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, Kim5 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 Bailey7 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 Bambi9 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 Brothers11 and we wished we had seen the other episodes.
Tuesday, 14 May
Davvy12 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 angl
icised 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.
Saturday, 1 February
I had Cracker (my second issue but really Number 4 but I missed issues 1 and 2) and the free gift was a funny face maker with 40 brilliant funny faces.
Wednesday, 5 February
Me and Simon went with Dad to the dentist and I’ve got to have two fillings and I’ve got to have them on my birthday. Dad says it is Mr Wright’s present for me!!
Wednesday, 19 February
We practised Wind In The Willows yet again.1 Me and Simon played an Action Man game at the barracks going on leave in the tank for two weeks and it was brill.
Tuesday, 4 March
It was my birthday and I had one filling. My party’s on Sunday. I got Mum, Dad, Nan and Pap’s presents. A felt tip with three refills, a dictionary, a French dictionary, two packs of felt tips and the Mummy glow in the dark model.
Saturday, 8 March
This afternoon we went shopping with my birthday money and Griffin came in the end. I bought a brill Lego gravelworks and it has a conveyor belt and a brill crane. I’ve already built it up.
Sunday, 9 March
It was my party. Griffin, Ed, Johnny and Dean came and I got two drawing books, a pen wobbler, some paints, a charcoal pencil and a packet of pencils.
Thursday, 20 March
We did our play Wind In The Willows and I was Toad. I had ever such a lot to say and so did Eddy who was Rat. I liked it when we had the fight with the weasels.
Wednesday, 26 March
Me and Simon stayed up to see a brill film which we didn’t know the name of.
Saturday, 17 May
Me and Simon watched a film with Eric Morecambe and Ernie Wise called The Intelligence Men. After that we watched Look – Mike Yarwood! He did Denis Healey and our favourite (Steptoe).
Monday, 26 May
I had German measles. Me and Simon stayed up till 10.00 to watch this brilliant war film called The Longest Day starring Richard Burton, Robert Mitchell,2 John Wayne and Red Buttons.
Tuesday, 27 May
It was hot and me and Carl and Maria played a great game. I was in my room and I tied my Action Man to the open window and I got him wedged in the gutter and Carl threw balls to knock him out.
Thursday, 29 May
It was Simon’s birthday and he got lots of presents and as a treat Dad took us to the pictures to see The Poseidon Adventure and Please Sir! They were both brilliant especially The Poseidon Adventure.3
Saturday, 31 May
Simon had his birthday party. Simon Coles, Paul Givelin, Jonathan Ashby and Dean all came. I started making a book all about The Poseidon Adventure. I have already drawn all the stars and written about them.
Monday, 2 June
Simon had to go to Birmingham with Dad to have an allergy test. As a treat Dad bought him (with his birthday money) a new Action Man with gripping hands4 and an assault craft and Dad bought me the book of The Poseidon Adventure.
Sunday, 15 June
Me and Simon stayed up tonight and watched a horror film till 10.00. It was The Hunchback of Notre Dame starring Charles Laughton.5
Saturday, 5 July Holiday
We got to Anglesey to stay for a week but it was all tatty and horrible so we asked Mrs Roberts, the owner of the farmhouse where we were going in the second week and she let us stay in the bungalow and we have settled in. I have bought two comics and two holiday specials.
Thursday, 24 July
In the morning me and Simon went down to help Pappy Collins in the allotments. We picked some beans, onions, potato, beetroot and some carrots for Sooty.6 In the afternoon I did my 320-piece jigsaw of Piccadilly Circus.
Thursday, 31 July
I came down Nanny’s to sleep till Monday. I made two cars and a garage out of Lego and I played spe
eding them into the garage and smashing them up and seeing who got broken up completely first.
Saturday, 2 August
I watched telly all morning. After tea (two crisp sandwiches) we went to a pub and I had two Cokes and when we came back I watched telly till 9.00 and me and Pap played Rummy till half past.
Thursday, 7 August
Me, Simon and Dean went to the play scheme which is a place near my school and it has a big bus all painted, with a slide, and you do what you like. We went with Griff and we had great fun. We had our faces painted. I looked horrible.
Saturday, 16 August
Mum and Dad went shopping and Griff and Eddy came round and Dad bought Simon two packs of little soldiers7 so he let me have his English and German big soldiers and Dad bought me some Australians and I have painted them.
Saturday, 23 August
In the morning we went shopping and Nan bought me a packet of Russian soldiers and we got Simon a pack of Japs.
Saturday, 1 September
I went back to school only it is a new middle school. I am in the same class as Angus and our teacher is Mr Walman and he is very nice. I sit next to Angus as well. The headmistress is Miss Malins.
Sunday, 7 September
In the morning I swapped three rubber things that go on the ends of a pencil for the Russians, Afrika Korps and the Field Marshalls in little soldiers and two rubbers with Wilson. I covered my two French books and my hymn book.
Saturday 13 September Blackpool with Nan and Pap
In the morning I bought Melissa a book, Mum a flower holder, Simon an Action Man bed and me a Dr Who book and a halftrack. We went to the Tower and we saw the animals being fed and we went to see Freddie Starr and it finished at quarter past eleven.
Friday, 19 September
We did art. I was with Miss Scott for sewing. I started sewing Mum some oven gloves and so far they’re good. I watched Dad’s Army and The Liver Birds and I had an ice cold Coke.8
Sunday, 21 September
In the afternoon Nan and Pap came round and I had a lovely tea: cheese sandwiches, pork pie and crisps and fruit cake for afters. We watched Celebrity Squares and Black Beauty. We both had an ice cold Coke.
Tuesday, 7 October
I went to the dentist. It was St Francis Day (skills) and St Francis went home 10 minutes early. We all got special badges. We had science and we are making little crystals. Our little group is me, Angus, Kim and Milner. Me and Simon saw Oil Strike North.
Where Did It All Go Right? Page 9