Fifty Years Ago: Monday, 30th August 1976
(Gosforth, Age 14:11)
After breakfast, I started building a fence with the wood my brother and I got from a tree we’d chopped down in the garden. Grandpa had come over was taking the lead. Fifty years on I haven’t the first clue what the fence looked like, or where it ran, or even what it was intended to keep in, or out. So much for memory.
We also dug up two stumps using a fork, pick, and crowbar. I loved the physical work: it was something to do, in wellies, outside. A blister meant you’d been working hard.
Grandpa was meticulous about cleaning the tools, drying them and putting them away. Every tool had its peg on a hook on the garage tool. Each tool had its silhouette painted on the white washed walls.
Grandpa, a man born in 1896 and raised in the grounds of a ‘big house’ in Shotley Bridge, showed his grandsons how to do all kinds of practical tasks: sharpening a saw tooth by tooth, sharpening an axe or knife, finding and fixing a bike puncture, oiling the lawn mower, wiring a plug, hanging a door – our grandfather had stepped into the role that our father should have occupied.
I enjoyed gardening; as a boy Dad he been the one who choose and bought the shrubs and plants, hybrid rhododendrons and roses.
A year or so after he had left I decide to clear a patch of garden to the north of the house and work out a planting pattern of dead nettles and hostas. I’d gone to great lengths over it, following his Reader’s Digest book on gardening. I did a plan for it, and a drawing which I coloured in. On one of the few moments I got with him when he’d come over for some reason (I doubt we saw him more than once every three months) Dad looked at what I had done and was dismissive and blunt.
“You’ll not get any colour in the shade.”
That’s it, verbatim. Word for word.
Nothing about my effort, or my expectations of praise. Nothing about the thought that had gone into it or the skill expressed in the layout and drawing. Nothing about having taken his own gardening book and tried to make something from it.
Dad’s was smart, perhaps too smart. The kind of person at school we’d call a ‘smart arse’. He’s the man who gave our mother instructions on how we were to be raised but was no longer there to do it himself. One such instruction that came down to us children’s I’m guessing something like 8, 10, 12 and 14 was not to call him “daddy” – it had to be “father” or “dad”. What was that about. It made me wonder how he’d been brought up. Mum once told me that Gran had been cruelly strict with her two boys – stemming from her desire only to have had girls. Apparently.
Grandpa’s view on the world counted for me. He had experience and survived a lot. One of five sons to the chauffeur in that ‘big house’ he’d started work in the head office of a large regional brewer on his fourteen birthday. Still a teenager he’d volunteered for Kitcheners Army in the First World War, was transferred to the Machine Gun Corps and survived the Somme and Passchendaele. He transferred to the Royal Flying Corps and trained as fighter pilot and in doing so became an officer. This must have given the insight and taste for another kind of life. Once back at work he gradually climbed through the ranks to become a regional manager for the brewery. He found a way to put his only child, his daughter through Newcastle’s leading girls school. She even went on to university where she met Dad.
Their story for another time and place. Their marriage ended as his affairs were exposed. Grandpa simply called him “a naughty boy”, after revelations about his affairs with a secretary and the wife of a family friend. The understatement was extraordinary. Any belief in God died in the trenches but he could forgive human folly- he’d seen enough of it.
Gran was probably over (Mum was away). She heated up Fray Bentos steak and kidney pie, made gravy, mashed potatoes and peas. We followed this with raspberry ripple ice-cream from a tub in the freezer in the utility room.
We finished in the garden around three.
I stuck on the TV and just ‘spaced out’.
4:00 PM – Play School: The staple afternoon programme for preschool children.
4:25 PM – Yogi’s Gang: Hanna-Barbera cartoon block.
4:45 PM – John Craven’s Newsround: a children’s current affairs show.
5:00 PM – The Oddball Couple: a cartoon of mismatched creatures.
There was nothing but the trade test card on BBC 2 until after 6:00pm.
At some point I got fed up with it all and had a bath – a soak in Badidas, and then used the sunray lamp.
The sunray lamp, as we called it, lived in Mum’s room. It was usually out permanently on top of the chest of drawers. we’d set it up on her dressing table and sit in front of it for ten minutes. Heat, warm metal, dust, ozone, hot skin: all of that.
Supper, watched more TV, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.
I knew Chitty Chitty Bang Bang because we’d been to see it as a family: Mum, Dad and us four children. A proper family evening out. We had parked in the multi-storey behind the Odeon in Newcastle, had an evening meal in The Milk Maid, then gone to the cinema, where we sat upstairs in the circle, often next to the balcony edge overlooking the stalls.
So seeing it on television carried another memory of the family together – all six of us, the Milk Maid, the Odeon, the circle
I rang my ‘girlfriend’ Julie-Anne from the phone by the bed in Mum’s room.
It was a local call, so there was no great issue of cost or asking permission.
Ringing a girl was always exciting; It was a bit of a gamble.
Would she be in?
Would she pick up?
What would she be doing?
Did she have time to talk? Would she be over heard? What would we talk about?
“Hi, how are you? What are you up to?”
You got out your phone book (or looked it up in a phone directory) dialled the number and committed yourself.
There was another complication with telephones in the House. The extensions were all on the same line. Someone could simply pick up another telephone and listen.
Gran would do that.
You could be talking to a girl and become aware that Gran was on the other end. “The other end” meant precisely that: somebody else on another extension of the same telephone line, listening in to the conversation.
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