All the same, I shall try to make these diaries tell me something and I’m going to do it following a lead given me by my incomparable friend and teacher Alan Davies. ‘Foo’, the name we all knew him by, was a Professor of Political Science, known to generations of students for Australian Democracy. Others knew him for his short stories collected in A Sunday Kind of Love. One story begins ‘Raw shame like raw grief blinds only in gusts’, a phrase that would be no less at home in his academic writing. I have seen a picture of him graduating in the old Wilson Hall in the 1940s, crême de la crême and thus freed from the Front. He looks like Auden and later he gave lectures on Auden’s poetry and like the poet he became interested in Freud. This led eventually to his psychoanalytic contributions to politics, Private Politics and the huge Skills, Outlooks and Passions.

This was at the Tavistock in its prime, in the late 1940s and 1950s. Foo used to say that the long, uniquely Australian sabbaticals of those days, P&O one way, Orient back, weren’t complete without four sessions a week on a Hampstead couch. When he died he was beginning another leave and thinking about draft two of a big book about dreams, his own dreams he’d interpreted himself over a period of two years.

The hint was this. Start with the rough old sociology if you have to, don’t be afraid of counting, and the stuff that matters, the inner life, the psychology for want of a better word, will follow. So the dream book, as he called it, is organised round a sample of his dreams – he assayed 200 but Evan Jones can only find 199 – and his first chapters take a census of the real-life and imaginary characters populating his world of the night, arranged by gender, class, politics and type of school.

So, if Foo could get to the unconscious along the low road of sociology, maybe I can get to myself at thirteen and fourteen by a similar route.

1953 is black with the palest yellow pages, sewn so well that forty years later it still opens flat and not a page has come loose. It’s about the size of the slim bar of Nestles you once bought from station vending machines. There’s a lilac ribbon for marking the place – that’s a little frayed at the bottom – and the cover has the year in silver on the top right-hand corner while in the middle, also in silver, is M&D Biscuits. Meredith and Drew, they were. My father would have been given it in the way of business.

There can’t be many diaries with a Foreword. In Britain in those days we had the confused feeling that we’d won the war, hadn’t we, and didn’t we have everything to be proud of, then why were we scrimping and saving, dowdy, depressed, and being told by the world Britain was finished? So I’m grateful to M&D for the good news that plants (an American usage already?) are set ‘to expand the manufacture of creams and fancy lines of which the public has been starved for so long’. There are people who make ‘the public’ sound beneath them, and ‘the people out there’ is the same, but this is kind, isn’t it? I can’t help feeling pleased for the men of M&D – we are shown twenty-four of them, head-and­shoulders, starting with the young Scottish division, who will work their way down as they work their way up, to the London division, older men, looking more in control. They boast about the continuing expansion of ‘our now famous half­pound packets’ – I hope they went well.

On the calendar inside the front cover every month is crossed off except June. I still do this, crossing off the months till I’m dead, as if they were chores it is a relief to get done. Suddenly there’s June, completely untouched. As it happens, the entry for the last day reads, ‘I did not go to school but went to the Test match with Dennis Compton. Had a lovely day.’ Talk of blandness: ‘Had a lovely day’ – with Dennis Compton, only England’s most exciting batsmen ever, and he also played outside right for Arsenal! This immensely exciting arrangement was my father’s, some return for a favour, and it nearly went very wrong. I duly arrived at Lords and went up to the man at the famous gate where the players arrive and was told to wait while he let Tom Graveney through in a taxi. ‘Then I asked him to tell ‘Mr Compton’ I was there. You can imagine the reaction, not to mention the colour of my cheeks because I wasn’t stupid and just hadn’t been able to think of a better way to put it.

I had a longish wait, feeling foolish under the gatekeeper’s gaze. But Compton did arrive at last, full of apologies, and the gatekeeper Jocked surprised. Compton walked me to a seat in the pavilion and then excused himself saying he had to pad up, then he went to the wicket where an over or two later he was LBW for 53, most of them made the day before. The rest of the day belonged to Trevor Bailey and Willie Watson who assured us a draw and I went home early, my mother wondering how I could be at home while Freddie Brown, the England captain, in the only bright play of the day, was hitting fours on the television.

