Fifty Years Ago: Tuesday, 31 August 1976
(Gosforth, Age 14:11)
I was sick in bed when someone’s dad, one of my brother’s friends, dropped my brother off after his short stay in Beadnell.
Don’t ask me about Beadnell. I’ll just cry and get angry at my father.
Beadnell was our holiday cottage by the sea and holidays every Summer and Easter and even long weekends as we grew up through nursery school and the first years of primary school. All our family friends from Gosforth spent their holidays at Beadnell, whether they had a cottage, modern bungalow or caravan. And that’s where our friends grew up into their teens — without us! Without me :(
My brother was approaching seventeen, so eager to be with his friends but not yet driving. And we no longer had a home in Beadnell and hadn’t since 1970.
I showed my brother the patch of the garden I’d cleared and where I had started to shift the larger logs.
The garden was part of an historic landscaped garden from 75–100 years before. The planting was now looking dense. Under guidance from Mum we’d take out odd trees here and there to let in light.
We must have had a garden fire to deal with these. It was Grandpa’s habit to light a fire soon after starting work around the garden. I did the same. It was satisfying to put dried wood on this fire or get it roaring with a few branches from a conifer.
I can see it now.
It occupied a space that once had a children’s swing and see-saw.
Green.
I can even remember Dad assembling it now that I think of it.
Of course, thinking of this, I wanted to be sharing this with Dad. But where was he? He’d done a runner six years ago, he’d been divorced, married and divorced again in that time.
There was so much he had taught me. How to prune a mature tree. Finding the right point in the branch and how to cut it. Those days we painted the ‘wound’. Planting hybrid rhododendrons — testing the soil for acidity, pH levels, then creating a hole and putting it in. Constructing a wooden water barrel. Putting up a rope ladder.
What else?
Which was such a loss.
Would he come back to Mum?
There was still hope.
We could see what had happened with his second marriage. From our first stepmother to our faces: she had no intention of staying in Cumbria with my father. I’m surprised we weren’t asked by a lawyer to provide evidence that she’d married our father for his money, stuck it out for a few years then took him for all he was worth.
This woman reduced me to tears.
It had my father in tears — the only ones I ever witnessed in my life.
Basically, how could he feck up so badly?!
Indeed.
Breakfast. I got it myself.
Porridge maybe, but unlikely. A cooked breakfast likely. Followed by Robertson’s marmalade on toast. Dishes into the dishwasher.
I adored cooking and was an early student of the My Learn to Cook Book. I would prefer to sit on the kitchen counter watching my mum cook than anything else. She taught me what I learnt.
Bacon and eggs wasn’t cooking.
We were self-reliant. We were made to grow up at boarding prep school and had even done lone camping trips. That and our ‘den life’ in the woods had supported a semi-feral ability to be independent.
Robertson’s mattered. Brands mattered. The taste.
I recall a day exeat from boarding prep school when my brother and I, home for a matter of hours, got through an entire loaf of bread, Lurpak butter and marmalade. The marmalade at school was dross. As was most of the food: as cheap as it could be produced.
Some nutritional value I hope.
I then lolled about.
Bath. Sun lounger. Glued to the TV even if it was only the trade test card or a ‘test card transmission’. Sleeping was a bonus. To dream a treat.
This sounds like a tending towards being bored.
I’d hate that.
Irritable and guilty. It had been my father’s thing to crush me if I dared even say the words ‘I’m bored’, let alone say it with a facial expression.
And while I’m here.
This was the man who passed instructions for us via Mum that we had to stop calling him ‘Daddy’. It was Dad or Father.
Fifty years later I feel how he was terrorised as a growing boy by his mother — who was a martinet for discipline and for her own reasons loathed boys. She’d only ever wanted to have girls and instead had two boys. And she had a messed up childhood — brought up by her wealthy maternal grandfather rather than with her parents. Her father was a butcher apparently.
As Voltaire expressed, don’t give me too long with my thoughts, look what it digs up.
I rang Julie-Anne, my friend who also was a girl.
What is a girlfriend at 14?
I was very coy with Julie-Anne. We rarely got into situations where a cuddle and kiss might come up. No games of sardines, no disco dancing — she was never allowed out to them :(
We had kissed.
Tender without any thrill.
I wanted to arrange to go to the flicks. We’d generally go to the Royalty on Gosforth High Street.
The Royalty always felt a bit rundown to me. But I did one or two Saturday Matinees as a boy and went again in my teens at least three times.
The first time we met a couple of girls in the dark and got chatting and snogging and they left before the lights came up.
It was all a bit ‘murder in the dark’!
Knowing what was showing was never difficult. You could look it up in the daily Journal or the Evening Chronicle. Or ring up and ask. Or look at the posters outside.
Mum wasn’t back.
Julie-Anne said she had intended to go tomorrow anyway.
Cheerful. Delight to be asked. She didn’t turn up with a female friend. It would be us.
At this point it struck me that I did all the asking!
Do girls ever ask? For a dance? A date? Do they arrange anything? Do we do it all? Is the initiative ours alone?
Not that I recall Julie-Anne ever telephoning me first.
I’d have liked that. A girl eager to say let’s go and see a film, go to the beach, have a coffee on the High Street.
At most I got was ‘come round to mine’, which in all fairness was perhaps as far as a parent would permit.
At dances we did ALL the work. We had to ask, and be rejected or accepted. We had to join them on the dance floor and sidle over and be given the once over.
One rejection in five?
I wasn’t resentful about it at the time.
That was our lot.
And then there was the question of paying. I’d like to think I paid for Julie-Anne. But maybe we each paid.
That’s the thing about being the male and doing the asking — you ask and you pay?!
Great-uncle Spencer turned up.
He came from my grandfather’s family and their story is an entry in an encyclopaedia. Lowly born. His father a domestic servant in Shotley Bridge. Five brothers: Percy, Jack — my grandfather — Billy, who died in WWII, Stanley, who died as an infant, then Spencer.
Or the other way around.
Mum came soon after.
And Dad appeared with my younger sister just before lunch.
Appeared.
His rare appearance in or at the family home was a thrill which never deserved that kind of status.
In some respects he was deliberately blinkered to all that he’d given up and tried successfully not to take any interest whatsoever in how my brother and I, and Grandpa, and Mum, had maintained the house and garden.
Yet there he was.
Just before lunch
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