Fifty Years Ago: Friday, 3rd September 1976
I recalled a dream. I was going to write it out because the retelling of it stuck in my mind.
Shortly I learned how to record a dream. Just write the basics down! But then how to analyse the dream? This came from an article in a Sunday Colour Supplement that my older sister shared with me. We talked a lot about dreams together. I very quickly, or intuitively, dropped any nonsense around this or that symbol meaning one thing or another. It seemed as unscientific as astrology or Tarot Cards. Dreams had to mean something, be doing or achieving something.
Mum decided not to go into town.
Usually she would have said, “I’m going into town. Do you want anything?” and we may have chirped up with ‘M&S underpants’, a swimming towel, the latest LP from Genesis, a putty rubber, Badedas for the bath. Going into town was an opportunity to put in requests.
Instead I used my brother’s go-kart.
It was his amazing construction, and he was rightfully proud of it. He had made a hand-built motorised go-kart: frame, wheels, bucket seat, brakes and accelerator, and a two-stroke lawnmower engine bolted in at the back. It was much more than a toy because he had built the thing himself.
Driving it reminded me of the fun my brother and I had once had skidding down the highest sand dunes around Beadnell Bay on a tray or, later, on a plastic sledge. There was something about being low down and hurtling along, the ground rushing underneath you, that made it tremendous fun.
Our neighbours were back from holiday. They were a huge part of my sisters’ and Mum’s lives. Mum was friends with their Mum and my sister was friends with the kids who were all her age or younger. At home she was the youngest in the family. Over there she was one of the oldest, so she could lead their activities. She liked that.
When one of my brother’s friends came over, Mum gave my brother a lecture about him being a ‘spiv’.
We kids knew that our parents and grandparents were dreadful snobs. They were so protective of the middle or upper-middle-class lifestyle they aspired to. Both my parents had come through turbulent times. They had both been born in 1931, not into families of five or six as their parents had been, but, given the times, one or two children tops. My maternal grandparents had been making the shift from working-class artisan and domestic-service backgrounds to something else through private education for their only child.
Mum calling someone a ‘spiv’ – what was one of those? Aren’t we?
I used my brother’s go-kart again – alone. Trouble. A belt came off.
Of course I was shitting myself that I’d inadvertently broken something. My brother later told me I’d broken the fuel connection or something that sounded like it induced a heart attack. It had come detached as I had bounced along down Fencer Hill Park Drive.
We had lunch.
My brother was not too pleased with me. He was genuinely pissed off. I had been bouncing his amazing homemade machine down the driven and something had come off it.
Later, though, fixed – he said I could still use his go-kart when he went out. He seemed pleased that I was so keen to keep giving it a go.
Later I watched TV.
I didn’t ring Julie-Anne. I was starting to hold back. I was waiting for her to take the initiative. It never happened. She and I would plan stuff if I rang, but never, not once, did she ring me and say let’s do x, y or z. Or did she? I’m probably being unfair.
I thought I was now too old for her.
This appeared most apparent in my photo of her at the beach.
The strange thing was that in the photograph we both looked fourteen. Our age! She could have thought the same about me—just a boy. Yet somehow I felt I was growing up faster. Part of this was my biological age. I had gone through a growth spurt the year before, so I was physically different. It was as if I felt I was becoming, or was already, a ‘young man’ while she was still a young girl.
We had been doing adolescence together and she had got behind.
I couldn’t have put it like that then. Fifty years on I could see exactly the issue. My biological age had overtaken my birth age. Puberty had pushed me towards manhood. Curiously, Julie-Anne was a late developer, and I saw this partly because her best pal, who had introduced us, looked so grown up that she was like a university student.
Our bodies were doing one thing, our minds another.
At fourteen I was frustrated. I felt as though I was being blanked, or that we had got out of step. Fifty years later I would have said I was discombobulated.
I was a teenager going through puberty at such a rate that I didn’t know if I was a man because I could pass as one, or a man because I spoke posh and looked good in a suit because I went to a fancy boarding school.
Yet there I was, fourteen years old, looking at a photograph of another fourteen-year-old and deciding that somehow I was now too old for her.
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