The Summer of Love, or at any rate the autumn, brought Alistair into all our lives. He was tall, bearded and flame haired: a movie director's idea of a Scots nobleman whose family were gentry from somewhere around Perth. Alistair came with us on trips, crossing fords and hills out towards Deeside and north in the direction of Inverness. We took turns to ride on his shoulders through the prickly gorse and he skimmed stones for us over the translucent water of the lochs. My mother had met him through the folk music group at the college and together they went out night after night, singing songs and recording old tunes in pubs and community centres in the outlying villages.
Our mother transformed into a different woman; she cut her hair into a smooth pageboy that curved under her ears; she was no longer Maureen. Her new friends all called her Chris.
Winter arrived. On a dark, icy morning I woke up and slid my feet into my slippers to go to the toilet. I tried to take a step. My slippers resisted. They refused to part company with the lino. Overnight the temperature had plummeted below freezing and all our shoes had stuck fast to the floor. It was almost as though they were more afraid to go outside into the cold than their owners. We won a goldfish once at a fair, where I tasted the melting sweetness of candyfloss for the first time. The ill-fated creature survived the confines of life in a plastic bag, overfeeding by three small children, only to perish when we went away one weekend and came back to find the pipes frozen and the goldfish entombed in ice. Our mother thawed the ice, thinking that the fish might be held in suspended animation, but the corpse disintegrated and then she couldn't even flush the pieces down the loo, because that was frozen too.
These are the memories that are left behind from our lives in that caravan. I didn't question my life: I hadn't learned to. Nor had I yet learned not to. I don't think I asked about Big Aminatta, or Jim or even my father. I had no yesterdays and no tomorrows. My days were routine, punctuated by small deeds, minor happenings; I was roused by the occasional petty excitement and endured a series of childhood mishaps.
I was hospitalised by a Highland terrier called Paddington whose teeth tore through the flesh of my lower lip and slashed my nostril. On the way to the hospital I sat between my mother's legs; she had a flannel held to my mouth. By the time we reached the children's wing of the Aberdeen Royal Infirmary, the cloth was so drenched in red the pattern had been obscured.
I spent an eternity in the hospital in a bed opposite two American boys. I recollect nothing of the pain. Or the hours of stitching to reconstruct my lower lip. Or being unable to eat because of my ruined mouth. I only know that I was angry because the nurse who made the rounds of the children's ward with a potty made me pee in the pot on the top of my bed. The American boys, being several years older, she allowed to take the pot under the covers.
The scars were eventually entered into my passport: ‘scars on left lower lip’ in mauve ink next to the heading ‘Special peculiarities/Signes particuliers’. That meant I would always be identified in the event of an accident. I was the only person I ever knew who had a special peculiarity listed in their passport. Eventually the lopsided slant to my mouth evened and the scars faded, almost.
The teacher training course had given our mother an enthusiasm for organising educational trips. Somewhere along the way she met an architect who worked on the design of the Forth Road Bridge. At his invitation we all drove down the coast road to the crossing over the Firth, where her friend led us on a tour of the bridge. Thirty minutes later, at the halfway point, we stopped to look at the view. And what a mighty scene it was, truly. There we were, hanging perilously over miles and miles of uninterrupted sea. I clung to the steel railings and looked through the bars at the white-peaked waves and the seagulls gliding past at eye level.
Above my head I could hear the architect's voice. My mother asked questions. Their conversation bubbled on. I wasn't tall enough to see above the railings and the heavy top bar blocked the view, so I slipped my head between the bars, where the murmur of adult voices was carried away by the buffeting bluster.
Minutes passed; our guide decided we should press on to the other side, where coffee, juice and biscuits were waiting for us. Everyone moved away. I tried to follow them, but I couldn't seem to withdraw my head. Each time I tried to pull it out, my ears caught against the bars.
There was no choice but to stare at the view for another hour. Help and emergency equipment was summoned; two men worked around me. In time the bars were forced open. I was out.
