Every 27 September
Armed with my five-year diary and a set of pages tabling a century of calendars, age thirteen I looked up 27th September for the rest of the century: 1975 to 1999.
I kept a daily diary (age 13 to 30 or so) so I’ve always seen it approaching. And with a Five Year Diary I’d naturally compare the year I had reached with the ones before.
As a child I was full of expectation. Presents might have been discussed, although with my parents long separated they were likely to act independently. There were grandparents, godparents and ancient aunts who were very good at remembering. Mum remembered. My sisters remembered. Dad was the one who could miss the date. This may be apocryphal, but I would claim that at Mowden, aged eleven or twelve, I received a birthday card from him that had been pp’d by his secretary.
The surprise of a birthday was also a gamble. If nobody had asked what I wanted, would somebody nevertheless get it right? What I wanted was not simply a present. I wanted somebody to have thought about it and, through the gift, to show that they knew who I was.
A well-thought-out present could do that. How Things Work did. So did a punk jumper. I’d hoped for an electric guitar; I got a second hand manual typewriter. I needed a piano to practice on but got a well-meant electric organ which was an octave or too short of what was required for my Grade III and following practical exams (ours was not a musical family).
Being misjudged did the opposite.
Looking back at the birthdays from six to twenty-one, I can see something else happening. At first other people made birthdays happen for me. Then, for most of my school years, they became dates that happened to me. Eventually I learnt to make them happen for myself.
Birthdays made for me
At six, seven and eight I was still a day boy at Ascham House and birthdays belonged to home.
The party was in the playroom at Orchard House. Ercol furniture. A table for perhaps five school friends and me, with the birthday tablecloth, sandwiches, cake, jelly and trifle. There were party games: Statues, Sleeping Lions and, of course, Pass the Parcel.
The mothers occupied the kitchen and the adults’ sitting room. All mums, as I remember it. Sherry. One of them smoking.
My closest friend was Simon Smallwood. We were both at Ascham House and our mothers were close friends. There were Airfix kits, Action Man and chemistry sets. I slept in the little room above the kitchen, by then mine alone after sharing it for several years with my brother.
Birthday parties had a formula. They might be after school at home, or involve the Royalty or the Odeon cinema. or a Swimming pool: Gosforth, Jesmond, Montague Baths and Tyne mouth come to mind. There would be a cake, presents, party games, prizes and a going-away bag.
Someone else’s birthday produced one of my strongest memories from this period. Mike McAdams’s mother hired a magician. What remained with me was not so much the magic as working out one of his tricks. There was a velvet pouch concealed in the lid. I had figured something out for myself.
I was already ceasing to believe what I was simply shown or told. There had to be a logical explanation. I wanted to know and understand a thing for myself.
And Simon had a Thunderbirds themed party. We each had a Thunderbirds sash and cap. We had our favourite characters too.
For age eight see age seven!
Nine
In September 1970 I was nine and newly at Mowden.
From then until I was sixteen, my birthday always fell several weeks into the new school term. I was away.
Mowden did at least have a system.
The birthday table was at the far end of the dining hall, in the top left-hand corner. It was always that table. I think there were nine of us, with the birthday boy at the head. The evening meal was the same as everyone else’s, except that we had orange squash and a cake.
Mum made extraordinary chocolate cakes: a Spitfire, a castle, the Titanic and others I no longer remember. There were candles.
Occasionally I might see Mum for ten minutes after lunch, or after games, in her car in the school car park. She brought the cake and perhaps presents. Then she went home (with most of the gifts) and school resumed.
The cake was shared until it was gone. I went around the tables offering pieces to those I deemed worthy. It was a slightly grubby exercise in social preference: deciding who did and did not get a piece.
It was not home, but that did not mean it was miserable. A birthday at prep school was enjoyed in a different way. I was with my friends all day. From the moment I got up, friends and masters might wish me happy birthday, and I hoped the magic of that would rub off on the day — literally a day sprinkled with fairy dust.
I hoped.
Lessons and games were exactly the same.
Post mattered. It was nice to accumulate a small collection of cards. Nobody else shared my birthday, so 27th September was mine. Books were always among my presents — I still have The ABC of Science — though by my middle teens gifts increasingly became money.
Age itself mattered enormously at school. Years and months appeared on the school report as though age, achievement and development formed an exact science which could be measured and pondered over. Age determined teams: Under-10, Under-11 and onwards. It determined where you stood among other boys.
There were portals ahead.
Was I a big boy now?
Could I use a bus on my own?
Dive in at the deep end?
Stop wearing shorts?
Have a girlfriend?
Thirteen didn’t feel like becoming a teenager. I was still physically a boy and still at prep school, although by then I was a school prefect and at the top of the pecking order.