Continuity was at a premium after the war and I wanted it as badly as anyone, partly my age, partly coming from Belfast and still learning to be English. I seem to have supported a team in every game, flown a flag for one side or the other in every war, chosen a hero from every list. Past the M&D photographs are four pages, covering a quarter of a century, of ‘winners, jockeys and prices’. Gordon Richards, looking a bit like Jack Brabhall) now that I think of it, was well known but there in the list is C. Smirke, one of those names you remember but can’t remember why you remember. Lester Piggott was about to be a very big hero just because he was a prodigy ... We all wanted to win the Grand National or play for England or whatever when we grew up but that was only in public. Secretly we dreamed of doing it as Boy Wonders, children talented and wise beyond their years, or miraculously gifted like the boy in The Rocking Horse Winners who had a vision of who’d win before the race was run. We would attract huge crowds and embarrass the critics (people like schoolmasters and Lords’ gatekeepers) on our way. to renouncing it all to teach natives in Africa – because it was important if you were going to be famous and powerful to be, Eric Liddell­like, famously good as well.

There are two pages of soccer results. In fountain-pen ink I’ve put dots beside Arsenal’s championship wins in the FA Cup and the League. In pencil there’s Blackpool’s last-minute win 9ver Bolton. At 3–1 down, Stanley Matthews, the Rolls Royce of pre-Pele soccer, decided he was too old to get another chance at a Cup-winners’ medal so he’d better get it now, and they won 4–3. How often grown men – and women? – actually do what schoolboys – and schoolgirls? – dream! From all this, you’ll not be surprised I’ve underlined Rugby Interna­tionals we won, even though I never followed the game. The surprise is that the team underlined is Ireland, hardly to be expected of a Belfast boy and British colonial subject. Of course there’s the cricket, which I updated with the four draws of that warm summer and the Lock-and-Laker win at the Oval. In the Spring the New Zealander Hillary and the Sherpa Tensing climbed Everest as a gift for the Queen in the year of her Coronation, and now the Ashes late in the summer. It never crossed my mind that she might have wanted the Australians to win.

The sports go on and we haven’t reached January yet. There’s boxing, but all I see there now is the great heavyweight, Joe Couis, still champion in 1951. We loved the Brown Bomber although he was American but we worshipped Freddie Mills, champion light heavyweight in 1948, because he was British and beat the Americans to a pulp. Joey Maxim’s there too, after going fifteen rounds trying to protect a jaw that was broken in the first.

My diaries acquit me of unhealthy interests and wimpish concerns. I’m into the spirit of the thing and still on the printed pages at the front! You’d never tell I preferred reading in front of the fire to cricket and football, though, on the other hand, I liked them enough not to qualify as a first-class aesthete either. The truth is that for interest nothing matched making my mother a cup of tea, her lighting a cigarette, and the two of us sitting down at the table in the kitchen while she talked about, well, whatever she talked about. I talked too, usually getting excited and ridiculously hopeful about what l would do or be someday, partly to keep her talking. I was careful what I said about grown-ups but sometimes I said too much, showed too much interest, appeared to know things I shouldn’t and she’d look at the time and stub out a cigarette conveniently nearly finished while I vainly offered a fresh pot of tea.

Birthdays are passed over briskly, but Christmas gets the full treatment. ‘We were all so very excited we did not get asleep until about 1 o’clock.’ Meticulous with that dot after the one, but perhaps hesitant over ‘to sleep’ versus ‘asleep’ and that Christmas Eve entry cheated with time. Didn’t I just get the diary on the 25th? Then, with my parents out somewhere for drinks and the presents arranged on the bed, I made a final check on whether Christmas had been really good, or just a little bit disappointing as even Christmases sometimes were: ‘Had a super Christmas. I got an electric train (Dublo). Had a lovely dinner of turkey. Mammy [she was still called by the, embarrassing Irish word] and Daddy went out in the evening to the De Buriettes’. Not giving much away though, and not on Boxing Day either: ‘Today was Mammy and Daddy’s [wedding] Anniversary. We gave them their presents. Went to Jack Hylton’s Circus at Earl’s Court. Very good.’ Jack Hylton later saved my father’s business by buying it for a song, which I suppose speeded us on our way to Australia. There was an outing the next day to the TV Music Hall to hear someone sing, an Irishman called Downey my father had some interest in (he had a scheme with Joseph Locke, too) which was ‘Very good’. On the 28th, a Sunday, when the diary tells, military fashion, the sun rose at 08.05 and set at 15.18, we ‘Had a quiet day’.

