opening the fitted cupboard awkward and was now partially under my fitted bookshelf.
I’d had to move my desk. I shoved it over where the bed had been. The records and record player went on the floor there too.
Everything was squeezed into one end of the room—the fitted cupboard, the bedroom door onto the landing, the bedside chest of three drawers, the bed.
It felt like being in a cabin.
It felt as if I was camping out.
I didn’t recall exactly what posters I had up. A Bowie. Roger Dean’s Badgers.
Lying in bed under the window was very different. At night, with the curtains open, I could look at the stars. I could pick out some basic constellations, though urban light pollution limited what I could see.
I sunbathed.
I’d lie on a sunlounger in the garden. Then, as the sun came round, I could lie on my bedroom floor for half an hour and sunbathe naked.
I liked that.
Sunlight felt like a tonic on the skin. It needed to get everywhere. A body covered felt unnatural.
It felt raw, animalistic. It wasn’t that I was a secret nudist. It was like skinny dipping, but under the sun rather than in water. There was the feeling of sunlight on skin normally covered by swimming trunks, the possibility of being seen, and also the difference between nudity I chose and all the communal bathrooms and changing rooms of boarding school.
I finished reading Second Foundation and continued with the history of the Early Middle Ages.
That tied into the map of Appleby and my interest in the world of six or seven hundred years before. I could move from Asimov’s Galactic Empire to the Early Middle Ages and then back to the contours around Appleby, time-travelling in my imagination: the steep bank, the ford, the river curving around the settlement, paths going where the land allowed them to go.
Supper.
I wondered whether Gran was still around to heat something up and then went home, or whether by then I was on my own.
After supper I chopped a tree.
The density of all those mature trees limited the sunlight and, over time, we thinned out the unwanted ones. There were plenty of them.
I had been known to chop down the wrong tree.
There was no chainsaw. I used a saw and an axe.
There was sawdust sticking to me, the smell of the wood, blisters, the physical workout, the repetitive sawing action. How long could I keep it going? How fast?
Back and forward.
Back and forward.
The wood and the blade became hot.
Then I rang Julie-Anne.
I used Mum’s phone. It had a rotary dial. I’d sit on the floor resting against the bed, tuck the phone under my chin and settle into talking for ages.
There was always a nervous thrill about dialling the numbers.
One after another.
Then waiting while it rang until she picked up.
‘Hi, it’s me.’
We could talk about relations, what was on telly, what we’d read or what we were listening to. I could wax lyrical. Girls’ world sounded fun.
Julie-Anne probably freaked out at my being home alone. I wasn’t expecting her to come and pay a visit. Her parents would not have let her do that without certainty that my mum was there.
It wasn’t really about having an empty house and getting a girl into it.
It was more like nesting, and incubation ahead of a fledgling first flight.
Later I used the Sun-ray lamp.
It was a free-standing table-top lamp.
Topless.
Goggles.
Ten minutes max
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