Never Let the Saucepan Boil Dry Chapter 2: Chocolate and Things Pertaining to Puddings

An improbable fragment of my first life was transferred over to the second in the form of a sandpit. The first manse we stayed in in Aberdeen, 54 Albury Road, seemed unlikely to be full of adventures at first. It had a Y-shaped staircase, which branched off in the middle, separating our room and Dad’s study from our parents’ room and the spare room. I remember it mainly for the nearby park and library, the latter a very traditional place where a pin drop could be heard, old men rustling newspapers. I loved the rows of books, which in this hushed environment seemed to have an antiseptic quality. The mobile library had come to Kinlochbervie, opening its yellow doors to an empire of dreams, dreams that could be taken from the shelves and shared. Ferryhill Library might have had more books, but seemed less accessible. There was a sweetshop across the road, where the woman would get impatient after five seconds. Accordingly, I usually went in knowing what I wanted beforehand, and this was often a liquorice pipe, or traffic lights. There was a striking view of the park from near the library, which fuelled my daydreaming.

There is a photo of me on my first day at Mile End school, leaving the house in my grey uniform. This manse was deemed unsuitable for Irene in particular, and the FP congregation purchased a house in Carlton Place in the west end, which was also much closer to the school. This is where the promised sandpit materialised, in the back garden, as if part of the country had travelled to the city with us.

     I enjoyed the half-days of early school, going off to a park in the afternoon afterwards, Irene in the pushchair. Rachel, a girl in our Primary 1 class I knew better later, gave me a gift of dandelions.  I liked their bright colour. She had an easy-going spirit. The new world of many more people than I had been used to had its drawbacks, too. People seemed to make immediate judgements on me: they either liked me a lot, or not at all. I was rarely in two minds about them. One boy, Michael, decided to bully me, and I ran the length of the playground for what seemed a whole break just to get away from him. He always seemed angry, his face twisting with it. That side of the playground was for a mixed primary one and two, the other side facing Midstocket Road for boys only from primary three to seven.

     The school had its own library, and we went in groups for our first trip. I liked one on dinosaurs, but on opening it was disconcerted to find the story of the early world featuring the “lungfish”, a hybrid creature supposedly between stages of evolution. It was not like anything I learned at home.

     I was grateful for the picnics and entertainments Mum devised for our Saturdays. One such Saturday, a planned trip to Hazlehead Park in the yellow Fiat was curtailed by a flat tyre. We barely got onto Forest Road, the street adjoining the top of Carlton Place. Somewhat disappointed, we returned to the house. As we got out, I saw a boy in a kilt coming up the road. I do not remember exactly how I came to talk to him, but it turned out he lived in the next street, Desswood Place, and would come to mean a lot to me. His name was Jonathan. His house, number 108, was very dark. A stuffed stag’s head hung over the entrance. A glance up the stairs showed further exhibits, skulls with the antlers still attached. Jonathan’s people had the innovation of eating toast and jam without margarine, which seemed somehow shocking to me.

     In contrast, our manse on Carlton Place was very light in its décor. The front hall resembled an airlock in a spaceship (so I thought), with white wallpaper and paint in the hall beyond, and up the stairs. I shared my bedroom with my sister for a few years after our arrival. There was a homemade guard against her falling out in the night, made of wood, one of Dad’s many practical ingenuities. Our room had an airing cupboard, positioned directly above the boiler in the dining room downstairs. My stories began in the early time before school, based around Toby, a toy cocker spaniel, retired from work as a holder of night clothes. I had adopted him from Great-Aunt Helen, who used to have a real such dog. To me though Toby was quite real, to the extent I put up my hand in primary three to say I had a dog, only he was stuffed.

     We watched little TV compared to most in school. Our imagination was encouraged primarily through books, supported by visits to art galleries and picnics at the castles surrounding Aberdeen, in the nearby countryside. We had a black-and-white TV, and no video recorder. The one TV programme that really stood out for me was Doctor Who, which I discovered shortly after my sixth birthday. Tom Baker might have been greying in 1980, already resigned to leaving the starring role the following spring, but he meant a lot to me almost at once. My fascination for him and his TARDIS have been undiminished since. I could leave the real world behind completely for twenty-five minutes each Saturday, and follow the Doctor to Alzarius, Traken- and Logopolis, where he met his end. On 21^st March 1981, Tom left the show and regenerated into Peter Davison. This was rather shocking to me, but reading other stories revealed there had been other Doctors before Tom. I lived for the moment when I spied a new Doctor Who title in the children’s section of the Central Library, which we joined after the move to Carlton Place. It had a dedicated children’s section, which was more relaxed than the limitations of Ferryhill Library. We still went back to Ferryhill regularly, for reasons of nostalgia if nothing else. I was always nostalgic. On at least one occasion, Irene found a Doctor Who title for me in Ferryhill I had not read.

