TWO Edinburgh Boy Thank you, Stella. Thank you for giving birth to me in Edinburgh, for ensuring the most beautiful city in my known universe was to be my home town. Thank you, Stella, for making sure I had a new mummy and daddy to give me the life that you couldn’t. And Mummy and Daddy love you both very, very, much. They did. They couldn’t have loved me any more. I couldn’t have loved them more – my mummy, my daddy and Fiona my big sister. For my first three to four years I was a clingy child. I needed to be picked up and cuddled and hated leaving Mummy’s side. This was probably because I was always being picked up and cuddled by my mummy. After her miscarriages and heartbreak she had this perfect little gift, the child that was meant to be. I had consistency at last – the same person to hold me and to bond with. Did those five days with Stella leave their mark? Did my sudden separation from my birth mother register in any way on my subconscious? What of the four weeks in the nursing home? I always had a fear of rejection. It strikes deep. I suspect it’s just the flipside of chutzpah. Every morning Mum had to bite her lip and walk away from the little nursery school round the corner as she left me wailing myself hoarse for her. When I went to sit the test for the big school – the Edinburgh Academy – at four years old, Dad took me along so that I wouldn’t be tempted to stick to Mum like a limpet. It worked, I passed and they were allowed to part with their money. I had a wonderful childhood. I played Cowboys and Indians with my replica star-studded Colts and pheasant-feather headdress. We played Japs and Commandos with sound-effect machine guns. I had a huge collection of toy soldiers. They waged wars of attrition with Pyrrhic victories. My talking Action Man was always ready for action, or so he told me. You see – a selection of toys and games to make the social worker of contemporary urban myth shudder to the depths of her Doc Martens. While you shudder at my lazy stereotyping, let me tell you about my castle. Dad built it for me. It was a fantastic wooden castle for my little plastic men. He took ages, lovingly sawing, hammering, crafting and painting it. It was beautiful. Being the perfectionist he was he paid meticulous attention to detail – a moat, a drawbridge, turrets – everything my castle needed, my castle had. Dad was so wonderful with his hands. I can barely make a paper dart. I wish I could thank him right now and tell him what it meant to me. I know how much it meant to him. One childhood passion kicked off on a bright May evening in 1967. I was six years old. This was the first significant toggle on my anorak. The sun was streaming through the windows and Dad half closed the curtains so he could see the telly properly. I was playing on the stairs in the hall with my toy soldiers but was gradually drawn to the room by the excitement beginning to bubble. He was a rugby man but he liked the really big football matches and was hooked on this one. Glasgow Celtic has an overwhelmingly Catholic support and strong links with Ireland. In 1967 they were playing Inter Milan in the European Cup final and were on their swaggeringly beauteous way towards lifting the trophy. From that night I became Celtic obsessed. They had a flair and style and passion I fell in love with. They exuded football glamour. Their Glasgow rivals Rangers were the antithesis – hewn from the bleak bedrock of Calvinism. The ‘Gers’ seemed stolid and prosaic by comparison, or as this wee boy thought – ‘Boring’. By the time I was thirteen my room was like a green and white emporium. Pennants and posters all but obscured the marching soldier wallpaper. Then it came, the icy gust of reality. The little green apple fell from the tree and turned blue. Friends started to say, ‘What the fuck do you support them for?’ The naked support for the IRA from the terraces was much worse in those days and I remember seeing lairy lads of my own age at matches in balaclavas and paramilitary gear. This was the time of some appalling ‘mainland’ atrocities and I recoiled at the sight of these ignorant and provocative little idiots. Supporting Celtic became untenable. I couldn’t explain why I liked them. I couldn’t justify it. I didn’t know. ‘Because they are the best’ wasn’t enough. Of course I didn’t regularly encounter the raw bigotry of Scottish sectarianism. It was a received version if it. A genteel derision for cleaving to the wrong tribe. It mattered though. I switched to Heart of Midlothian. Rangers-lite. Mum and Dad were not well off. All the family income went on school fees. Of course by the standards of society in general we were comfortable but at my school, with my faded and ill-fitting second-hand uniform, I felt like a pauper. Going to friends’ houses – huge detached stone mansions on Edinburgh’s Southside or on the boulevards of Murrayfield – was great. When they first came to my place it wasn’t. I felt ashamed. What would they think of the peeling wallpaper, the shabby carpets and the bijou dimensions of the place? We only had one ‘smallest room’, never mind a utility room. Every summer we holidayed in the Scottish Highlands. My affluent school pals came back from their holidays and changed for gym to reveal spectacular white bits untouched by the golden rays of