I’ve been wondering when would be the right time to light a bonfire under my teenage diaries – or whether I should keep them.
This ‘shall I? shan’t I?’ debate has occupied my mind this week after a snatched hour delving into an old box in which I keep ephemera dating back to childhood.
I’d been on a mission to find the two Premium Bonds that I have owned for decades, each bought for a precious £1 in the days when a young Ernie did the honours. I wanted to check the numbers and see if belated celebrations might be in order.
Of course I became hopelessly distracted. When I eventually emerged from the cellar, my brain soupy with nostalgia, Geoff asked “Did you find them?” I hadn’t a clue what he was talking about.
But no, I didn’t find the Premium Bonds, so I remain in suspense: I’m either a millionaire or still a pauper. The answer is beyond doubt, but it’s always fun to play the game of ‘what if?’.
In the box, among the bundles of old love letters (my serious dating and early married life was a long series of aching separations) I found several crushed, half-desiccated rose corsages. These had been gallantly presented for wearing on nights of glamour when everything sparkled with an electric excitement and the port was unquestioningly passed to the left.
How dusty and distant that life seems when nowadays we all happily sit with our feet curled up on the sofa to snaffle what remains of any old bottle of hooch that happens to be available, and if it gets passed to the person on the right no-one faints in horror.
Before that buttoned-up, starchy period, my life was filled with horses. I squashed a bit of school into small gaps, but really it was the smell of hay and Propert’s saddle soap, Elliman’s embrocation and a summer-warm neck-of-horse that enriched my soul and ensured I always had grubby fingernails.
In my box of memories I found a large envelope crammed with some of the dressage score sheets that I had kept from Pony Club competitions. Those columns of numbers and judges’ written observations remind me of all my training, all my eagerness, and all my dashed hopes.
I can tell from the scores for each movement that most judges were unimpressed by my ability to ride in a straight line, marking me down for wobbly approaches and erratic halts. From what I can recall, they had a point, since I expended most effort in keeping my horse within the several acres of field, let alone in the confines of the tiddly little dressage arena.
As well as horses there were hormones to be wrestled with through the teenage years, and boy trouble of varying intensity features in far too many of those diary entries.
The ‘trouble’, I note from skip-reading a few months’ entries here and there with increasing embarrassment at my naivety, may not have amounted to more than a pitiful, unrequited longing from afar or ‘a look’ in my direction, but I agonised over every nuance.
If only I’d written it all down coherently instead of part-coded in a messy pencilled scrawl, interspersed with ‘had toad in the hole for lunch’. Instead of fretting about my two Premium Bonds I might now be cocooned by fame and wealth from a giddy career as a romantic novelist.
I suppose there’s still time, so I won’t burn the diaries just yet.
Sally Hill's Journal 