Thursday, 9th September 1976
(Gosforth, Age 14:11)
I went into town with Mum and my older brother as part of the usual rush of purchases before going back to school, with my birthday only a few weeks away.
I had my hair cut. I didn’t really want it cut. My conformist years were over, or at least beginning to be. Sedbergh didn’t have rules about hair length and some boys had it almost down to their shoulders, certainly over their ears, like a crash helmet. Dad’s was long too, coiffured down to the collar so that it hid his ears — more Bee Gees than Jason King.
It wasn’t that I was turning into a hippy. I never encountered one at Sedbergh, nor a heavy-metal fan; that might have been going too far. It was more a matter of wanting to make my own choices about things.
I wouldn’t play rugger unless I had to, although I had been a keen player at prep school. I didn’t have to join the choir, so I didn’t. At prep school you didn’t choose anything: you were told what to do. I had been auditioned for the choir because I could sing, so I joined the choir. I must have appeared bright because I learnt to read music there, then bought a flute and learnt to play it. One thing simply led to another, but none of it had really begun with me choosing it.
Now I could choose some of my subjects as well. I had dropped Latin and was going to learn German instead.
The six months I had spent at home after breaking my leg had altered something too. I had experienced the rhythm of life at home and, above all, how quiet it was. How much time you got to yourself. My sister seemed to watch an extraordinary amount of television. At school that same time would have been games here, more lessons there, music practice, orchestra, band practice, a game of squash, house-play rehearsals, table-tennis, chapel, evening prayers — you name it, you rarely had a moment to yourself. Even homework had its allocated evening period: “prep”.
Increasingly I felt I couldn’t play to my strengths. Swimming, creativity — performance and art — and wanting a balance between science and humanities didn’t fit particularly well into the structure. If I wanted Chemistry, Physics and Biology I had to drop either History or Geography. There was no Art O-level or A-level. Academic work itself seemed confined to prep; if you became passionate about something and wanted to put more time into it, there was always pressure to be doing something else.
There were boys there who seemed like ghosts of themselves, crushed by a handful of arsehole bullies. There were no girls. There was no social life at all.
And yet part of me still looked towards Dad and his friends as the way adulthood was supposed to work. They appeared to have it all. There was an order to things. But the system was clearly broken.
I was still thinking about what I might do with my life. I drew RAF aircraft and picked up RAF recruitment magazines and careers stuff. Becoming an RAF pilot wasn’t simply about aeroplanes. There was family heritage in it. My grandfather and his brother had been pioneers, one an RAF fighter pilot and the other a bomber pilot in the First World War. That made it part of the family story rather than just another career fantasy.
I had also got interested in shorthand and bought a book to try to learn it. The attraction wasn’t secrecy or codes. It was the idea of being able to take down a lesson easily and then read it back at my leisure. I tried teaching myself from the book, but without someone else learning with me and without a teacher, success was unlikely.
The idea had partly come from my grandfather. He had learnt shorthand when he started at the North Eastern Brewery. Over the decades I got him to tell me his life story several times — rather as I now go back through these diary entries — and he lived into his ninety-seventh year. Much later, his memoir and the recording I made of him would end up in the archive of the Imperial War Museum.
History was already everywhere. I had Chronology of the Modern World, and ancestry interested me too. I knew the family roughly back to my great-grandparents on both sides. Appleby made this sort of thing impossible to ignore. The family there could trace itself generation by generation and marriage by marriage back to the eleventh century, through the Cliffords who had come over with the Norman Conquest. Much later I discovered that two Vernon brothers had also been knights fighting under the Duke of Normandy.
There was something very satisfying about putting people and events into their correct place in time.
Going back to school also meant letters. Basildon Bond paper and the ritual of writing home still belonged to boarding-school life. At Mowden the letters were read and corrected by the teacher on duty, which perhaps explained why they could make everything sound Hunky Dory when the private diary did not. By Sedbergh the letters weren’t supervised.
I wrote differently to each parent anyway: boasting to Dad, requests to Mum.
Music belonged to the other part of this newer version of myself. Bowie certainly did. There were fairly clear musical camps at school: Bowie; middle-of-the-road female singers like Barbara Dickson; or American rock — the Eagles, Boston and the like. I could take cassettes back to school but not records, so Changes One Bowie stayed at home.
The cassette player mattered. We made mixed tapes for each other and every study seemed to blast out its own music in an attempt to drown out everybody else. It was hardly conducive to private study. Music went off during evening prep, but that was it.
Julie-Anne and I didn’t even have the same taste in music. She liked David Soul and Rod Stewart; I preferred Bowie and Genesis. Neither of us tried particularly hard to convert the other. We simply knew our tastes were different.
Now that my sister was at the same school as Julie-Anne, I could also get reports back — effectively spying on my sister. Julie-Anne supplied stories of the mischief and mayhem she and some of her friends caused.
I still hadn’t told Julie-Anne that I might be away for most of Christmas. Dad was talking about taking us skiing in the French Alps for three weeks. It would be my first time back on skis since I broke my leg in March 1975. I think Dad and my brother were going to drive through France, with my older sister and Dad’s girlfriend flying out to Geneva.
Christmas was still months away.
I suppose I didn’t want Julie-Anne to think she ought to get a new boyfriend just yet. That wasn’t entirely fair because I had an eye on any eligible girl who caught my eye myself, although at Sedbergh the opportunities were slim to non-existent.
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