15 January 1977

I went into the attic today to put last year’s journals into their box, and I came across that record player I bought John, a present for passing his eleven-plus exam. It looked so small - a brown and black plastic box without any speakers, just a small grille on the side. It only played seven-inch singles and it had a small disc to put over the spindle of the turntable if the record didn’t have a centre. I’d forgotten those odd plastic things, like curved triangles, that you had to put in the middle of singles. You had to snap them in with your thumbs. He played the most awful music and it got worse as he got older. I’d give him pocket money, maybe two shillings or half a crown, for washing the car, cutting the grass, or tidying his room, and he’d catch a bus into Plymouth and buy singles he’d play over and over. The cottage too small to get away from the noise. There was one — 'In the Summertime’ - that he played again and again, singing along endlessly. It drove me mad. Then, when we moved to this house, I threw away all the records, put the player in the attic and he never asked about it. Why would he?

10 December 1999

The papers are full of end-of-millennium predictions and speculations. The television when I watch it, which is rarely, focuses on nothing else. End of year, end of century, end of millennium. Everyone trying to whip up some fin de siècle spirit. There are constant reviews of the century — the Great War, the moon landings, the nuclear mushroom cloud. Sometimes I wish Einstein had been a watchmaker. What madness, really, all of it. Strange, though, to think that I lost one of those years, a whole year, when I lived in that flat in Lambeth, visiting John in hospital every day. My world shrank to catheters and drips, lino floors and endless nights of waiting within the same four beige walls. England joined Europe, Nixon was re-elected, the Israeli Olympic compound was stormed. Ezra Pound and Harry Truman died. Burglars broke into the Watergate complex. The Americans dropped napalm in Vietnam, Northern Ireland smouldered and caught fire. And I stared at John’s back for months as the world exploded outside those walls.

JOHN

I lost my hearing on my thirteenth birthday, the day after I discovered that hearts could be broken. My mother woke me at four o’clock that morning, the November sky midnight black, the air still tangy with cordite from the weekend of Guy Fawkes Night. I trod on Tub the Ted when I got up, hopping from foot to foot on the freezing floor. My mother had packed the suitcases the night before and as she tidied the kitchen I splashed some water on my face and dressed, still yawning. My mother made a flask of tea and I carried a bottle of lemonade — very gingerly - out to the car. It was cold, not quite freezing. She idled the car, the engine loud in the pre-dawn black morning, while I fetched the cases and Toulouse, the cat, nearly tripped me, squawking when I stepped on his tail. I forgot to duck as I left the cottage and smacked my forehead on the door lintel, not for the first time. I remember every detail of that early morning, not because of what happened or what we saw but because of what I heard. I never thought to turn and look at the cottage, perhaps wave as we left, because I didn’t know then that I wouldn’t see it again.