Where Did It All Go Right? (12 page)

Saturday, 5 January

We went shopping in the morning, Simon bought a beret
¹
and I bought a Subbuteo team.

Tuesday, 8 January

Dad went to London. We saw Abbott and Costello and Mum had a Young Wives meeting.
²

Friday, 11 January

Me, Griffin and Boults all did a Basil Brush show. I was Basil Brush, Boults was Mr Roy and Griffin was the special guest.

Monday, 14 January

We stayed for sandwiches. I had two cheese sandwiches, a packet of crisps, an Ice Breaker, a wafer and some Ribena.

Sunday, 20 January

Nanny and Pappy came and I made a gondola, two penguins and a frog out of origami.
³

Thursday, 24 January

I went to John Portwood’s party.
⁴
He was nine. I bought him a pad, two Pop-A-Points and a rubber.

Monday, 28 January

We stayed for sandwiches and I had two cheese sandwiches and a chunk of cheese, a packet of crisps, a Fondant Fancy, a wafer and some Ribena.

Friday, 1 February

Me, Griffin, Kim
⁵
and Cockle did a play called
Abbott and Costello Meet The Horror
and I saw
Perils Of Pendragon
on telly.

Monday, 11 February

At three o’clock me, Griffin, Cockle and Kim did our Abbot and Costello play to Class 3, my brother’s class.

Tuesday, 12 February

We saw
Question of Sport
on telly and Henry Cooper’s team won.

Monday, 25 February

In the evening Nanny had drama group and I stayed up till 9 o’clock and played cards with Pappy.

Saturday, 1 March

I made a new comic called
Crunch
and I made my own free gifts.

Monday, 3 March
Day before my birthday

I got a glow in the dark monster, the Hunchback of Notre Dame, from Paul Cockle.

Tuesday 4 March
My birthday

I got another late present from Cathy Knight.
⁶
It was a
Stop the Pigeon
puzzle book.

Wednesday, 5 March

Jonathan Bailey
⁷
bought me a late present, Dr Jekyll glow in the dark model and a tube of glue, so I made the Hunchback.

Friday, 7 March

I had a cold and a cough and I had an aspirin and now I feel better.

Monday, 10 March

On Saturday night we had a thief who stole Dad’s golf clubs and now we’ve found out he stole Dad’s chequebook and building society book.
⁸

Wednesday, 12 March

We practised for the country dancing festival. My partner is Cathy Knight.

Thursday, 13 March

I got a
Phantom Of The Opera
glow model and a late present from Dad, Mouse Trap.

Monday, 17 March

Simon and I played outside on bikes till 7 o’clock because it’s light at nights now. We got filthy.

Tuesday, 18 March

Griffin was away and we moved desks around and we Vimmed them.

Saturday, 22 March

Me and Simon played Subbuteo but Simon was silly so he had to go to bed and I had a game with Dad.

Wednesday, 3 April

We did a dress rehearsal for our country dancing festival. My partner is Cathy Knight.

Thursday, 4 April

We played soccer and we lost. We saw
Are You Being Served
and Simon was naughty.

Friday, 5 April

We broke up from school. I played with Carl and Dad bought me a Liverpool lampshade.

Thursday, 11 April

Dean came up for the day and he bought the Chihuahua Bambi
⁹
up as well.

Friday, 12 April

I played with Carl nearly all day and we got our new suite because we’ve sold our old one.

Monday, 22 April

We started back to school and in the evening I gave the Phantom Of The Opera another coat of paint.

Wednesday, 24 April

We rehearsed the country dancing festival today. My partner is Cathy Knight.

Sunday, 28 April

Dad found his old
Dr No
book and I have started reading it and it is ever so good.

Tuesday, 30 April

In the evening Dad made Simon real orange juice and me banana flip.
¹⁰

Wednesday, 1 May

We did our May Day festival and Mum came to watch and I was in two dances and my partner was Cathy.

Thursday, 2 May

We played rounders because the football season is over and we don’t play football any more.

Sunday, 5 May

Tonight Mum let us see the last part of
The Brothers
¹¹
and we wished we had seen the other episodes.

Tuesday, 14 May

Davvy
¹²
brought his Frankenstein glow model to school and it looks brilliant.

Wednesday, 15 May

Miss Rowan took us for art and me and Griffin are doing a sawdust mosaic of a log camp. And me and Griffin joined the choir.

Wednesday, 22 May

We went to choir and learned a new song, ‘Maytime’ and we like it very much.

Wednesday, 5 June

I did another three pages in my maths book. I am now on
see here
and it is simple.

Monday, 10 June

Paul Cockle gave me Dracula glow in the dark model free. It was painted and made.

Tuesday, 11 June

I painted over Dracula in better colours and it looks much better now.

Saturday, 15 June

It was lovely and hot and I went down Carl’s and we put our trunks on and played with the hose.

Monday, 17 June

I stayed for sandwiches. I had tomato sandwiches, a can of Coke, a packet of crisps and a piece of ginger cake.

Tuesday, 18 June

Today it was the area school sports where five different schools take part and I was the reserve in the sack race.

Wednesday, 26 June

At school at 6.30 we all had a Womble Disco.
¹³
They sold drinks, ice creams and crisps. I went with Carl.