I’m in the mood to be rough with my data, ask a few direct questions, give them a good shake as my mother would say when things didn’t work, and count. Sociology’s supposed to be about ‘relationships’ – so what’s revealed in M&D 1953 about the ‘human envelope’ the diarist lives in? When the year opens he is thirteen and his two sisters are eleven and eight. The parents are coming up to thirty-six. Who else, relatives and friends?

There’s an entry nearly every day from Christmas 1952 to New Year’s Eve 1953. Two out of three have someone’s name attached, and in most of the rest I name myself: 12 January ‘I played with my train. Just stayed around the house’; 29 May ‘We got off from school for Coronation Week’; 16 October ‘Had quite a nice day at school. Hope I go to see Arsenal tomorrow.’ There’s me and whoever I think I’m addressing in these entries.

Sixty-five times it’s my mother who’s mentioned, forty-eight times my father, appearing together just six times. My sisters get a dozen mentions each, other relatives sixteen, one of them Monty, who was miles away at boarding school and boasted about being my uncle though he was two years younger. I was attending a smart Catholic Prep school in Hampstead favoured by diplomats, and my school friends Silva, de Sa and Ferraro – we used surnames – appear briefly. But David Whittington (not Dick, and there’s an extra t) is mentioned twenty-one times. David still lived in Kent, where we’d lived for three years after leaving Northern Ireland. That put him two and a half hours away by Southern Region steam train and his presence in my diary, coming on visits, writing a letter, once even phoning by trunks, indicates my attachment to the past. He’s still there in the 1954 diary but other friends are growing in importance, especially de Sa whose father was the Brazilian Naval Attaché to Britain. De Sa told me his country had a navy of two submarines, the only trouble was one couldn’t dive under water and the other couldn’t get back up if it did.

So there’s David, a major part of the envelope, but at a distance. Sixteen mentions for relatives is pretty thin I should think – Foo would interpolate: readers might try a quick calculation of their own, relatives in contact within the last month, say – and since they were usually short of the price of a ticket, my father sometimes wired them the fare for the boat train, thinking they’d be company for my mother. For Aunt Maime and my cousin Jacqueline the journey from Antrim to London felt like a once-in-a-lifetime expedition, and it wasn’t long before they’d be wondering what was happening at home and talking about starting to make their way back. The diary stretches so far as to report a visit from ‘Jacqueline’s teacher’, probably a music teacher getting her London certificate.

The relative mentioned most is my Uncle Jack, a real uncle, my mother’s just-older brother. When he was in the house, my mother was high-spirited and all of us children felt reassured, I don’t know what by exactly. Uncle Jack was a labourer, went to Egypt and Italy with the REME in the war, could fix things and seemed sure of himself, a bit of a lad, really, though he had no wife – there was a de facto tucked away – and longed for a home and a child, which later he got, along with a bad heart. I took immense encouragement from the way he believed in his own, whether it was his family, the Protestant Irish or a British black man, Randolph Turpin, going fifteen rounds against the Yanks. I could never be sure my father would stand by his own that way. He was a man who took his cues from his ambition. Uncle Jack told me I was becoming too polite, it was those pansified Englishmen: ‘Uncle Jack, could you please move over, I’m falling out of the bed’, he’d mimic. ‘Should’ve given me a whack on the bum, boyo, like the Irishman you were born.’ Walking down Frognal he promised me there’d be no National Service when I grew up, ‘the world’s wiser now, after the war, that’s what we fought for, boyo’.

At the same time, I felt a sadness for my Uncle Jack, as if I should look after him. I’d watch him eat the fry of bacon and eggs and soda bread my mother always made him, after a bath, with his clothes around the kitchen getting dry, wishing, but knowing it was foolish to wish it, that moments like this would go on forever. But then he’d go to lodgings in Dorking or somewhere and we’d never know when we’d see him again, and, for us, when was very close to if. Before leaving he’d give me a pound and I’d spend it slowly, eking it out to show him a shilling left next time he came.