exotic climes. I had no incidental suntan. I was peely-wally and covered in midge bites and nettle stings. I loved the Highlands though. I can smell the heather and bracken as I write. My parents had a cottage bought for a pittance in a Glen not far from Loch Ness. I told my friends we had acres of land and a dozen bedrooms. We didn’t but we had the best view in the world. I became obsessed with the Loch Ness Monster. I was zealous about it and read everything on the subject I could lay my hands on. I’d two twin aunts called Ethel and Beatrice who claimed to have seen the beast when they were schoolgirls in the nineteen thirties. That was proof enough for me. If they stuck their necks out the monster must have as well. Their story never changed either. My Nessie obsession spilled over into other mysteries. The Yeti, UFOs, Chariots of the Gods, ghosts, the Marie Celeste – you name it, as long as you couldn’t solve it. This mystery mania went in tandem with a ravenous hunger for biographies. From a very early age I had to find out and know about other people’s lives. The stories had to be true. Mysteries and other people’s lives. The amateur psychologist is working overtime here, of course, but the big unsolved mystery was in my own life. I was passionately Scottish. I still am but within limits – normally about ninety minutes. With age and perspective, reason has calmed the beast. The history we were taught at school was raw meat for that beast though. We were fed tales full of tragic reversals and cruel misfortune all at the hands of and benefit to the perfidious English – our oldest and only enemy. The loathsome light at the end of our tunnel vision. Kenny Ferguson was my friend three doors up our terraced street in Edinburgh. The two of us joined the Scottish National Party just before the ’74 election. We filled in the forms and sent them off to HQ. ‘It’s Scotland’s Oil’ was the slick slogan of the day. It seemed so glaringly logical to thirteen-year-old me. We could be like Saudi Arabia without the amputations. Having received my application form, two activists turned up on the doorstep just a few days later. They were keen. When the bald and insignificant man at the front door and his frankly nondescript comrade saw an impish thirteen year old before their beady eyes they were, shall we say, disappointed. Mind you, neither of them was exactly Rob Roy. ‘We have – er never had – er one this – er – young before.’ I love the Aldington aphorism: ‘Nationalism is a silly cock crowing from its own dunghill.’ It leaps to mind thirty years later – except he wasn’t a cock. He was birdlike though. He was a puffed-up little pigeon. Still, Kenny and I traipsed up and down tenement and pavement delivering leaflets and posters to the people of the would-be tartan Emirate. In return for our efforts we got badges, stickers and the dour gratitude of the bald man and his baleful buddy. In that 1974 election ‘we’ came a poor third or fourth and Edinburgh South, a safe Tory seat, stayed safely Tory. This was a long time ago remember. I felt vanquished. We had worked so hard and walked so far. Such ignominy. What was wrong with people? The message had seemed so simple and irresistible. It’s Scotland’s oil! After one football match a year later it felt like Scotland’s dunghill. We lost 5–1 to England. My friend Robert and I were grief stricken. After all our hopes had been crushed by some cataclysmic goalkeeping, we fled his house. Having pinched some of his dad’s cigars we stole up Blackford Hill and attempted to blow away the blues. Unfortunately, we both ended up vomiting away the blues. But really, we felt bereaved. To beat the English at anything meant everything. To lose, hurt horribly. The Edinburgh Academy was founded in 1821 by, among other pillars of the Scottish establishment, Sir Walter Scott, to provide an education for the young gentlemen of that most elegant corner of North Britain. Nicholas Andrew Argyll Campbell was sent there in 1966 and Robert Louis Stevenson had been there some time before. He’d lived near by and set one of his most famous stories in the cobbled back streets near the school. The Academy did have certain Jekyll and Hyde-like qualities about it. The school had some wonderful and inspiring teachers. Jack Bevan and Bill Stirling, both now dead, were English teachers of exceptional ability and men of true quality. They were great men. I’d love to have sent Bill Stirling this mistake-ridden manuscript for his perusal and would have read avidly and taken on board every one of his considered comments in beautifully written red biro. A lot of explain this better and what do you mean by this and nearly there, I would imagine. I had a great education and made some life-long friends in my time at the Academy. The Hyde qualities of the school have been aired elsewhere many times and were, I believe, symptomatic of a darker age. Kids are far more savvy now. Back then we knew it was wrong but we didn’t know it was right to tell. There were, to my certain knowledge, two teachers in my time there who took an unhealthy sexual interest in small boys and another who took an unhealthy interest in hurting them. I suffered at the hands of the sadist and was touched by one of the perverts but not in the appalling way one of my close friends