1.
Simon, though only seven, is already taking his commitment to the armed services very seriously. He has discovered ‘army surplus’. Though the pair of us were equally gung ho for Action Man, Airfix soldiers, war games, war films and military comics, there was a point at which Simon’s interest outstripped mine. Pap Collins, the old soldier, sensing a kindred spirit, gave Simon his medals and two cap badges – Royal Artillery and Lancashire Fusiliers – which my brother treasured even then (and treats as holy sacraments now that Pap, like the majority of those who fought, is gone). The beret bought on this particular occasion from the old Army & Navy on the Market Square was a green one similar to the Royal Marine beret or Intelligence Corps, Simon now informs me. In 1984, by which time he was doing his basic training, I accompanied Si on a mission to London – some months before I moved there, so it was still a foreign field – to acquire
another
beret from Silverman’s in Mile End. Why? Simon takes up the story: ‘At the time Kangol (now a designer label I believe) used to supply the army’s berets and they were cloth-banded and had too much material to them and were not as easy to shape as the leather-banded type previously supplied by Compton Webb. We weren’t allowed to wear leather-banded berets in training but would be when we joined our units. So we all started buying them and getting them shaped up ready for when we passed out. Silverman’s were the only surplus company who still sold the old ones.’

2.
Abington Vale Young Wives was a secular social group founded by like-minded youthful female spouses in and around the estate who had no church to unite them. They met once a month to chat, drink coffee and support one another. No bra-burning took place but I expect the man-free atmosphere was heady. These were Mum’s sacred evenings. When the venue was our house (they rotated), Dad would be banished upstairs with Simon and I, where male bonding would occur, in direct answer to the girl power brewing beneath us. (Young Wives was later renamed, with some dignity I thought, Wives.)

3.
I had a real yen for the ancient Japanese art of paper-folding. I think Robert Harbin was ‘the man’ in this regard, he wrote all the instructional books, which I devoured. Got pretty good at it. I can to this day make a ‘flapping bird’ from memory.

4.
John Portwood’s entry from Friends Reunited: ‘Hi everyone. I am now working as an IT Project Manager at Thorntons and eating too many chocolates each day! I am married and living near Nottingham.’ Good on him. Not one of my major friends but it’s always nice to know that people are alive and well.

5.
Another enduring pal, Kim Gupta (I’m now assuming his first name had been anglicised from something more authentically Asian). The son of a doctor, Kim’s ethnic mix was otherwise irrelevant to us. The fact that he lived in a massive house on Weston Way was more important. A clever lad, it was always him or Anita Barker I jostled with for top marks at middle school.

6.
Still haven’t got this Knight/Knights thing sorted out, have I? She’s called Williams these days. The Reverend Catherine Williams actually.

7.
Can’t tell you a huge amount about Jonathan Bailey other than he was – we later discovered – epileptic. He surely deserves to be remembered for more than a medical condition but there you are. He had freckles.

8.
Our grandparent generation lamented the loss of the days when you could leave your back door open and ‘people were in and out of each other’s houses’. As well they might. Dad nostalgically left the garage door up one night (and by extension the car inside it unlocked) and an interloper saw his chance. Years later I spent the summer with a girl whose family lived in Jersey, and they left the doors unlocked all the time. Now that’s island mentality.

9.
What was it about the Ward family and these miniature Mexican dogs? Janice had one – Bambi (who were they trying to kid with this allusion to Disney cuteness?) – and Mum’s brother Brian and his wife Janis (note distinct spelling) had a
set
: Pip and Perry. At least those two were of the hairy school; the bald Bambi was often disparagingly referred to as ‘the rat’ (especially by Nan Mabel). There really is a sense of the Chihuahua not being a
proper
dog. Aren’t they called toys in competition?

10.
They must have invested in an electric blender by this stage, hip young trendsetters that they were, as I believe a ‘banana flip’ was milk jooshed up with a banana.

11.
Grown-up BBC melodrama about Midlands-based haulage firm Hammond Transport Services, it ran from 1972 to 1976, so we were coming in late here. No idea what appealed to me, aged nine, about
The Brothers
.

12.
Paul Daverson. I have a feeling he resurfaced years later as a bona fide town-centre punk.

13.
The same as a regular disco except there were pictures of Wombles on the wall. This was not, however, my first disco. That was Christmas 1973, again at school, and even though I illiterately describe it in my diary as a ‘discotec’, it seems we played musical bumps – all sit down when the music stops – which I think would have pushed the boundaries at Studio 54. Or maybe not.

1975

Selected Extracts From My Diary

A RATHER NICE
National Employers’ Life desk diary: red, padded and with the logo and year picked out in ‘gold’. The front is filled with more guff about the firm who sent the thing out – with compliments – to my dad
(‘NEL provides a comprehensive life assurance service to meet all present-day needs’
etc.). What’s odd is that Dad seems to have used it, putting in the odd appointment and important date: incomprehensible code like ‘G. Gross – re SERP’ and ‘DJ Rawlings B61’. Presumably he decided not to use it and gave it to me some way into the year. I must have copied the early entries out of another diary. What dedication
.

Key change in style: I now write in capitals, as per the speech bubbles in comics, and many of the entries are illustrated with little cartoons of me and my pals
.

I have also drawn a pretty good flick book of a stick man losing his head and getting a new one in the bottom corner of the diary
.

Thursday, 2 January

Simon and I played Action Man and we played that my Action Man was stuck on an island (Simon’s bed) and Simon’s Action Man had to rescue me in his helicopter.

Saturday, 11 January

Dad bought me a scrapbook and I have made it into a horror scrapbook and I am having a page for each monster. I saw
Carry On Laughing
.

Wednesday, 15 January

We had art at school with Miss Rowan, the subject was blue and cold so me and Griffin drew and painted a picture of an igloo with two Eskimos by it.

Sunday, 26 January

Me and Simon stopped up till 8.15 to watch
Colditz
. It was brilliant because two men have escaped but me and Simon think the Germans will catch them.

Wednesday, 29 January

Nanny Mabel baby-sitted and she slept in my bed so I had to sleep in Dean’s sleeping bag on the lounger by the side of Simon’s bed.