Back home in Sierra Leone my father was released from prison. Two months later he left the country to join the APC government-in-exile in neighbouring Guinea, where they were indeed amassing arms and men, bankrolled by the diamond millions of Henneh Shamal, a Koidu-based Lebanese diamond dealer. Siaka Stevens and Henneh had known each other for many years, from the time when Stevens served as a minister for mines under the pre-colonial native administration. Shamal, previously an SLPP supporter, was ready to switch allegiances and ally himself openly with the prospective new power.
They planned to invade Sierra Leone and topple the military junta by force, if necessary. Colonel John Bangura, a pro-APC military man who had been sent into comfortable exile to Sierra Leone's embassy in Washington, returned to train the troops. Our father's job was to act as medical officer to the men and he joined them in their bush retreat, where they lived and were drilled. He left everything behind; even the clinic he handed over to an old schoolfriend, Dr Turay, without expecting anything in return. He wrote to my mother and asked her to send him a portable medical kit, which he packed, alongside a copy of the speeches of Che Guevara, and departed for the bush.
Meanwhile my mother spent more and more of her time with Alistair. One chilly evening Brian came home from a trip to London to find me asleep alone in the caravan. On the table was a note from my mother: ‘Please look after Aminatta. We've gone to a concert.’ Brian was due to attend an event himself that night, at one of the architects’ professional associations. Seeing no alternative, he fetched me from my bed, dressed me in mismatching clothes and carried me with him. At the entrance to the cocktail party, in one of Aberdeen's smart hotels, the doorman refused to let me into the room, which was full of men in dinner jackets. We stood at the door not knowing what to do next.
‘Come on, then. Bring the bairn here. Come on.’ It was the receptionist who had overheard everything from her place at the front desk. For the next four hours I slept on the floor under her desk until past midnight, when Brian came to fetch me, and we walked the three miles home, me riding high on his shoulders.
Brian and Sonia left the caravan soon afterwards, and I had completely forgotten Brian until he wrote to me after I began to present a series of programmes for the BBC in the early 1990s. I have the letter still, asking if I was the same little girl from Sierra Leone who lived in a caravan up at Nigg. A dark photocopy of an old photograph was contained in the brown envelope. It was taken one Christmas spent at the ski slopes at Aviemore. He thought the date was 1969 or 1970 but I knew it must be perhaps two years earlier. Our mother is on the right of the picture, next to an unknown man, and Brian is on the left. Between them is my sister. Sheka alone is forward of the group, peering into the camera lens. For some reason, I am not in the picture.
Yet I remember the day well. We had been ice skating for the first time and everyone had eventually conquered it except me. I wobbled and slid until my mother persuaded me off the ice. I sat in the empty stands and watched. Someone brought me a cup of hot orange juice, so hot I scalded my tongue. I remember the strange rough feeling, like licking rubber, that lasted the whole of the next day.
There was a telephone number at the top of the page; Brian still lived in Scotland – in Elgin on the coast north of Aberdeen. In his letter he wrote how he often wondered what had become of all of us; he had tried to trace my mother several times without success.
My mood was light as I dialled the telephone number. I thought it was fun: here we were after all these years.
Yet as soon as he answered I realised the mistake I had made in telephoning without warning. I announced my name and the man's voice that answered trembled with emotion.
I feigned confidence, but I was experiencing the sensation of walking back into my dark past, the geography of which was both familiar and confused. A feeling of dread; too late to turn back. So much of the past was covered in veils. Whatever was coming, he would expect me to provide the answer and as likely I would not be able to do so.
Brian's enquiries among my mother's friends and acquaintances in the early 1970s had met with a series of blanks. Finally he came across a woman who told him, apparently on good authority, that Maureen was living overseas. He asked about the children, the girl he used to baby-sit. He was told I was dead, slaughtered as a child along with my brother and sister somewhere in West Africa. Until he saw my photograph in a newspaper twenty years on Brian had no idea I was alive.