Age meant more than birthdays did.
Sedbergh
At fourteen I moved to Sedbergh and the modest Mowden birthday ritual disappeared.
There was one important qualification. If 27th September happened to fall at a weekend, there was a chance of escape.
My fourteenth birthday in 1975 did. Mum took me out on the Saturday. We went from the Barbon Inn towards Cautley Spout and had a meal. The following day Dad took me to Appleby Castle. It was almost the perfect demonstration of my divided family: one parent on Saturday, the other on Sunday.
Otherwise, at Sedbergh, birthdays disappeared into the timetable.
There was no birthday table. No cake. No party games. Packages and cards could arrive a few days before, on the day itself, or trickle in afterwards. Unless I mentioned it, most people had no reason to know that it was my birthday.
At fifteen I wrote:
“A routine day, no different for being my birthday. Another year over.”
I had received good things. There was How Things Work II, a long variegated Doctor Who scarf, a Snoopy towel and Granny’s fudge. There were letters. But there were also lessons, rugger, swimming arrangements, prep and Mr Wood’s punishment map.
Being given a punishment on my birthday seemed especially mean, but I kept that to myself.
Why didn’t I say, But it’s my birthday?
Because I did not want the fuss and attention. And perhaps I did not want the teacher’s obvious riposte: that it made no difference.
That was the contradiction. I wanted the people who cared about me to demonstrate that they cared, while simultaneously not wanting to admit that I wanted anyone to make a fuss.
So I treated myself in tiny ways where I could: getting up early to read, taking a bath and soaking, washing my hair and using conditioner. Anything that distinguished the day privately when the institution would not distinguish it publicly.
At sixteen the cards mattered more because of who had sent them. I kept them all. Fifty years later their value as artefacts has increased, particularly now that greetings arrive through WhatsApp and vanish up a screen.
I think I opened cards from girls first.
Then Mum, sisters, grandparents and the rest.
Julie-Anne’s card occupied a different category from a relative’s card because by sixteen the emotional pecking order was changing. Friends, and especially girls, had begun to displace family from the centre of teenage life.
Boarding school had not made birthdays wholly miserable. That would be too simple. It had made them compromised.
From nine to sixteen, this was not how I imagined a birthday ought to be enjoyed and celebrated. School routine came first. There was no independence at all. Yet public excitement about birthdays was beginning to feel childish at exactly the age when I still wanted those closest to me to remember.
Seventeen
At seventeen the enclosure suddenly opened.
I had left Sedbergh and started at the RGS in Newcastle. I was at home every evening. I could go to pubs and clubs and overnight parties. Girls were no longer people glimpsed occasionally across some institutional divide.
I had a girlfriend of sorts. “Friends with benefits” would probably describe it now. I filled a gap that needed filling, as it were, and I suited her needs. We went places and did things together.
She was an eye-opener.
Girls, I discovered, could be every bit as forward and sexually exploratory as boys.
By then the birthday itself could almost become incidental because ordinary life contained freedoms which boarding school had withheld. A date with a girl was enough. Being able simply to go somewhere with someone I had chosen was something Sedbergh could never have supplied.
Perhaps I also wanted to make up for lost time.
Eighteen
Then came eighteen.
The diary began:
“How depressing!”
Not because I objected to being eighteen, but because of the let-down of it being a normal day.
Eighteen was supposed to be a portal, except that most of its portals had already been crossed. I could legally drink in a pub, but I had been drinking in pubs for three years. I was not suddenly going to celebrate my legal adulthood by going out and getting drunk.
Sex, driving, drinking: the diary hardly bothered mentioning the legal thresholds attached to sixteen, seventeen and eighteen because lived life did not observe these boundaries neatly.
I talked about getting a lightweight tent. Mum seemed to want me to have a thing. I had been camping much of that summer in France and perhaps imagined I would continue doing so.
I did not.
The absurdity was that eighteen sounded momentous while the day itself offered three five-pound notes, an English essay, P.E., presents and cards, meeting my girlfriend outside Marks & Spencer and going to Tuxedo Junction.
Adulthood did not arrive at midnight.
Nineteen
At nineteen I wrote:
“Big day, huh?”
The irony was already there.
My younger sister forgot my birthday. I spent time with my older sister and, as usual, somehow we ended up arguing about Ireland.
I looked at a Bowie album despite not having anything to play it on. I went to Supernatural for a salad.
Then I bought a guitar amplifier in Windows in Newcastle’s Central Arcade.
That was superb.
The good birthday gift was no longer necessarily the surprise object selected by an adult. I could turn birthday money into exactly what I wanted.
Twenty
At twenty I was clearer about what I wanted.
“I want a social occasion.”
Not necessarily presents. People.
