Fifty Years Ago, Thursday, 2nd September 1976
(Gosforth, Age 14:11)
After breakfast I watched TV and played with the cat.
The cat was an anomaly. My sister, at twelve years ten months, had been given it, despite being horribly allergic to cats. Mum hated both cats and dogs in the house because they left hairs. It couldn’t last.
I went to the dentist and saw Julie-Anne just outside, leaving the waiting room in a rush. We said hi. It wasn’t exactly an enchanting encounter if someone’s face was numb after a filling. Small talk shared at the dentist was about all the horrible things that had just been done to you, or were about to be done.
Stubly put ligatures in my orthodontic brace. He was quick for a change. I never knew if he was going to take half an hour or three. I could be sitting around for ages in the dentist’s chair for no good reason. He would go off, apparently to deal with other clients, for half an hour or more and then come back to me. I hated being left like that. Like being at a bus stop not knowing all the buses had stopped. The feeling of time wasted was eating away at my brain.
I went into Gosforth for a Kodak film for my Pocket Instamatic. Turner’s or Robertson’s. The Pocket Instamatic might have been my best ever birthday present. I got it when I was twelve, in September 1973, and I used it frequently, capturing life at boarding prep school, family, friends and holidays. I was still using it five years later, hidden up my sleeve on the Disney set of The Spaceman and King Arthur.
Buying the film, developing it and getting the prints back would probably cost about £3.25 to £4.00 altogether. Sometimes you got a bonus plastic display book for the prints.
Back home I found the Colson man was in the kitchen to service our somewhat ancient dishwasher. The dishwasher was placed at waist height over the kitchen counter draining board.
I went to Auntie Shirley’s after getting a drink from Grandpa’s. Grandpa had joined a regional brewery at fourteen and retired fifty years later, having gone from office boy to regional manager. Part of his pension was four cans of lager or ale every month, or perhaps every quarter. He didn’t drink, or only rarely, so his grandsons got the benefit.
Town too crowded.
I could feel overwhelmed in a big crowd, claustrophobic even. Too much like life in an enormous rugby scrum without a purpose. Too many people loitering about, window shopping without purpose.
I got a Kodak film back that had been developed. Any good prints went into wallets, albums or a scrapbook; many survived and have now been copied and digitised.
The ones of me were okay. Julie-Anne had taken one of me. I looked my age: fourteen. Squinting in the sun failing to look cool.
Then there was the mirror image of Julie-Anne. Blonde hair, bright blue eyes, very Scandinavian, the most delicate features. She looked as sweet and as delicate as a kitten.
But the one of Julie-Anne made her look too young.
To me? Really?
Maybe she looked twelve. I felt older. Physically I was pushing towards six feet tall and becoming a young man, an older teen. In the right clothes I could pass for someone older. Julie-Anne, I felt, was still a “girl”. Boarding school gives you a false sense of maturity too.
Not that we had any lessons whatsoever on puberty and how we developed. Not a word on menstruation or sex beyond basic reproduction and its consequences, rather than how it was done or instigated.
At our age we were very specific about playing with, or being with, people our own age, or a bit older if it made us appear older. We could be horrid to younger boys and younger brothers, leave them out of games and conversations and call them “squirts”.
I was trying to not to think about Julie-Anne in this way. I could say I had a girlfriend. That’s cool. Even if we rarely of ever kissed or held hands. A put the ‘not kissing’ down to my brace.
Back home I watched the new BBC series Gangsters on TV.
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