Where Did It All Go Right? (5 page)

My first, an orange Letts Disneyland diary, contained no secrets.

I had a beefberger for dinner. I saw
Deputy Dawg
and
Crackerjack
on TV.

Yes, yes, beef
berger
, but I was six. The entries for 1972 are brief and revolve around comics and TV, and Sunday 27 February has been mysteriously written in by my dad:

Melissa came home from hospital. We are all glad. She looks a lot better. I have promised to be a good boy.
¹⁰

I guess I was not a good boy on that day and either refused to write my diary or got sent to bed early. Fascinating to wonder, isn’t it?
Much
better than to know. It’s like archaeology, except without Tony Robinson.

Thanks to my twenty-year love affair with the diary, I know pretty much what I did
every day
from age six onwards. Friends’ names – Paul Milner, Tina Woods, Jeremy Skoyles, Jonathan Bailey, Melanie Ashby, Carl Merrick, Richard Angerson, Paul Cockle, Paul Givelin – help to flesh out the supporting cast of my youth, and TV programmes help to paint a broader cultural picture of Britain in the Seventies. I’m so glad I kept these diaries. (And
kept
them.)

There is a direct, hereditary link between my own attention to book-keeping and my parents’ overflowing loft. Never mind Mum’s wedding dress, they still have every single love letter they wrote to each other while courting up there, neatly boxed and labelled, not to mention the life story of each of their kids told in exercise books,
Beano
annuals and badges.

Mum and Dad are not unique in storing junk in the attic, I know, but this need of theirs to hang on to stuff lies at the heart of my own desire to get everything down, to retain that ticket stub, to maintain constant links between the past, present and future. That’s what I’m doing by symbolically hanging that naff, framed picture of a kitten in the office where I write; it used to belong to Melissa when she was very young. Nan Mabel and Pap Reg bought it for her, but within days Dad was ordered to take it down because she said it scared her at night. It comforts me to have it up.

I’m sure I don’t need to keep all my bank statements and electricity bills from 1987 in a box file, but you never know.

Maybe I do know. Maybe I knew all along that my diaries would one day prove invaluable with their dates and their names and their funny little drawings. Was I writing them out of a sense of fun, or duty, or investment for the future?

The irony of all this genuflection to posterity is that reading these boyhood diaries today won’t tell you what I felt, or even what I thought. That will take some serious rebirthing. It can’t have been orange Disneyland all the way. Can it?

1.
Uncle Pete and Auntie Wendy (Jones), honorary relations, and godparents to Simon. He was a bank manager for the Midland and as a result they kept moving about the country, Leicester, East Goscote, Ashby-de-la-Zouch, Calver (nr. Bakewell), Wisbech, Stowmarket, Bury St Edmunds. Honestly, they were like Orson Welles and Rita Hayworth darting across Europe in the late Forties: Rome, Florence, Venice, Naples, Capri. In keeping with most couples who have no kids of their own, Pete and Wendy seemed to treat us as little grown-ups, rather than idiots (I like to think Julie and I do this now), and I always loved visiting them. Pete also used to give me
Giles
annuals and had a huge old Meccano set.

2.
I’m told all new mums got an ambulance in those days. These days you’re lucky if they say goodbye to you.

3.
Both paps had allotments, and what a fine post-war tradition that is. Pap Collins’s was in Billing Road; Pap Reg’s in Bants Lane, on the other side of town where he and Nan lived. I’m happy to report that both allotments are still open.

4.
Pap Collins never learned to drive; a moped was as far as he got. My other grandparents – younger, that bit more dynamic, flush from Pap Reg’s union gig – both drove, he well into his seventies. Nan passed her driving test first time in her late fifties but was then too anxious to ever use the car. At least she did it. When I was learning in 1982, Dad used to spur me on, saying, ‘If Nan Mabel can pass her test, anyone can.’

5.
He had diabetes, undiagnosed for who knows how long. I admire his fighting spirit, and his distrust of doctors (I’m not a fan myself), but there comes a time when you have to give in, ideally when you can still get out of bed.

