MEMORY SPILL

My memoir recalls my childhood and adolescence in the town of Bonnyrigg, near Edinburgh in Scotland during the 1950s and 60s. It was a time when life was uncomplicated. There were only one television channel, and we communicated through cumbersome telephones in cold draughty hallways. We children unfettered by Health and Safety invented our own games and designed the props.

At Lasswade Primary School we sang with an American music teacher about bees buzzing in peppermint trees, and Mr Horn, a missionary, screened an inappropriate film about leopards (or was it lepers). The past haunted my grannys home. A railway station mysteriously burned to the ground. A peculiar cricket match took place on the playing fields of Lasswade High School. A Starship failed to reach the stars, and there was Bob-a-Job mayhem. We danced with the Devil in the church vestry and danced to Glenn Millers big-band sound at a school Christmas party. During a bizarre Italian holiday, my brother and I escaped the talons of the signore of the night in Rome and watched a drive-in movie at an American military base near Naples.