Never Let the Saucepan Boil Dry Chapter 4: October, Part 1

My new confidence extended to school. There was a very marked difference when I returned to the Grammar for the 1988/9 academic session. ‘Your voice has broken,’ said a classmate in General Science who had bullied and threatened me with lines before the summer break as if he were a teacher, his eyes opening wide, but there was far more to it than that. I was not going to be pushed around by him, or indeed anyone. An established bully, a different person in the same class, left tacks on the stools in the General Science classroom. I picked up the nails. ‘Why are you doing that?’ he said.

    ‘Because I don’t want you to hurt people,’ I answered, and to my surprise he did nothing. My grades improved, and I particularly enjoyed History, especially with the arrival of Mr Milne, a new Head of department. I enjoyed the SU more than ever.

     The final services were held in Skene Street Church over the communion weekend in October 1988. A new building had been acquired, more in the centre of town, though not that far as the crow flew. Our school portacabins were directly over the road from the church building. Around lunchtime on the Friday, Dad and others could be seen emerging from the side door after the service that day. ‘Oh yes, there’s a wedding on,’ said R, the girl I remembered from Primary 1, sitting near me in the English class. She peered over at the people emerging, but was clearly going to be disappointed if she expected a bride or groom. I did not like to explain the extent of the communion services. Around that time, Dad also dedicated a Wednesday meeting to celebrating the combined anniversary of the publication of the Great Bible in 1538, the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588 and the “Glorious Revolution” of 1688. I was previously familiar with the first two events, but not with the last. It seemed a time to remember and celebrate our Protestant heritage.

     Storm clouds were louring on the church horizon. I had been aware for some time that some parts of the FP Church were stricter than that to which I was used, particularly in the application of “church discipline”, i.e. the removal of the chief privilege of membership, namely, participating in a communion service as one of the elect. Such a person could in theory be treated as an outcast unless or until he/she was restored. With clear distaste, Mum told us how the exercise of this discipline had been applied to Mr Alexander Murray, the FP minister in Lairg, a place we knew in Sutherland on the road to Kinlochbervie. He had asked a Roman Catholic priest to pray at a combined meeting, and for this had all his privileges, including all work as a minister, suspended at the meeting of the Southern Presbytery in Glasgow in November 1988. It was part of an increasing rise in tension between what were effectively separate wings of the same denomination. The matter was to be referred to the general meeting of the church, at the forthcoming synod of May 1989.

     Then there was the much more high-profile case of Lord James Peter MacKay of Clashfern. He was a family friend and lawyer who had been very successful in his career, becoming the first Scot to be appointed Lord Chancellor of Britain by the Conservative government in 1987. He had been an elder of the Edinburgh FP congregation, returning from London when time permitted. He had attended a funeral mass of an RC colleague. Any kind of association with the RC mass was pretty much the cardinal sin to the stricter FPs. Like Mr Murray, he was also suspended from his office as elder, and denied communion. Many in the Aberdeen congregation were disturbed and saddened by this turn of events. Our future as a denomination did not seem very bright, where we faced the possibility of greater overt control by the stricter element or possibly leaving. At the start of November, at the height of this trouble brewing, we moved to Alford Place, our new church building. This had been the former library to Christ Church across the road, and part of it had always been used for services. I saw inside it before it was fully restored and adapted, with racks of empty bookshelves in the middle part stretching almost to the roof, narrow little windows above. This became a relatively informal meeting place, with a large square of seats for the midweek prayer meetings, after-church chats and coffee-drinking. It was located by Holburn Junction, at the start of Union Street, Aberdeen’s principal street, and was a much busier locale than Skene Street had been. Alford Place was modern, bright and convenient, all the things the previous building was not.

     Despite the trouble in the denomination, my third year at school was my most consistent and positive, both in schoolwork and in building and maintaining relationships. I had had a keen ambition to be a doctor, but was not permitted to take ‘O’ Grades in Physics and Chemistry that would have facilitated this in my third year, so fell back to thinking of being more of being a minister and/or missionary. I particularly enjoyed History with Mr Milne. Third year had started in June 1988, so I had not had long to settle in before the summer while I still felt ‘imprisoned’. I reached out to others as I had not the chance to before, and realised some had perceived me as mean, or just shy. The History class was also where I had some of the best friendships.