6.
Uncle Jim to us. He and Auntie Christine are the other vital non-blood relatives in my life. We had so much
fun
when we visited them and their daughters Lorraine and Sandy in Coventry. They’re an awfully tall family, the Brittons. Jim was in computers at the time (he used to give us printout paper with holes down each side to draw on), and Christine was a teacher.

7.
In 1967, when I was two, Hawkins appeared on Simon Dee’s TV chat show
Dee Time
and won the nation’s hearts all over again, gulping for air and hoarse-whispering with valiant good humour.

8.
Harpole and Ecton are about as far apart as you can get in Northampton.

9.
Though it would be a full 16 years before I appreciated Eliot, I got into Laurel’s work a lot sooner. Interestingly, Laurel and Hardy visited Northampton in October 1953, to play the New Theatre, their first time on stage since returning from Hollywood. Their visit coincided with Car Safety Week and the pair agreed to pose with a 1902 Wolseley to publicise it. Priceless photos were taken by the local paper and can be seen in the second volume of
Northampton: Welcome to the Past
published by W.D. Wharton.

10.
Melissa was hospitalised with bronchitis when she was just ten months old and it was a bit dicey for a while there.

1972

Selected Extracts From My Diary

THE ORANGE DISNEYLAND
– my very first – with Mickey and pals on the cover. Inside is a section called
HOW TO USE YOUR DIARY
,
which offers this advice
: ‘Every day you meet new people. Become observant and learn new things. Write them all in your diary when they happen, because writing helps you to become more observant.’
Yeah, don’t patronise me, Mickey
.

In the
PERSONAL NOTES
at the front of the book I reveal that I am three feet eight inches tall and weigh three stone
.

Incidentally, the entries in this diary dry up after 21 March. No staying power
.

Tuesday, 1 January

The Double Deckers
came back on TV. We all saw
Play Away
on Nanny’s colour television.
¹
Melissa can say ‘Ba-ba-ba.’

Thursday, 13 January

Today Paul Milner
²
brought his ‘Ernie’ record to school. And we all heard it. And we liked it.

Monday, 24 January

Today I saw
Bright’s Boffins
³
on television. Mummy and I saw how many words we could get out of Constantinople.

Wednesday, 26 January

Tonight I am going to start to make a Tom and Jerry book and it is called
Party Night For Puss
.

Saturday, 29 January

Today I heard some records on the tape recorder and it was a bit of when I was a baby.
⁴

Wednesday, 2 February

Today I saw
The Frog Prince
and
Sir Prancelot
and
Soper At Large
and
Jackanory
and
Play School
on TV.

Tuesday, 15 February

Today me and all my school pals and chums all had a visit to the fire station and it was Pancake Day.

Friday, 18 February

Today we had a power cut and I had to write my diary by candle light and it was fun.

Wednesday, 8 March

Today I saw
Star Trek
on television and I went to Jeremy Skoyles’s
⁵
birthday but there wasn’t any prizes.

Sunday, 12 March

Today it was Mothers Day and we bought Mum some walnut whips and she liked them.

Thursday, 16 March

Today
Top Cat
came back on television and it was about Top Cat falling in love with a nurse.

Tuesday, 21 March

Today the Budget was on TV so we had to see children’s television on BBC2.

1.
Quite why Nan and Pap got a colour television before us is a mystery to me. Were they perhaps working for the KGB? Either way, it was at Nan’s that I saw my favourite cartoon
Top Cat
in colour for the very first time and thrilled to the revelation that Choo Choo was pink (pink!), Benny was blue, Spook was green etc. It was my version of the Queen’s Coronation and I assume it occurred in 1971.

2.
Paul Milner lived two streets away in Exmoor Close. A chunky fellow with hair so blond it was white, he turned out to be a real soulmate as we entered our teens: great at drawing and with an identical sense of humour to my own. His dad – who in my memory’s eye is Prince Andrew in naval uniform – worked for Geest as the captain of a banana boat and was thus always away. (I’m sure Paul told a horror story about his dad finding a tarantula in a crate of bananas.) I remember overhearing phone calls at their house to Mr Milner when he was shipboard – they had to say ‘over’ at the end of sentences. That seemed pretty exciting. Over.

