Diaries 2: Teenager in Kent

Diaries often raise more questions than they answer.  Reading through some of mine recently – whiling away hours which could have been employed on tasks around the house or the garden – I wonder why I wrote such banalities? Every location was ‘charming’, every meal ‘delicious’!  And at the same time, infuriatingly, I failed to include answers to questions which they raise now.  So why had I written those heart-searching reflections fifty years ago as a student in Paris, those enthusiastic travelogues forty years ago in South America, and that mesmerised day-to-day description of revolutionary events some thirty-something years ago in Teheran, if it was not with the intention that I would want to look back and read them again and that maybe others, if only family and friends, would find them interesting?  No, those diaries were not a waste of time and won’t be consigned just yet to bin bags.

But teenage diaries are another thing altogether.  BBC radio recently broadcast a series, in their 6.30 comedy slot, of ‘My Teenage Diaries’ in which well- known, or at least people with a claim to some kind of fame, chat with a presenter about their teenage diaries and laugh along with a studio audience about the funny, lovable or mostly embarrassing confessions they made at the time. 

They must, I feel sure, have exercised considerable self-censorship, for my own teen-age diaries are an almost-indecipherable mixture, a lot of them written in pencil probably last thing at night, of telegraphese remarks:  school friends, boy friends, ponies, school dramas, going to church and more boy-friends, real or imaginary and love-lorn longings, all of which at the present time I find embarrassing and difficult to admit was the ‘Me’ of the time in question.   Those were mostly from my sixteen-year-old diary.  But despite the love-lorn laments, upbeat and cheery is the overall impression of the diary entries at that time

Here are a few examples from that sixteen-year-old diary:–

Jan 8th  ‘Our dance.  Only Paul J with Bill (chiz)’. This might need translating:-  We used to give ‘dances’; i.e. our friends and families in the neighbourhood, either at home, if home had a big enough sitting room with a wood floor, or else  in a hired venue.  Our own dance took place in the upstairs function-room of the ‘George and Dragon’ pub in the village.  Some friends had a band, a group of three on piano, some kind of wind instrument and drums.  I think we did supper and there was a fairly mild alcoholic ‘punch’ to drink.

I can’t really remember what kind of dancing we did but it would have been ballroom because I know we went to dancing classes during the Christmas holidays in the town, where we learnt quickstep, waltz and other slightly more exotic dances and I remember also that the dancing classes were an opportunity to meet others of our age.

We also did Scottish dances, eightsome reel, Gay Gordons and Dashing White Sergeant were the usual ones.  But to return to that diary entry I puzzled over ‘Only Paul J with Bill’. Who was Paul J?  Why was he and only he, with Bill?  No problem remembering Bill; he was the one I was in love – or, thought I was in love with but was not sure if that was what it was but whatever it was I could not imagine life without it.  So,’Only Paul J with Bill’?  suddenly it came to me;  I had danced only one dance, the ‘Paul Jones’, with Bill.  Well, that was an anti-climax as far as my love-affair with Bill was concerned, as you will realise if you know what a ‘Paul Jones’ is ( or was).  It was the dance – and correct me if I am wrong, where you changed partners every so often.  Rather like an ‘Excuse-me waltz’ ( remember that?).  There will be one person too many on the dance floor and he – or she – can go up to another couple and request the pleasure of…. And so another free-radical is released to go and split up another couple, and so on.  I may have got that not quite right about the Paul Jones, but it was something along those lines and if that was my only dance with Bill that evening, well, the affair was not going anywhere fast at all:  sad! You may have noticed and perhaps recognised that bracketed word ‘chiz’. Simple explanation:  see Nigel Molesworth and ‘Down With Skool’.  If you are none the wiser I feel sure it will be on Google     By mid-January I had still not made it with Bill (i.e. had not even heard from him or bumped into him) and the school holidays were nearly over and boys like him were returning to boarding school. The entry for January 20 reads ‘Well!  Bill presumably has gone back.’ But it appears that there was another, unwelcome suitor in the offing because the entry goes on: ‘Letter from that wretched John W. wants me to meet him Saturday … oh dear!’

There you have just a couple of entries with so much to delve into, remember and explain.  I am beginning to think that my teenage diaries could provide the basis for a year’s course in Cultural Studies of the early 1960’s.  Here are some more: make of them what you will (clue:  I had sold my shaggy pony and was hoping to upgrade to a superior model). 9th April ‘Well, we can’t have the mare.  I’m so disapp. ‘cos I liked her so much. Had hair cut and v bored – hols nearly over and no horse. Went for long walk.  I wish I cd see Bill – I do want him’  –    You see?  I still had not got over Bill!  I am not sure what happened to the ‘wretched John W’ and today I have no idea who he was, although I remember Bill distinctly.

Yet I still haven’t brought myself to bin and burn my teenage diaries, and I wonder why not?  Perhaps it’s because they represent that early life, that I would like to feel happy rather than embarrassed about today, but can’t quite?  In any case, beyond the tiny extracts I have bared in this space to the public, I most definitely don’t want others to see these particular diaries and at some point, perhaps when I have succeeded in coming more to terms with them, I will consign them to the bin-bag.