Fifty Years Ago: Tuesday, 7th September 1976
(Gosforth, Age 14:11)
I spent the morning flying my new Peter Powell kite, bought with birthday money. I ended up at the Model Shop – no where else had one. It was a blue stunt kite. I asked my brother to come and help me get it up and he was happy to do so.
We took it to the Bohemians Football Pitch at the end of Fencer Hill Park. I stood more or less in the middle, with the prevailing south-westerly wind on my back ready to run towards the top left hand corner of the field. I wanted to keep the kite out over the open ground and away from the houses and gardens of Benton Park beyond.
The dangers were telephone lines and simply crashing it hard into the ground. A fast nose-dive could damage it. A slower one into a tree might leave the kite intact but cost half an hour getting it back.
It was not particularly robust, though perhaps it didn’t need to be. It was light but rigid enough. Plastic fittings and hollow aluminium tubes were more forgiving than the older sort of kite with wooden struts and canvas. The control lines were like fishing lines.
The real problem was a death spiral. Once it started spinning, the two lines twisted tighter and tighter around each other until you could no longer control it. I learned to step forward, taking the power out of the wind, and then spiral it back the same number of turns the other way to unwind the lines. If I failed, it came down.
Later Mum took us out in the car: me, my younger sister and Cap. Cap was with a large red setter from next door. My sister went over to fetch her as they were going away for a few days. She was such a docile dog that having her around made hardly any difference.
We went out on the West Road towards Corbridge. Mum had a variety of different ways of joining the West Road from our end of Gosforth. Into Gosforth and through Kenton, to Westerhope, or round that back (north) along Brunton Lane, or as if to Granny and Grandpas, out on the Broadway to Fawdon. Each route had a different feel to it: Brunton Lane meant a patchwork of fields long since filled with vast plantings of houses; Fawdon meant estates of semi-detached cloned council houses. She knew her way around like a taxi driver. She’d lived in this corner of Gosforth her entire life.
These excursions often filled the last days before I went back to school. Other destinations were the Swan Inn, Belford, then Bamburgh Castle and the beach; or Hadrian’s Wall, a picnic lunch and a hike back and forth along side the wall or an exploration of the excavations.
On the way out on the A66 to Corbridge we passed the entrance to Mowden Hall School, my prep school from 1970 to 1975.
Just seeing the stone lodge at the bottom of the mile-long drive was enough to bring back vivid memories. I had made that journey perhaps a hundred times. About thirty would have been with my parents (always Mum), at the beginning or end of term. The rest were backwards and forwards for exeat days, rugger matches, swimming matches and choir.
The connection was bittersweet. Mowden had lifted me high and then, ultimately, let me down badly.
That belongs to a much bigger story about boarding-school education, particularly when you are very young: the match or mismatch between personality, character, adaptability and resilience — not things, quite frankly, that an eight-year-old should have had to worry about. And, as ever, it was less about the institution itself than certain individuals with authority and what they did with it.
Back to Corbridge. We stopped at the Black Bull for something to eat. A Prawn sandwich with mayonnaise and crisps? Ham and chutney with cheese? Something of that sort. An icecream and coffee afterwards.
It was only once sitting in The Black Bull that I recalled last being here 18 months before. This was where the Mowden Head Master and Deputy Head had taken me and a friend for a kind of last supper when we left the school in March 1975. It was an odd time; the pattern of boarding school life out of kilter – my last term should have been the summer term 1974, not the summer term 1975. Why I left when I did was a major tipping point with huge consequences. It needs time and space of its own.
Back home, boarding school was now frighteningly close.
A few days earlier I’d bumped into my ‘sweetheart’ Julie-Anne at the dentist. The least of romantic settings; the smell of mouthwash has a numbing effect.
With the new school term almost upon me, I made the brave decision to ask her out that evening. It was impromptu planning rather than something arranged long in advance.
She had been my girlfriend, and I had been her boyfriend, since the party I threw at the end of December 1975. Were we ‘steady’ ? Being away at school for thirty seven weeks of the year – twelve to thirteen weeks this Autumn Term with no exeats or half term home at all.
We went into Newcastle to see Jaws. Julie-Anne lived only half a mile from Gosforth High Street, so I imagine she was given a lift into town and dropped at the Haymarket. I went in by bus.
This time I took my chances and scored.
I’d be asked once at school “Did you score?” Over the ‘hols’ or ‘vac’. It was the immediate question if a male friend knew you’d been out with a girl. A grin was enough. They would invent and exaggerate the rest. We always did, but never had. Holding hands and a peck on the cheek wasn’t enough to satisfy their interest.
Watching Jaws, we sat in the circle (there still was such a thing) – when the head appeared through the hole in the side of the boat there was a noticeable shock throughout the cinema. I can still feel Julie-Anne flinch in my arms and give a little jerk. I had jumped too.
There was a tingle of joy in that momentary tightness. It felt like something I had always wanted: having someone there with me, doing something together, sharing it. I sometimes think I would have made a great twin — always having someone to do things with and discuss things with.
Kissing was another matter because I still had the brace cemented onto my teeth. I barely clocked what other boys were doing, though I could see how older couples behaved in cinemas. I was certainly not about to stick my tongue down Julie-Anne’s throat.
Perhaps we kissed – a peck, rather than a snog.
Afterwards our buses went in different directions. I stood on the kerb thinking that I ought to go with her. Just hop on, pay the fare, enjoy the bus ride together, see her home and then walk tall back to the High Street for mine. It was only about fifteen minutes down Graham Park Road. There would be plenty of buses from there.
I didn’t do it.
I felt, in the way one could at fourteen, that Julie-Anne would be faithful. She did not strike me as someone who was out a lot. She had female friends. She was studious. Like all of us in middle-class Gosforth families, there were boundaries on behaviour and expectations.
The approaching separation sharpened everything. Boarding-school boys were rather like naval midshipmen and junior officers being sent away for a few months. We had home lives and friendships and girlfriends, and then suddenly we disappeared again.
By the final Saturday morning before going back, I would wake at home and already feel that I was at school.
It felt as though something had died, or at least been put into stasis.
My bedroom would remain exactly as I had left it. Mum liked everything spotlessly clean and everything in its place. That was how she had been brought up. She once told me that she kept the house like that “in case Dad visited”, even though by then they had been separated for eight years and divorced for six.
The house never really looked lived in. It was like a museum piece, or somewhere permanently up for sale.
Everything remained in its place while I was away.
So did I, in a sense.
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