was. Of course, any way is appalling but there are degrees. Abuse is not an absolute term. However, when I think about what I saw my friend subjected to I feel sick. When he thinks about it now he feels angry. Back then, as nine year olds we simpered in front of this man and mocked him behind his back. He was loathsome. They were such different times. When I was there the school still had one foot in the Victorian grave. One of the relics of a bygone era was in the person and office of the Rector, in actual fact a rather pompous name for Headmaster. The Rector was a terrifying character who made the staff in Tom Brown’s Schooldays look distinctly Secondary Modern. He was called H. H. Mills. A hero of Arnhem, his face was constantly contorted in a twitching mosaic of intellectual restlessness. It was putty in his hands. The distance and detachment were deceptive though. He’d strafe you like a Spitfire. The school was predominantly for day boys, although there was a significant boarding element. It was expensive and my parents adjudged it the best in town. They couldn’t really afford it but sacrifices were made and cloth was cut; only the best would do. When the money ran out my sister was moved to another school but I was kept in the Academy at all costs. The Edinburgh Academy had a high opinion of itself, an opinion not without substance. It had provided mainstays and leading lights of the Edinburgh, Scottish, British and Empire Establishments for generations. The newly rich and the habitually rich clamoured to hand over their cash. They still do. In those days rugby was king and if you were in the first fifteen you were accorded god-like status. One of the associated perks to rucking and mauling sans pareil was a lead part in the school play. This was a source of amusement to those of us in the rebel units who revelled in the manifest truth that there are limited common skills in handing off a prop forward and holding a mirror up to nature. My great school and university friend Iain Glen is one of the finest actors of his generation. The first time he ever trod the boards was up at Aberdeen University and he was horribly good. I am reliably informed a much more holistic approach is applied at the Academy these days. I was a barely mediocre rugby player. In a school of umpteen fifteens I ‘graced’ the Fourths. My dad had excelled at rugby and cricket and anything where a ball was required to be thrown, caught, kicked or hit and I never once let him come and watch me on a Saturday morning. When he came to pick me up I insisted he arrive after the game was over. He would have loved to stand on the touchline and would have been so proud despite my shortcomings. I deprived him of something every dad should experience if he can and I regret it to this day. He did as I wished because his own father had been a martinet and Dad naturally tended to over compensate. He was terrified of being despised the way he despised his own father. When he was dying I sent him a card saying how much I had always loved him and what a great dad he was. When I went up to Edinburgh and entered the hospice ward shortly after he’d received the card he just pointed to it with tears in his eyes and I kissed him. He went quickly. An unfinished Telegraph crossword. Hours before he died my sister Fiona left him late at night and said, ‘We love you, Dad.’ He already looked at peace and gently replied, ‘And I love all of you.’ He was so incredibly proud when I got a history degree from Aberdeen University. Aberdeen – my exotic escape from Edinburgh and what a fascinating place it is. The city of schizophrenic stone. It’s the granite you know. When it sparkles in the sunshine the place radiates beauty but on a dreich hungover Sunday, the greyness is unrelenting and the gloom unforgiving. Despite that I stayed on after graduating and went into radio. After I’d left university in 1982 I secured one show a week on Northsound Radio, the local commercial station. Then I got a daily show. Dad and Mum drove up to Aberdeen to listen to every live second of one early-morning parade of eighties’ pop peppered with ‘personality’. Dad loved it. When I joined Radio One in 1987, after a two-year stint on Capital Radio, they listened religiously. They both came at every opportunity to sit with the gaggle of Glasgow Grannies in the audience at Scottish Television’s studios to see Wheel of Fortune being recorded. This glitzy trashy game show was about as far away from Dad’s life and times as it was possible to get. He loved it. He made a point of telling me just how proud they both were at what I’d ‘achieved’. As far as he was concerned, I might as well have been representing Scotland at rugby – or his other great love, England at cricket. On reflection Dad and I loved each other for the qualities we saw in each other that we didn’t feel we possessed ourselves. Our differences bonded us. I loved his prowess at sport, his natural charm, his courtesy, his gentlemanly qualities, his artistic talent, his skill with his hands, his ability to talk to anyone. Qualities which I was wanting. He in turn loved the fact that I was quick and clever and a right little show off. It tickled him. He called me Nicko or Nickle-Arse and I miss him so much. My mum and dad were married for forty-two years. Sheila, my