     In March 1989 I went on a SU camp weekend, this time at Alltnacriche, near Aviemore. I enjoyed very much the chance to be away with others my age and savour games and learning in a Christian environment. On the Saturday, we went into Aviemore. I looked at some tapes in a music shop. I had heard of U2 from my cousin Ian, a very gregarious and animated person who had also made quite a difference to me since the previous summer. I looked at the different tapes on offer. Not easily influenced by current trends due to my background, I wasn’t that interested in the latest, ‘Rattle and Hum’. I examined ‘Boy’ and ‘War’ before settling on one called ‘October’. Maybe it was because it was my birthday month. The picture showed the boys hanging out at the Dublin docklands, their surroundings seeming cold, like Scotland much of the time. ‘Oh yes, U2 are really good,’ said R, also on that weekend camp, before adding vaguely, ‘I don’t really know them.’

     ‘I don’t know about them now,’ said David Wraight, a very warm and sociable boy two years above me, busily stuffing clothes under his bed, ‘but U2 certainly were a very Christian band.’ Clearly it facilitated communication. I fished it out of the flowery paper bag and put it on my Walkman. The sound of the opening song, ‘Gloria’, was something wonderful. I had never heard anything like it. True, I had not a lot of experience of music up to then, but I knew what I liked. I wrote a poem on the Day of Judgement, influenced by one of the songs from ‘October’, ‘Fire’, the same day. Clearly, it was a good match for someone of my background. ‘Tomorrow’ and ‘Scarlet’ I also particularly liked.  

     We knew that something big was looming come the FP Synod of May 1989. The discipline of Mr Murray and Lord MacKay were formally upheld, and that was the verdict of the denomination. It was too much for Dad and several other ministers. There were a few possibilities on leaving: join with other Presbyterian denominations like the Free Church or the Church of Scotland, or start a separate denomination, for the short or long term. The last option is what happened, albeit with an explicit statement of the respect for other denominations as a counter to claims of further splitting the ‘holy Catholic church’ as the Apostle’s Creed has it. We knew it was a historic event: the end of our involvement with the denomination my great-grandfather had joined at its inception in 1893.

     Roughly 40% of the pre-1989 FP church seceded to become the Associated Presbyterian Churches. Across Scotland, the split varied in its effects. The issue of who owned which properties was far from clear-cut. In Aberdeen, the congregation were almost entirely behind Dad in moving into the APC, so the manse and church building remained as they were. An elderly couple known as the Bruces, who had not been out to church for some time, became very keen on preserving the FP presence in Aberdeen, and the FPs duly supplied them with ministers now and then. They would have been permitted to share the Alford Place building with the new APC congregation, holding their services at a different time, except there was an attempt to seize the building by changing the locks. This was averted. Thereafter they rented a room out at Aberdeen University to hold their services. I was aware that some congregations split, or that there were less equitable results in some places as to the allocation of church property.

     There was a lot of media attention on the run-up to the Synod, and its results. Dad was interviewed in the front room of the manse. At that time, there was still a Grampian TV studio just down the road, by the Queens Cross roundabout, in a converted tram station. Ministers and elders on both sides of the divide were interviewed across Scotland, and featured in a 40-minute documentary about Lord MacKay and his suspension as an elder. ‘Was that your Dad on the radio?’ was a question I got used to being asked at school, when I did not as a rule listen to the radio. A Catholic friend, David Garland, said he appreciated Lord MacKay’s stand before we went to our History class. It was a radical, exciting time in some ways. Work finally got underway on rebuilding the school around that time, with a lot of noise and disruption at the language block in particular.

     The summer holidays came, and a long-anticipated trip to Brittany, northern France. We drove down through Scotland and England towards Plymouth, visiting the far-flung Uncle Andrew en route. I bought U2’s live tape ‘Under a Blood Red Sky’ and enjoyed it crossing the ferry. We were based in a holiday camp by Carnac, with standing stones. I made three attempts to buy a skateboard, with basic French. I read a novelisation of ‘Doctor Who- Black Orchid’ aloud to Mum on the beach. It was quite an easygoing holiday. We had to leave at night. I listened to Deacon Blue, a band my cousin Hugo, a former medical student earlier in the 1980s, had introduced me to. Then we went over to Harris with Dad as the new APC Inter-moderator, passing by Stornoway where he had partly grown up and where his father, also an FP minister, was buried. Listened to Simple Minds on the beach, a band who I’d heard might be nearly as good as U2. I thought not quite so, clearly lacking the same spiritual influence. We stayed in a schoolhouse in Sheilabost, and heard one Gaelic Psalm as part of the service. Then came the other major musical epiphany which is still with me. I got a tape of Runrig, ‘Heartland’. Then last but not least came the first APC Youth Conference. This was broadly similar to a Scripture Union event, having a share of informal games and fellowship, as well as more organised Bible teaching.