Not that you’d know all this from the diary. On the Monday after Christmas, the shops opened again and I ‘did shopping’ for my mother arid I got back to find Uncle Jack there. The diary entry is ‘Uncle Jack brought his pal Bert up. He was very nice.’

I’ve done my counting in freehand. There are columns for mother, father, each sister by name, relatives, friends, other. The last, which included friends of my parents, who were mostly the people my father was meeting in business, has more than fifty entries. We had to call these people uncle and aunty. One, Uncle Bob, was a controversial figure in the family, my father encouraging him, my mother suspicious that he was a rake and a con-man. She hated the change she saw in my father when that man came to stay. He was a steward on P&O liners when we knew him, and he certainly seemed to have every chance to be glamorously wicked. He once brought a set of dirty pictures from Port Said, Which I found under a cushion on the sofa.

There are schoolmasters in this list, and the Head’s wife who gave a Complete Shakespeare as the prize for an essay on the Coronatiori which I still have, and the doctors and nurses my mother was seeing. The Bradens appear once, a Canadian husband-and-wife team we once went on television with. She was called by her own name, Barbara Kelly, in what seemed to me an exciting blend of New World and Show Business cheek. Not much of a story that TV performance, only I did surprise them by knowing the weight which I’ve Looking down the list, these are remote people, or; in Uncle Bob’s case, disturbing. Poor substitutes for relatives if we needed any comforting or for making connections in the world. There were warmer people, Eileen whom we’d known in Ireland and the Tylers we’d stay with in Kent when my mother was in hospital. But they visited only once or twice in the year. Some on the list are former neighbours, like the old people we called Grandpa and Graridtna Smiles from across the road where we once lived, who had us to tea when we were back on a visit. Again, to find the warmth you have to rake up the past,

Inside the house, sickness is a pervasive theme, sickness being perhaps another word for the difficulty of coping in an envelope so thin (sociologese: upward-mobility sickness). There’s the expected flurry of parties around Christ­mas and New Year: 31 December ‘Big ball at the club. We all stayed at. the Wilson’s. It was fun, we slept on cushions on the floor.’ But overall the diary privileges the lugubrious. The entry for 15 April is ‘I learned that Mammy was very ill and I was terribly worried’ (the prose wobbly there) and July 8 ‘Heard that Mammy was going into hospital next week & that we are going down to Anne’s. Poor Mammy.’

When you do the sums, she was ill for three weeks between April and May and again for parts of July and August. A fair bit of time. She even stayed in hospital, in Hendon, for her birthday.

Sickness led to homesickness, because my sisters and I were sent off till my mother recovered. On 27 July ‘I miss Mammy a lot – so does Maime’. In fact the diary has taught me a scepticism about my family, which I always, thought homely – or would-be homely – in an Irish and working-class. way in contrast to English middle-class coldness and fondness for boarding schools. ‘Feeling sick’ was our way to get a day off from school when there were going to be tests or the inspector was coming and might examine our books, but the diary shows how often my parents were turning, because my mother was sick, to people who’d take us off their hands.

The diary is full of our movements, occasionally as at Easter because my parents have gone on a holiday together, but usually because there’s something wrong with my mother. It wasn’t all bad on these visits (July23 ‘Went to see Desert Legion. It was very good and starred Alan Ladd.’) and we often settled in well enough. But I felt ashamed of not having a home of my own, or being out of it, and I couldn’t help wondering if privately these people who took us in thought ill of my parents. I felt ashamed on their behalf, my cheeks reddening when I thought about it.

This time, in July, the three of us moved from the Antonious to the Tylers, one town further away in the country, because the Antonious went to Cyprus where somebody’s father had died. The entry on 3 August shows hope rising: ‘Mammy came out of hospital yesterday. She said on the phone, last night, she is coming down on Sunday to stay with us.’ This also shows how we were living our life on hold. Staying now here, now there, missing school, with no friends to play with because they were at school, we wondered why she wasn’t coming straight down to see us or why we couldn’t go home to where she was. Were we so hard to look after?