15
‘Stand here, dearie. And if you see anyone, you let me know.’ Gran leaned over and straightened my anorak on my shoulders. She smelled of cigarettes and Parma Violets. Then she walked away as I stood still and watched her: blue cloth coat, fur hat, brown zip booties. Today she had a large handbag slung over her forearm.
Gran and I came together to Duthie Park – for years I called it Dusty Park – almost every afternoon in the days before I started school at St Margaret's. The park was a short walk from the house, just the right distance for a small child and a woman in late middle age who was finding it ever more difficult to leave the confines of her own home. Above us the sky was open and cloudlessly blue, and the park was in full bloom. On either side of me banks of flower beds displayed clashing blooms: grape hyacinths, heavy-headed yellow crocuses, rubbery scarlet tulips. Unseen hands had arranged them into a cacophony of colour – the first I had seen since we arrived in Scotland – and their brilliant attire brought back hazy memories of the women in the markets at home.
Opposite the gates of the park flowed the river Dee. Where the river entered the city of Aberdeen swans glided on placid waters that widened and stretched until they slipped into the sea. But only a few miles farther west the same water crashed dangerously and dramatically down a narrow channel over rocks and boulders. There, on a crag opposite the bridge at Peterculter, a brightly painted statue of Rob Roy stood poised on the banks, in perpetual readiness to escape his English captors. In my eyes he looked magnificent: dressed in a kilt painted red and black with shiny waterproof paint, matching gaiters, a round shield in one hand and a long, broad sword in the other, framed by a forest of Scots pines.
Gran's father, my long-dead great-grandfather, was crippled in the exact same spot, so the story went, when he tried to save a drowning man from the water below. He leapt in only to find that the water was only a few feet deep and he compressed several vertebrae, confining himself ever after to a life spent living off his wife's earnings. When I was a child I failed to spot the question begged by the story: if the water was so shallow, how then could a man possibly be drowning in it? My grandfather told the story quite differently. He claimed his father-in-law wrecked his legs one night performing a leap of drunken bravado in imitation of Scotland's hero.
On the other side of the park from where I was standing was a concrete boating pond, a good one hundred yards long. On the weekends we came to the park with my mother and watched the boats skate across the surface like beautiful winged insects. To the side of the pond, facing the river, were the swings: six box swings – the sort with bars on each side to hold you in so that you felt as though you were in a flying orange crate. Next to those were three of the regular swings. I wasn't allowed on them after Memuna fell off backwards once while my mother was pushing her. Memuna didn't complain but walked stiffly back to the Mini and stayed silent on the trip home. At bed time Memuna's shirt was stuck fast to her body, dried onto her back with the blood from her skinned back.
In between the swings and where my grandmother and I had entered the park was the bandstand, ringed by oak trees and copper beeches. To the right was a memorial to Elizabeth Crombie Duthie: a girl in a toga with a snake wrapped around her upper torso standing on a tall granite column overlooking the Granite City. She was surrounded by roses contained within a perfect semicircle of privet.
Beyond the trees were the glasshouses, where thousands of bright buds were raised to be planted out each season. Old ladies in beaver coats walked in pairs in the sun. Below them, masked by trees, was the pond – the focal point of my outings with my grandmother. In her handbag were half a dozen slices of stale bread from yesterday's tea and in a short while we would go together to feed the ducks.
In the meantime I waited, concealed behind a wall of rhododendrons, in a nether world of understanding. I wasn't exactly sure what we were doing, but I understood my instructions as far as they went. Wait here until I saw someone. Then what?
My hands felt hot, restricted in my mittens as I stood in position. The top of my head tickled under my hat. I tried hopelessly to scratch it with my floppy woollen paws. Beyond the curve I could see my grandmother bend over one of the flower beds. As I watched she took a paper bag from the large handbag she was holding and placed it on the path next to her. Next she produced a small garden trowel and began to dig around the bedding plants.
The itch under my hat was getting worse. I tried to pull my hands out of my mittens. They were tied on tight with a bow of wool at my wrists. I curled my right hand into a fist and pulled clumsily at the end of one mitten with the other hand. Finally, by sheer force of will, I freed my fingers. I let the discarded mitten fall and reached under the warm tight bonnet to the crown of my head. My grandmother was easing marigolds out of the soil and putting them one by one into the bag.
