Fifty Years Ago: Friday, 27 August 1976
(Gosforth, Age 14:11)
I got up very slowly. There was nowhere to be, no timetable to follow, no one expected me to do this, that or anything else. I could take my time.
In bed under the duvet was a sanctuary. There would be none of that once I was back at boarding school, with all spaces shared. Here I could stay in my room and listen to the radio or play Abba, Elton John, David Bowie or Genesis. I could read science fiction by Asimov or early medieval history. I had my own thoughts to occupy me, dreams to recall and think over. I wasn’t tired or depressed. I simply had no reason to get up quickly and had the time to enjoy it.
I listened to records and stayed in my room.
Then I went under the sunray. We set the sunlamp on Mum’s dressing table in front of her vanity mirror, with a view of the garden beyond. Because we were lit up, we closed the curtains, though there were no neighbours to see through the windows. The sunlamp was meant for the face only. I wore blackened goggles and probably sat there in shorts or pyjama bottoms. Ten minutes max.
Later I went into Gosforth to buy a lead for the record player to connect to the radio. What I wanted was to put the clock radio through the hi-fi speakers. The technology was crude and analogue: long-wave radio, vinyl on the record player, 45- or 60-minute cassettes.
If I was going in to buy things I probably caught the 45 or 46 from the bus stop by the Northern Rugby Club. For a cable I would probably have tried Woolworths, though I might have looked in at Thorpes, the DIY store. I wasn’t sure where else I would have tried. Grandpa might have known though he wasn’t an electronics person. Unless it was the kettle or the toaster. He used to tell me about the ‘crystal set’ the first radios at the beginning of the century.
I also bought Acker Bilk’s Aria. It had been on the radio and was in the charts. It had become something of an earworm.
Then I went to the dentist. The usual; except that he decided to do a little extra and kept on going for three and a half hours.
The surgery was in the centre of residential Gosforth, in a significant converted Edwardian Lodge. Our family doctor was close by, and so was the nursing home where Gosforth mothers gave birth. Mum had gone there when each of us was born, in 1957, 1960, 1961 and 1963, and that was how and where she had made friends with other young mothers. Several of my friends were the product of the same maternity home. We went to each others parties and in due course attended Ascham House Prep School (where Dad had been).
I had been planning to see Julie-Anne. I had arranged to go round.
Instead I was stuck in the dentist’s chair for far, far longer than planned and I hadn’t even been able to let her know. What drove me mad about this dentist was that I was certain he would leave me to deal with another patient for half an hour or more and then pick up where he’d left off. An inordinate amount of time was spent having nothing at all done.
At fourteen you don’t complain, especially about a man armed with a dentist’s drill.
The appointment went on and on. I became upset, bothered, anxious and frustrated, thinking about what I was missing in contrast to being stuck in a dentist’s chair. It wasn’t as if I’d been forewarned that the appointment would take this long either.
There was the taste of the mouthwash and the taste of the dentine as my teeth were drilled. Whether anaesthetic was involved I can’t remember. Not that I’d have been kissing Julie-Anne with a numb mouth — or any mouth, ever. It’s not what we did.
I developed ‘gut rot’ and took Rennie. It must have been indigestion or heartburn from the anxiety of sitting in that dentist’s chair for three and a half hours.
Later, I made an audio cassette recording of Peter Watkins’ Culloden. It was on in the evening. It was a BBC documentary. It was structured like a live, chaotic war report with an excitable journalist voiceover narration, battlefield interviews and a sense of historical balance. Having the audio cassette, I could listen back and make notes. I also had a history book on the events leading up to and after Culloden for reference.
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