Nostalgia
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Peter Millar ...remembers
P
ICKIE Pool. Castle Park. The shelters by the McKee Clock. Nowhere else much mattered if you were in your mid-teens in Bangor in the late 60s. Winter was dead and dark and damp. We crawled to school before dawn, because the clocks had stopped going back – or forward – and watched the sun come up yawning in the back of Mr Bonar’s history class. When the gales came lashing in off the Irish Sea and forked up High Street and Main Street, splattering ice-cold rain across the windows, my mother would tell me: “You wouldn’t want to be down at the McKee Clock on a night like this.” And I wouldn’t. I still wouldn’t. In summer though, it was different. Life revolved around Pickie Pool. A freewheeling cycle ride down High Street, along Queen’s Parade – on the wide pavement, eliciting ‘tuts’ from old ladies who dodged out of the way – to spend the day in skimpy swimming trunks, wondering if I dared to ‘do the platty’, a 12ft jump, nose gripped tightly, into murky green waters, and trying to ignore the showboats who dived – dived, Jesus, I ask you! – off the top board. I never even dared climb up there. Or out the back, over the rocks and out to the raft, in the sea water itself – exactly the same as that in the pool,
PETER Millar went from Bangor Grammar School to Magdalen College, Oxford, where he studied French and Russian before joining the Reuters news agency in 1977. Following spells in London, Brussels, East Berlin,Warsaw and Moscow, he joined the The Daily Telegraph in 1985, subsequently moving to The Sunday Telegraph as Central Europe Correspondent. He moved to The Sunday Times in the same role in 1989, and was named Foreign Correspondent of the Year for his reporting on the fall of the Berlin Wall and revolutions in Eastern Europe. He later became Deputy Editor of The European, working closely with Robert Maxwell which he describes as “like being aide-de-camp to Stalin.” He is now a freelance writer for The Times and The Sunday Times, author of two novels, a travel book (‘All Gone to Look for America’, 2009), and a recently published memoir: ‘1989,The Berlin Wall – My Part in its Downfall’ (Arcadia Books 2009)
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Pickie Pool.
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just a degree or two colder, having a slightly lower urine count. Then back in to sit on the wooden seats and sunbathe shivering beneath a towel looking up at the long legs of flat-chested girls in bikinis. And wondering when my time would come. Not at The Boulevard afterwards with 99s and giggles from the next compartment. We wondered the same thing a lot too at night, in Castle Park, duffel coats pulled up, prototype hoodies, against the wind and rain – as we got older we even ventured out in winter – glugging from bottles of cider. Old English mostly, 3/4d a bottle, from the off-licence near the station (“You look 18, go on.”) – cheaper than the Triple V that came in a bottle your mum might turn into a bedside lamp. As a child the park had been a place to climb trees and invent fantasy worlds deep in the branches of an arboretum I thought was normal British woodland. As an adolescent it was a place to talk big and dream bigger. Depending on how much cider was consumed. The McKee Clock shelters were an alternative venue. Sometimes you’d get the tougher kids there. Down from the Ponderosa. One of them put my head through a pane of the telephone box once. Nothing personal. We discussed matters of global import: was it really Paul McCartney rather than Ringo Starr doing that funny little drum solo bit towards the end of the second side of Abbey Road. We carved our initials into the seats, now and then with a heart, and the initials of some girl from the Glenlola Fourth Form. I spent hours one languid sunny afternoon using my door key to carve two sets into the sandstone slabs that lined the sea wall along Queen’s Parade. The fantasy of youth: engraving immortality in sandstone.
P
ICKIE Pool. Castle Park. The shelters by the McKee Clock. Nowhere else much mattered if you were in your mid-teens in Bangor in the late 60s. Winter was dead and dark and damp. We crawled to school before dawn, because the clocks had stopped going back – or forward – and watched the sun come up yawning in the back of Mr Bonar’s history class. When the gales came lashing in off the Irish Sea and forked up High Street and Main Street, splattering ice-cold rain across the windows, my mother would tell me: “You wouldn’t want to be down at the McKee Clock on a night like this.” And I wouldn’t. I still wouldn’t. In summer though, it was different. Life revolved around Pickie Pool. A freewheeling cycle ride down High Street, along Queen’s Parade – on the wide pavement, eliciting ‘tuts’ from old ladies who dodged out of the way – to spend the day in skimpy swimming trunks, wondering if I dared to ‘do the platty’, a 12ft jump, nose gripped tightly, into murky green waters, and trying to ignore the showboats who dived – dived, Jesus, I ask you! – off the top board. I never even dared climb up there. Or out the back, over the rocks and out to the raft, in the sea water itself – exactly the same as that in the pool,
PETER Millar went from Bangor Grammar School to Magdalen College, Oxford, where he studied French and Russian before joining the Reuters news agency in 1977. Following spells in London, Brussels, East Berlin,Warsaw and Moscow, he joined the The Daily Telegraph in 1985, subsequently moving to The Sunday Telegraph as Central Europe Correspondent. He moved to The Sunday Times in the same role in 1989, and was named Foreign Correspondent of the Year for his reporting on the fall of the Berlin Wall and revolutions in Eastern Europe. He later became Deputy Editor of The European, working closely with Robert Maxwell which he describes as “like being aide-de-camp to Stalin.” He is now a freelance writer for The Times and The Sunday Times, author of two novels, a travel book (‘All Gone to Look for America’, 2009), and a recently published memoir: ‘1989,The Berlin Wall – My Part in its Downfall’ (Arcadia Books 2009)
97
Pickie Pool.
98
just a degree or two colder, having a slightly lower urine count. Then back in to sit on the wooden seats and sunbathe shivering beneath a towel looking up at the long legs of flat-chested girls in bikinis. And wondering when my time would come. Not at The Boulevard afterwards with 99s and giggles from the next compartment. We wondered the same thing a lot too at night, in Castle Park, duffel coats pulled up, prototype hoodies, against the wind and rain – as we got older we even ventured out in winter – glugging from bottles of cider. Old English mostly, 3/4d a bottle, from the off-licence near the station (“You look 18, go on.”) – cheaper than the Triple V that came in a bottle your mum might turn into a bedside lamp. As a child the park had been a place to climb trees and invent fantasy worlds deep in the branches of an arboretum I thought was normal British woodland. As an adolescent it was a place to talk big and dream bigger. Depending on how much cider was consumed. The McKee Clock shelters were an alternative venue. Sometimes you’d get the tougher kids there. Down from the Ponderosa. One of them put my head through a pane of the telephone box once. Nothing personal. We discussed matters of global import: was it really Paul McCartney rather than Ringo Starr doing that funny little drum solo bit towards the end of the second side of Abbey Road. We carved our initials into the seats, now and then with a heart, and the initials of some girl from the Glenlola Fourth Form. I spent hours one languid sunny afternoon using my door key to carve two sets into the sandstone slabs that lined the sea wall along Queen’s Parade. The fantasy of youth: engraving immortality in sandstone.