Forty years later, following Foo and filling out my columns, I discover what it might have been about, and it’s strangely saddening still. On 6 August I wrote, in pencil – everything around this date is in ink – ‘Mammy said she is going to have a baby’. I was angry and thought this was a silly idea because wasn’t she sick and another child would mean more work. But I’d spectacularly missed the point. Count back to May, then count forwards to Anne’s getting born the next January, and there you see why she was in hospital and why we were packed off. She’d had trouble before and the three children she had weren’t going to distract her from safely having a fourth. The diarist wasn’t told, of course, and he didn’t fathom the connection. If he had understood, I wonder if he’d have felt any happier exiled in those other people’s houses knowing his mother wasn’t sick after all, just turning her mind somewhere else.

Melodrama favours mothers and babies, and so does my diary. But when you do the count- though mother is mother, of course, and still called Mammy and she’s often sick – the big revelation is how the diary tracks my father. His mood, his health, his achievements, above all his whereabouts. He’s travelling North or South, arriving and leaving, here taking us to the pictures, there sweeping my mother off to a party. Half the time he’s just getting us out of the house. My own movements are related to his in considerable detail. I come back to London to stay with him alone, away from the women. I come back for the prize-giving at school, and he doesn’t need persuading to attend. I stay in his rooms before going to Scotland with Monty, but I change my mind and don’t want to go and he lets me hang about while he works. I see him off at the docks on a cruise to Gothenberg the doctor prescribed for him. And there’s even more thoughts about her, not a habit I’ve cultivated -and I remember as well a film I saw in the 1950s about a fictional bishop resembling Cardinal Mindzenty, Alec Guinness I believe, who can forgive the whole world but can’t forgive his prostitute mother. Then there’s remembering the shame, far worse than the homesickness, of being beholden; having no rights to the sofa or the rug by the fire, and when my sisters did something wrong the people telling me to see they didn’t do it again.

The diaries are in code, as I’ve said, the code of everyday life. Success at school, essay results, first places in French and English, my Latin improving, second place in the form. Winning goals for my House, 100s and 220s, the time I won the high jump. They show me ringing up friends to see if they’d be allowed to come to my house to play table soccer and stay on to tea, they could go home in a taxi. A boy’s life, busy and straightforward.

So why did I write them? Well, first, they were gifts from my father, pieces of him and his world (1954 is from BOAC, a very big world indeed) and what would it have meant not to fill them in, to ignore them? And I’m doing the right thing by him, showing him he’s got nothing to worry about, his son’s a success and as regular as the next boy-Schoolboy’s Own Exhibition two years in a row, and nothing written down about being bored stiff. I see that inside the cover of 1953 I’ve reversed my given initials, FGL, the same as his, so they’re GFL. In a fit of self-assertion, I suppose, to see what I looked like with my own name ahead of his. However, it’s beyond me – and we mustn’t expect sociology to answer all our questions – that in the 1954 diary, which has a big FL in gold on the front, I’ve not put my name in at all!

The diaries show a self that takes note but rarely lets on. My mind swarmed with myth, but I took care to write very plainly, making the letters clear, getting the grammar right. The thoughtfulness, the promises to do well and be good, the ordinary round of the day leave almost everything out. Not just the sins, though there’s no dirty pictures, no mention of the Easter egg stolen from Woolworths and puked up in the sink, or the lies at school or the rages between my sister and me; nothing about my terror of God, now assisted by a grandmother who could see into my mind. And not just the fears: of the Gestapo, of crying at school, or orphanages, workhouses and being sent away to school or war.

Also out are the excitements and the ambitions, not forgotten, I suggest, but stored somewhere else. I had a passion for Beaverbrook fame, writing and editing my newspaper in the hall where the lino was hard and good for the carbons. I got my circulation to twelve and glowed in the pleasure of seeing them strewn round the house, identical except for the smudginess near the last. I can’t recall a word of the copy or even whether I bothered with an editorial line, I just liked the number of them. Above all, there’s not a word in those diaries about the thing that occupied me most, the unending campaign to persuade my mother that my future was brilliant and how much better off we’d all be if she stopped worrying about my father and started counting on me.