I scratched my head with my nails and calming relief chased the frustration away. I glanced back at my grandmother; she was still busy. I reached down to one of my wool-encased calves and gave it a hearty scratch, too. It felt good. I began on the other one.
‘Are you lost?’
The voice interrupted my furtive indulgence. A man stood directly in front of me, about eight foot tall, clad in a greenish-brown uniform.
‘Well, Button? Are you all by yourself? Where's your muther?’
I stood still. I had instructions, but they had not prepared me for this eventuality. I tried to think but I hadn't learned how yet. I stayed quiet and looked at the man. Also, I was not supposed to talk to strangers. I stood still. I said nothing.
‘You are lost, aren't you? Come on. She can't be far. Let's see what we can do, shall we?’ He held out his hand.
Taking it was simply out of the question. My mind was numb. The world around me moved at thrice the pace of my brain. I was terrified of being led away, but I didn't know how to resist. And I had my instructions. Able to go neither forward nor back, I stuck to my position and felt the first surge of alarm in my bladder and my belly.
His tone changed into something brisker. ‘Yours, is she? Cute as a button.’ He looked from my gran to me and back again curiously, smiling and frowning at once.
‘Oh yes, she's mine all right. Come on, Pudding. Where are your gloves?’ My grandmother was next to me and all around me, fitting mittens back onto reluctant fingers, straightening my bobble hat and retying the bow under my chin.
The warden watched her. ‘Well, no harm done,’ he said. ‘It's a lovely day for a walk, a lovely day.’
‘Ay, well, it is that. Quite lovely.’
I put up my hand to be taken. Gran and I walked away from the park warden, who stood in the same spot, watching us go. At the corner my grandmother turned and waved, as best she could, her right arm hampered by the heavy bag that hung at her elbow.
My grandmother's parents, the Bruce Duncans, had been successful leather merchants – one of the first in Aberdeen. But by the time Lydia, my grandmother, was born just a few streets away from Gairn Terrace, their fortunes were already waning. As soon as she was of age Lydia went to Canada in sea
rch of work and a decent standard of living. It was the 1930s. Recession and a pattern of emigration set in place by the land clearances prompted thousands to leave Scotland in answer to advertisements placed by the Canadian and Australian governments. But a bout of meningitis shortly after she arrived put paid to Lydia's dreams. She was repatriated to her family. Soon after that she met Robert Christison and never returned to Canada.
Our grandfather amused himself by saying he had received two warnings not to marry her. After they met at a dance in King's Wells she called out to him from a passing bus as he walked home. He ran and jumped on at the lights. On the day of their wedding the taxi he had hired to drive him to the manse took him to the wrong address. That was the first warning. When he arrived at the right house he found his bride waiting, but no minister. The minister had gone out, forgetting a wedding was booked for that morning. That was the second warning. Eventually the minister was tracked down and hurried back to do his job. Mr and Mrs Christison spent their honeymoon weekend at Arbroath, and on Monday Lydia moved her possessions into her husband's bachelor digs in Crown Street.
Back at Gairn Terrace Gran stripped me of my layers, removed her own coat and slipped a housecoat over her twin set before she went to the kitchen to start the tea. She had a pale yellow and white checked housecoat, and another in lilac. She wore them all the time except when she was going out of the house, when she put on her blue coat or, on certain occasions, a brown wool one with an astrakhan collar.
In the days before she married our gran worked in a milliner's on Rose Street. With her curled hair, pert nose and soft eyes she was often called upon to model hats for well-heeled customers. Years of working in shops among expensive items had given her a taste for fine clothes. She dressed meticulously in skirts, stockings and pastel sweaters, a copy of a style favoured by the women she used to serve. But unlike those women, my gran had to cover her carefully coordinated outfit with an ordinary housecoat to carry out her chores.
The Devil that Danced on the Water Page 14