A pub meal. Company. Conversation.
The plans fell apart because I did not have a car available. Even in adulthood, apparently, the date did not organise itself.
Yet there was another kind of birthday contentment by then which scarcely required ritual. I could wake up with my girlfriend in my arms.
That could outweigh cards, cakes and parties entirely.
By nineteen I had been bonded to my first true love, Suzi. At twenty it was still, fundamentally, the two of us.
Perhaps this was one reason birthdays became less important. The thing I had once wanted a present to prove — you know me; I matter to you — could now be supplied by a relationship.
Twenty-one
My diary entry for twenty-one hardly sounds like a coming-of-age celebration.
I drove into Newcastle for a check-up and was told that all my wisdom teeth would have to come out, even after all the fuss over the orthodontics. There were errands, family and cake.
But my twenty-first itself became something else because I made it happen.
I drew up lists, had invitation cards made and sent them across a broad range of my Oxford acquaintances. I organised a weekend at Appleby Castle.
Every room in the castle was filled. So were the cottages and Castle Park. A guest list of seventy-five somehow expanded towards 110. Where everybody slept — or camped out — for the night or nights I no longer recall. A couple slept in the sauna I recall.
At seven, my mother had assembled five boys around a birthday table for me. At twenty-one, I assembled more than a hundred people in a castle.
That was a proper age-defining party: still an undergraduate, ostensibly an adult, bringing together everyone I knew.
Perhaps part of the pleasure was simply an excuse for a party. I liked putting people together, watching relationships develop, getting into conversations.
But there is an obvious difference between that birthday and the ones at school.
Nobody else was going to make twenty-one happen.
I did.
What I did with my children’s birthdays
It was only much later that I recognised how much of my own birthday childhood I had missed.
With my own children I made up for it.
From one to eighteen we had proper, full-on children’s birthdays. There were parties. Friends. Cake. Presents. The day was marked because it was their day.
When they were at university, we still did something.
Now, at thirty and twenty-eight, there may be no party games and no room full of children, but we go out for a birthday meal and exchange presents.
I did not consciously sit down as a young father and draw up a programme to correct my boarding-school childhood. But looking back, the contrast is impossible to miss.
I knew what I thought a birthday should contain because I had experienced both versions.
I knew the birthday made for a child: cake on the table, friends arriving, games, presents, some small excursion, the feeling that adults had rearranged an ordinary day because this particular date belonged to you.
I also knew the birthday swallowed by an institution: German, Chemistry, rugger, prep, a punishment map, cards opened privately and the faint hope that some of the birthday might somehow rub off on the timetable.
My children did not have to hope that someone would notice.
27 September
What fascinates me now is not that individual birthdays were happy or disappointing. It is watching the meaning of age change.
As a child, ages were portals.
Nine. Ten. Thirteen. Sixteen. Eighteen. Twenty-one.
Surely something happened when you crossed one.
At school there were even official structures to support the illusion. Your age in years and months was written onto reports. Teams and competitions were divided by age. One year’s difference could alter your status completely.
Then you crossed the threshold and discovered yourself on the other side largely unchanged.
The birthday remained important partly because I wanted it to signify something. A stepping stone. An automatic right. Evidence that I was becoming someone else.
The diary says otherwise.
At fifteen:
“A routine day, no different for being my birthday.”
At eighteen:
“How depressing!”
At nineteen:
“Big day, huh?”
At twenty:
“I want a social occasion.”
And eventually there would be:
“Just another day.”
But I do not think that means birthdays ceased to matter.
The meaning moved.
At seven, other people created the magic.
At eleven, a chocolate Spitfire arrived at boarding school.
At fifteen, I wanted acknowledgement while being too self-conscious to ask for it.
At seventeen, a girlfriend and the freedom to go out could transform an ordinary evening.
At twenty, waking with someone I loved could be enough.
At twenty-one, I filled Appleby Castle.
Then, when I became a father, I returned the birthday to the child.
Perhaps that is what I have been recovering in these pages. Not a catalogue of cakes and presents, but the changing answer to a very simple question:
Who made the day matter?
For a while it was Mum.
Then school might have but largely failed.
Then girlfriends, friends and me.
And once I was married and had children I knew exactly whose job it was to make their day matter; and I’ve had it back in spades.
And my best birthday? Ever? Today. 65. I’ve spent the weekend with my wife and the children and today after a treat at David Bowie: you’re not alone we too a mystery trip to the Barbican where I found myself having a one to one consultation at the ouze for one of my son Toby’s iconic rings. Later I told him about a Victorian ancestor, Henry Vernon who had been a jeweller in Alnwick. He wants to know more. And about Roger de Vernon who came over with William the Conqueror in 1066.
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