     I had recurring problems with my ears. These could interfere with holidays, as well as the term time. At Easter 1982 and again in 1983, we went to stay in holiday chalets at the Lake of Menteith, near Stirling. I had to have a pink medicine I disliked four times a day: with three meals, and once before. I would awake early, reading a book called The Giant Under the Snow and feeling grateful it was pre-medicine time. Dad had a boat which he took on holiday with us, and went on some fishing trips in the lake. He also took us across it to an island, where there was the ruined Inchmahome Priory, for one of our many picnics. The chapter house, where the monks had once listened to a chapter of their Augustinian Rule, was still mostly intact, and Irene and I tried to shut Dad in there. He took cine film of this voyage, which is extant. Swans nested near the chalets, and could get a bit aggressive. I decided one with a yellow beak was friendlier than one with an orange beak, but there was probably little to choose between them. I stood near the shore, the sky streaked a strong red, and thought a lot. We paid visits to Stirling Castle, the Wallace Monument, and the site of Bannockburn, with the equestrian statue of King Robert the Bruce. I found all the history very interesting. On the Sunday we had a pudding after lunch, specifically a sponge pudding, which had the instruction on both ends “Never let the saucepan boil dry”. The large black letters impressed me, as did the fact it had to be repeated. If I was curious about the consequences, I never had to find out.

     I had six operations on my ears by the time I was nine, and can only remember the last one. It was done on 9^th June 1983, a General Election day, and my mother’s birthday. I came home from school the day before to be told there was a sudden cancellation, and I could have the operation the next day, rather than later in the week. To hospital I went, with my sponge bag of the Hundred and One Dalmatians. I had certainly read Dodie Smith’s book by then. On the day, I disliked the pre-med more than the actual anaesthetic needle. I awoke with dried blood in my ears, and a new Star Wars figure to my credit. An All-Terrain Armoured Transport (AT-AT) driver, to be precise. I particularly liked his mask, and the strange pipes at the back, presumably conveying oxygen to his brain in the cold environment of Hoth. This was another escapist world I cherished. I had seen the films at Jonathan’s house, and made up many stories of my own based on the toys.

     I was glad of missing out on the annual school sports day because of the operation. I was unco-ordinated, and never enjoyed sports as many seemed to. Sometimes I lacked concentration in lessons too. I read of a composer as an English reading exercise, who liked his routines, apparently walking with one foot in the pavement and one in the gutter as a matter of course, and could relate to the notion of routines, if not to walking in that way. I have long had a system of making sure I touch chairs or other objects near me the same amount of times with both hands: doing so with one hand only leaves me with a sense of imbalance. I still use a revised system I created aged twelve.

     The church provided a consistent context. It was our whole raison d’etre, the backbone of our lives. Sundays were very different to the rest of the week, even in name. We called it “the Sabbath”. Skene Street Church was close to the centre of town, just over the road from what would become my secondary school, the Aberdeen Grammar. It was an old Church of Scotland, built in the 1880s, bought by the FPs. It was rather run-down and a bit derelict in places, but I liked it for that. A hole was visible to the left of the pulpit, where the organ had once been, apparently removed wholesale and sold to the USA. A gallery above was entirely disused, thick with dust. On one of my rare visits I left the imprint of my footprints, like the first men on the moon. My growing sense of enjoying history was also tickled by finding an old crystal set from the 1940s up in the gallery at one point. Church was a place to be very quiet. Our Sunday Schools were held before or, as an experiment, after the main service. The sermon alone would take at least fifty minutes. The service followed the same format throughout the denomination of having three metrical Psalms without music (from a Psalter compiled in 1650) and a fixed pattern of prayers and announcements. I read religiously-themed books for children during the sermon, tried and failed to read the Authorized Version of the Bible in a way that made sense to me, and compiled statistics on the panes of stained glass in the windows. It was perhaps my first conscious enjoyment of routines. The church was also a back-up for rainy Saturdays, where we went to play table tennis, thump an elderly and unresisting piano and run around to use up energy. These activities were in a large hall under the main building. The church on the whole was rather dark, forbidding and not entirely fit for purpose. The congregation eventually invested in a new building in 1988.