3.
Bright’s Boffins
is one of those programmes that will never make it on to an
I Love Nostalgia
show: because nobody except me remembers it. Thankfully, Mark Lewisohn’s redoubtable
Radio Times Guide to TV Comedy
put me out of my lifelong misery when it was published in 1998: in this children’s sitcom (which ran to an astonishing three series on ITV between 1970 and 1972), Alexander Doré played ‘a bumbling, old-fashioned (and, quite frankly, mad) scientist-inventor, leader of a team of similarly minded boffins working for an under-funded and irrelevant Whitehall ministry’. Yes, and they worked out of an old railway station. I distinctly remember the character Dogsears, played by that great British clown Gordon Rawlings, he of the hangdog expression – formerly Charlie Moffit on
Coronation Street
in the mid-Sixties, latterly Arkwright in the John Smith’s Bitter ads. His finest – or most widely seen – hour came in 1980 when he cameoed as a surprised angler in
Superman II
(34th in the cast) and then ‘Man in Cap’ in
Superman III
(14th). When I saw him in
II
, I just thought ‘Dogsears’ silently but happily to myself. He died in 1985.

4.
See Chapter 1
.

5.
Jeremy Skoyles, or Jes. Long-term pal, if something of a softy – unless we were just extrapolating from his name. I think perhaps he wore his gloves on a string inside the sleeves of his coat.

two

Cobblers

A love affair with Northampton is a journey into space
.

Rod Thompson, ‘Energy In Northampton’ (1980)

WE WERE ALLOWED
to park in the Equity & Law car park on Saturdays. They were clients of my dad’s. Our family shopping trips to town involved him getting out of the car and unlocking the padlock of our own private car park, a gravelly yard tucked away round the back of Abington Street, retail’s main drag. It wasn’t like we had the keys to the town, but it certainly felt like a civic privilege, avoiding the bottleneck (and the payment) at the multi-storey. There was even a cramped Pay and Display directly opposite the Equity & Law, which always had a queue of cars attached even first thing on a Saturday, the occupants of which would gaze at us in jealous awe as we drove past them down the Ridings and entered our own
special
car park.

Thus began the Saturday morning shopping ritual. It took the advent in 1976 of Noel Edmonds’s
Multi-Coloured Swap Shop
to disrupt it, after which Mum and Dad allowed Simon and me to stay at home alone (you’d probably get arrested for that nowadays). But in the days before Chegwin and Posh Paws, trips into town went like this. Dad would drive, even though Mum
could
, and, having taken advantage of our
special
car park, we’d set off on the same tried and tested path every week: up through the Co-Op arcade, across Abington Street to Marks & Sparks for fancy food (chunky chicken, cakes) and a chat with Nan Mabel if she was
working
Saturdays. Functional food (cupboard ingredients, packet stuff) came from Sainsbury’s. Then – once it was fully functioning – into the strip-lit gloom of the Grosvenor Centre, Northampton’s showcase antiseptic shopping mall boasting 300,000 square feet of retail opportunity. (Sainsbury’s later relocated there from Abington Street, but by then we were I think getting the packet food from British Home Stores in the days before ‘bhs’ rebranding, after which they stopped doing food anyway.)

The Grosvenor was – and is – a dark, stale-aired time tunnel linking the ‘old town’ Abington Street and the ‘even older town’ Market Square. Therein, we would dutifully trudge round Beatties department store, where Mum would look at clothes or buy some cotton for the sewing machine or a birthday card. If we were lucky we’d loiter with Dad at the tiny toy department while Mum went to the loo. (She always seemed to need the loo at this point, and Beatties had one.) If we needed felt-tips or a compass for school we’d get them in WH Smith’s, and here I would graze, every week handling the Pythonesque
Rutland Dirty Weekend Book
and knowing I would never get it as it had a ‘rude lady’ on the cover. I could but dream.