mum, is indefatigable and always has been. A force of nature – she can be brash, and domineering; brittle and needy. She headed a psychiatric social work department in a large mental hospital but, as my sister Fiona asserts, could be astonishingly insensitive at home. Wise and obtuse. Giving and selfish. Self-centred and caring. As I write this, it occurs to me that if I have taken after anyone it is probably her. My friends all think she is wonderful as she holds her own at any table and is so open minded and accepting. At eighty, she is still hurtling round the country in an absurd little Korean car and going on package holidays to far-flung places with her pals. Mum is an intuitive and intelligent woman. At her best she is an absolute gem and all that age withers are the things that used to infuriate us all so much about her. Dad’s outbursts from the front of the car still ring in my ears. ‘For Christ’s sake, Sheila, will you bloody shut up!’ Dad loved her with all his soul. In about 1970, some vague acquaintances were chatting to Mum and Dad at a petrol station when they peered into the back of our dark red Cortina and, admiring the specimen siblings within, declared ‘Don’t they look like one another.’ I felt as though I had passed some kind of a test. I was pleased as punch and so proud. What about my adoptive sister Fiona and me? Well, she’s the one who hung me over the banister when I was small, giving me a life-long fear of heights. I am the one who crushed a banana in her hair when she was fifteen and about to go out to a party. She is the one who has a fantastic musical talent and wanted to crawl into a corner when Mum demanded she perform and play the piano for friends. I am the one who would bash out a cacophonous ditty for anyone who would listen. We are the ones who fought like cat and dog. She used to hate me pulling her hair. We are the two who laughed till we cried. I’m the one who borrowed and fell in undying love with her Beatles and Kinks cassettes. She is the one who is a social worker. I am the one who needs one. She is my sister. I am her brother. She is worried about the banister business. We were laughing about it recently. ‘I work in child protection – remember my reputation here!’ That Fiona was my parents’ biological child was certainly always in my mind if no one else’s. At times it had to be in hers. She vividly recounts our being at a house on the other side of Edinburgh – in the elegant New Town. We were playing in a garden with a group of children. There were older children there. There was a sense of threat. Fiona was maybe nine so I must have been four. They started picking on me with a singsong taunt. ‘You’re adopted, you’re adopted, you’re adopted.’ Fiona was frightened. She didn’t know how to handle it. She felt vulnerable and exposed. She also felt protective. She still does. Dad and Fiona had a special bond – but fathers do with daughters. Mum and Fiona had a troubled and complex relationship but – well, the same again – that’s mothers and daughters for you. Or more particularly it’s Fiona and Mum. The fact that she was genetic and I was acquired merely nourished my sense of being different and, importantly, it gave me a reason and excuse to feel different. It inevitably influenced how I came to see myself and what I came to be. It was what I was. Fiona thinks I was the blue-eyed boy from whose backside the sun was thought to brightly blaze, the brother who was treated far more generously and leniently than his big sister. Mum dismissively says that’s often the way it is with younger siblings and boys in general. Different standards apply. That doesn’t wash with Fi. She says there is a huge body of evidence on her side. How is this for an accusation? Fiona came straight out with it recently and I coughed at last. I sang like a bird. ‘You broke a whole set of Rachmaninov Piano Concerto Number Two 78s actually performed by him.’ An act of cultural revolution on behalf of the glorious people’s vanguard, I had dutifully destroyed the works of Rachmaninov, the bourgeois individualist and imperialist lapdog. Yes it was the late sixties but I just fancied breaking them. Fiona was in full flow. She’d been storing this one up for thirty-five years. ‘You broke them and Mum made out it didn’t matter. I was always the one at fault. I was meant to have had the foresight to avoid the problem. “I am not interested,” Mum said.’ I remember that one well. I am not surprised at her lingering sense of injustice all these years later. I just saw these old discs on the bedroom floor and wanted to walk on them to watch them crack beneath my feet like a thin layer of ice on a pond. So I did and they did. Realizing the potential for trouble I mounted a preemptive defence. I ran downstairs crying, full of confusion and remorse, and it worked a treat. I walked away an innocent man, without a stain on my character. Was there malice aforethought? Who knows the mind of the sub-teen suburban guerrilla? Fiona and I aren’t in constant contact – not like my wife Tina and her sister, who are, well, like sisters, but we will never be estranged. When we talk – and she can talk at international level – and when we see each other in the midst of our hectic and chaotic lives, there is an ease you can only achieve with family.