Fifty Years Ago: Saturday, 28th August 1976
(Gosforth, Age 14:11)
In the garden, I returned to work on pulling down a large tree stump my brother had been cutting down. I was now chopping at the roots.
Tree pruning or removal was a task offered rarely but entered into with enthusiasm. It was man’s work; or more specifically, it ought to have been one specific man’s work: Dad. But he and Mum were long separated, so that left it to my brother and me.
We had a garage and a tool shed full of axes and saws. Grandpa kept these razor-sharp. Something about sharpening weapons in the trenches of the First World War meant that he knew how to keep a blade sharp. I often envisaged him in a trench sharpening a knife or bayonet.
Our sisters never got into chopping down or chopping up trees, from what I recall. Nor did they build a garden fire, which was another part of the job and experience. There was something satisfying in all of it. It was physical activity, a workout. You got your hands dirty. You felt like you had achieved something at the end of it. Men (and boys) had been chopping down trees and burning wood for millennia.
I had already done some the night before, so today I was carrying on with it, hacking through the roots and clearing whatever was left over from the stump. In all likelihood we built a fire and burnt the wood straight away. There was an odd irony in that because we could not keep the logs for the fire in the house: we had to use smokeless fuel. I don’t think there had been any ban on burning garden rubbish though, so the branches and roots could go straight onto a fire in the garden.
I would have been in jeans and a T-shirt, with one of Granny’s old knitted jumpers or an old school V-neck pulled over it if I got cold, and wellies. It was the sort of clothing you could ruin without anyone minding.
While I was doing all this, Grandpa Wilson was working on my racing bike.
Grandpa lived only half a mile away and came over regularly. He repaired cars, bikes, lawn mowers, kettles and toasters. He sharpened saws and axes, cleaned and maintained tools, removed leaves from gutters and drains and decorated, whether painting or putting up wallpaper. If something needed doing, he knew how to do it.
The racer had been my twelfth or thirteenth birthday present, second hand, with a dynamo and a speedo. Grandpa replacing the back tyre was simply another thing Grandpa could do.
Eventually I came indoors and flopped in front of the telly with a mug of tea and some chocolate digestives.
I caught the end of The Kissing Bandit on Tyne Tees, which ended just before 5:00 PM.
There were only three channels, so you watched whatever was offered. BBC 1, BBC 2 and ITV. I barely ever checked the Radio Times. You took what they had to offer.
After spending part of the day chopping at a tree stump, dirty from the garden and smelling of smoke, I had a bath. A soak in Badidas, Radio One on, perhaps a book — Early Medieval History — or a colour supplement to look through while I adjusted the hot tap with the big toe of my right foot.
Then supper.
From 8:15pm to 9:05pm we watched the BBC 2 documentary Hollywood Dream-Maker: Robert Stevenson — Mary Poppins, Bedknobs and Broomsticks.
Working in television was already an idea that was fermenting.
Although I wrote the diary as though I spent the evening alone, in all likelihood Mum and my sister and I were piled onto the sofa, with my older brother in the rocking chair. We might have tumbled onto the floor or flopped across Mum’s lap.
We also had Joker, our pet Dutch Hare, who lived in the dog kennel at the back of the house. We sometimes brought him in. He was tame and would stretch out in front of the television or hop onto our laps. By turning a circle around one eye or the other we could “wind up” his ears. He was very clean and ate his poo, which was one of those facts about him that was both disgusting and endlessly worth mentioning.
After the Robert Stevenson documentary came The Running Man, starring Laurence Harvey, Lee Remick and Alan Bates.
At the same time The Heroes of Telemark, starring Kirk Douglas and Richard Harris, was on another channel, so we channel-hopped between the two. We just randomly clicked between them as the drama waxed and waned. I am certain I had seen The Heroes of Telemark already.
So the evening became one film bleeding into another: Laurence Harvey, Lee Remick and Alan Bates giving way to Kirk Douglas and Richard Harris and then back again, according to whichever story looked as though something was about to happen.
I’d be fifteen next month. Another year and I’ll be sixteen.
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