     Then came the return to school for my fourth year, my confidence still steady and rising. I progressed in the History syllabus. I had become known as someone more sociable than I had been, and now seemed on a roll. I had noticed one girl, J, in the History class. I had liked her in first year, and not been able to say anything. It was fairly high on the list of impossible things at that stage. Now, I thought about her more and more. I think it was more by accident than anything that a particular incident happened. She was sitting across the room in the History class as usual. I looked across at her, and perhaps she was looking at me already, or was aware of me. I stared right at her, in a way she took differently perhaps to what I had meant: I certainly did not mean to come right out and express an interest in her. Likely I would have gone on thinking about her quite happily without much danger of actually doing anything about it.

     I had previously noticed her pointing at me and exchanging comments with her neighbour, a red-haired girl. Now seemed a moment of crisis: J looked back, registering me in a way she had not before, then looked away. I felt rather flustered, not sure how to handle it. The light-hearted bonhomie that had been there before vanished, and never returned. Her red-haired neighbour never exchanged comments of any kind in my direction again. On a few occasions after, I met with J and she gave me a great dazzling smile on her way home, that seemed to give every indication of encouragement, but still I did not know what to do. I did not have the same confidence in the History class, though I still did well in the class coursework in preparation for taking the ‘O’ Grade History in April 1990. In spring 1989 I had produced a project on the First World War which was judged the best in the class, earning me three ‘A’s. It was a sign of how far I had come. It did not however count towards my ‘O’ Grade result in any way.

     I was also due my first operation for an ingrowing toenail, at the start of October 1989. It had been growing wrong throughout the summer. When I came round from the anaesthetic, Dad was at my bedside, dressed in formal black minister’s clothes, which had become much rarer for him to do since leaving the FPs that May. In appearance and in manner, the church had become more relaxed since. He pointed at my tape of A-ha’s ‘Scoundrel Days’, to a lyric he found amusing. I enjoyed the sense of worry in it, of doom, of characters appearing to think they had done wrong. It expressed some of my anxiety over how to relate to J. In October, I attended my first SU camp at Auchengillan, outside Glasgow, during the week’s school holiday. Despite not knowing anyone there beforehand, I found leaders and other young people very warm and welcoming. I still enjoyed the school SU as well, which remained my best venue for relationships.

     I felt troubled for the rest of the term for how to relate to J. It seemed she expected some definite action on my part. That I was unable to supply it caused some friction. In November I gave a talk in the English class, on the early days of U2. It might have seemed I was trying to make myself popular through such a method, but my admiration of them was perfectly genuine. I played ‘Scarlet’ from the ‘October’ album at the end. Its long, sustained drum-rolls and Bono’s ecstatic vocal: ‘Rejoice…’ are the two most striking things about it. This event certainly had an impact. My image changed from a dull person from a deeply conservative background to someone riding the crest of the wave of a very popular band overnight.

     The unspoken relationship I had had with J deteriorated, the longer I left any action. Part of me hoped things would just return to normal, but they never did. I found History, previously my favourite class, more and more difficult to attend, as we progressed through the hardships of the Russian Revolution. In December I attended my first Runrig concert, as Aunt Liz, who had bought the ticket, was ill. It was a very special show. They were and are a terrific live band. They were in the Capitol, near the top of Holburn Street, not far from Alford Place. Irene’s birthday came around the same time. I got my favourite Simple Minds tape, ‘New Gold Dream’. The atmosphere in History plunged to something near Baltic. On the last day of term, my teeth chattering, I gave J a Christmas card of Craigievar Castle. She seemed very pleased with it, and it represented some motion in that situation. I got a card signed by several people in the class, another triumph for me over what had gone before. Within the week, I got a card from J, delivered through my letterbox at home. It was certainly warm and effusive.

     Over the holidays, usually between Christmas and New Year, we assembled at Granny’s in Dingwall for our usual family gathering. Uncle Fraser had also decided to join the APC. He kept his manse in Kinlochbervie, but the FPs kept the church building. His rather diminished flock met in a building by the harbour. Uncle James, the third of that generation to have served in the FP ministry and originally a doctor, had decided to stay on that side of the fence. Like Dad, he had been interviewed by the media in May. There was little evidence of division there, the event passing with plenty of food, presents and humour.