     The other main way that church life impacted on us, outside of Sundays, was in the twice-yearly cycle of communion services, held over the first weekend of May and the last of October. These involved extra services over Thursday to Monday, and at least one visiting minister to assist Dad. We usually had an influx of older relatives at these times: often Granny, her sister our Great-Aunt Helen, and/or Great-Aunt Ella on Mum’s side. For a minister’s child raised on a budget, these times were chiefly welcome for the extra food available. I would come home on the Friday to find scones and other things ready, and was very ready to assist with these. I also enjoyed seeing my relatives. To begin with, Irene and I gave up our room and stayed in our parents’ bedroom in camp beds, but by the mid ‘80s I was based up in Dad’s study at communion times, on the top floor of the house. I found I took to the air of dust and knowledge and solitude, like a kind of hermitage. One of my early jobs was dusting the many books there. I remember looking at the books of the Bible in their original scripts in some amazement, as alien in its way as something out of Doctor Who. ‘Logopolis is Greek for “city of words”,’ said Dad, showing a connection between these worlds that made sense to me. I would retreat from the busyness of the main house, clutching yet another Doctor Who book from the library, to sleep on my camp bed up there. Dad still used it during the day. Irene and I were not expected to attend any of the extra services, apart from the one on Saturday afternoon.

     Life, class relationships and indeed Doctor Who progressed through primary three and four, 1981-3. We had a teacher named Miss Scorgie, who was rather old-school, fond of rote learning and rather strict. I often expected her to row me, based on how she treated the others, but she did not. She particularly harassed those who had teachers for parents. ‘You’re throwing your pencils on the floor!’ was a refrain I got very tired of hearing. I attended a birthday party for a classmate, David Sinclair, who lived at the top of Carlton Place. One challenge in a game of pass-the-parcel instructed me to “do an impression of Miss Scorgie’s car”. I spluttered and beeped my way around the room, almost colliding with the door. She drove a purple Morris Minor. Books, as ever, were a welcome escape in her class, particularly during wet breaks. I rejoiced at not having to go outside. It was at this stage I discovered Doctor Who in the printed form in the school library, and rapidly read as many as I could. I also enjoyed Rebecca’s World by Terry Nation, who I already knew was the creator of the Daleks.

     Summer of 1983 brought a holiday in Kinlochbervie, in the course of which Dad did a pulpit swap with his elder brother and successor to that congregation, my Uncle Fraser, and he came to Aberdeen. I had to do some holiday work as a result of missing schoolwork with my operations and other troubles, such as catching mumps. Returning to Kinlochbervie meant a lot to me. It was a fairy-tale place to me, with its louring mountains, deep dark lochs and frequent rain. I enjoyed the harsh weather, up to a point. When it was dry we could go down to a little island behind the house, and spend some time there, even a picnic. We had to watch out for the high tide. That it was possible to walk over seaweed-encrusted rocks at one point of the day, then look down from the adjoining field at the sea some twelve feet deep where it had been safe to walk earlier gave me a morbid thrill. It was like something out of The Famous Five.

     August 1983 brought a return to school and a new teacher, Mrs Smith. I was to be very grateful later for the relaxed and creative environment she sponsored during this year, my primary five. My enjoyment of school peaked at this time, and there seemed to be so much to do that inspired me. I only had a day and a half off from illness in primary five. Activities ranged from outings to Hazlehead Park, which I knew well from our Saturday outings, to learning a little French for a “European” day, to handling grass snakes which Mrs Smith owned herself. I found them quite interesting. I read Charlotte’s Web for the first time, and did a class project on it, from learning about farming to the anatomies of flies and spiders. Partly informed by a 1982 Doctor Who story, The Visitation, I put up my hand and informed the class that the Great Fire of London in 1666 might have done some good in that it burnt the plague, during a project on the British capital. Jonathan had already been. I gave him a birthday gift of a green lightsaber, and already had a red one of mine. In the autumn darkness, we clashed with them amicably, and argued over whether it was better to lose the right or left hand and have it replaced with a robot hand, like Luke Skywalker. Jonathan had also been to Nottingham in time to see Torvill and Dean’s homecoming after winning gold in the Winter Olympics. He often seemed to be in the right place at the right time. We had holidays in his family’s caravan in Findhorn. I woke one day to look into the dead eyes of a fish Dad had caught in the early morning.

     I enjoyed myself throughout primary five. Doctor Who had rarely been on better form either, saving the 1984 opening serial  of Warriors of the Deep. It was a real shock to me when the current Doctor, Peter Davison, left at the end of The Caves of Androzani. I viewed the first episode in Jonathan’s house, probably the first time I had ever seen it in colour. I was surprised to see the starfield for the opening titles was blue, not black. The bleak ending to Part 1 appeared to show the Doctor in a lot of trouble, which was nothing to his regenerating into Colin Baker at the end of it. As ever, I believed in the show and was hopeful for its return. Summer 1984 was the last oasis of calm for me for some time.