About Me

I’m an “Elsie’s Baby”. Like thousands of other Edinburgh babies, I was born in the Elsie Inglis Memorial Maternity Hospital, located on the edge of the city’s Holyrood Park. At the time, Mum and Dad lived across the city in the Firrhill area – a bit of a hike for Dad, but my Gran lived on Salisbury Street, which was close by on the other side of the Park, so she was probably a regular visitor. For the first eight years of my life, I lived on Firrhill Loan with my mum and dad, older sister Sheonaid, and a couple of years after I arrived, my younger sister Diane.

One of my earliest memories is of crawling along the hall, I could only have been a year old, to a cupboard at the front door, that contained all sorts of things, including a tin of paint. I have no idea how I managed to prise off the lid, but I did, and, of course, like any infant, I decided to eat it. The paint was bright red. I was fine, but I’m not sure my mum ever recovered.

My dad was a very practical man who handled all the house decorating and maintenance himself, and he always encouraged me to join in and help whenever I could. I can’t remember exactly what he was doing, but one time when he was rewiring something in the sitting room, he wanted to conceal the wiring under the floorboards, which involved me crawling in the underfloor space and dragging an electrical wire to the other side of the room. It wasn’t live.

On another occasion, my sister Diane and I were playing in the back green. We had strung a rope between two clothes poles and were taking turns at taking running jumps over it to see who could jump the highest. Approaching the latest height, Diane raised the rope furtively. I tripped, fell heavily, crashed to the ground and started crying, holding my arm. She is still the only one to have ever been responsible for breaking one of my bones.

I have so many memories, my dad singing “I Saw Three Ships” on Christmas morning, the massive sofa bed covered with a hard, red plastic material that my parents slept in (there were only two bedrooms), sitting in front of the wee black and white TV watching a report of JFK’s assassination, stealing a little sip of beer in neighbours houses at Hogmanay, the Nursery School at the end of the road (and being put on top of a cupboard for misbehaving), our neighbours: the Whites, the Bishops, the Dixons, the Mitchells, and the Potters, and many, many more. So it was with a bit of sadness that a few years ago I walked along my childhood home to see it looking quite neglected. On the other hand, the old nursery looked great.

From P1 to P3, I attended Oxgangs Primary School, a short walk from home. However, in the summer of 1964, we moved to a larger house on Oxgangs Avenue, and I then attended Hunter’s Tryst Primary School, which was just over the fence from our back garden. There is one teacher I will never forget: Miss Sulley. The school was quite large and temporary accommodation was brought in when the roll increased. Our class was in one of these huts, which had a large walk-in cupboard. Periodically, Miss Sulley would disappear into it and not emerge for some considerable time. Was she in there to have a nap or perhaps a wee dram? Who knows. She was eccentric and would play the piano at assemblies in flamboyant fashion, raising her hands high into the air as she played. She also had eclectic tastes in clothing, and I remember she used to travel to school on a Honda moped, not like a modern one, but one with pedals. At the end of the day, she would coast down the hill from the school onto the main road and pedal furiously to get it going, with her voluminous, brightly coloured dress flapping behind her. Everyone loved Miss Sulley.

I have really fond memories of my time at Hunter’s Tryst, and while I haven’t kept in touch with many, I still meet with my oldest friend, John, who was also at Hunter’s Tryst. We meet once a year around Christmas, drink lots of alcohol, go for a curry and talk absolute nonsense.

I sat my “Eleven Plus” or “Qually” in the final year of Primary School: an exam that determined which secondary school I would attend. The local Secondary School was Firrhill, but if you passed your 11+, you could choose to attend a Senior Secondary School, which I did, namely Boroughmuir Senior Secondary.

After six years of education there, I went on to earn my teaching degree and spent 36 years teaching. Not all of my career was classroom-based; I spent seven years in Outdoor Education, engaging in a wide range of wonderful outdoor pursuits. I also spent seven years as an ICT Development Officer at a time when technology was beginning to appear in more and more schools: I loved that job. After 35 years, I became disillusioned with education, and when offered an enhanced early retirement, I jumped at the chance.

I have always been really interested in history, particularly social history that focuses on the everyday lives and experiences of ordinary people, rather than the actions of elites, states, wars, and world events. I am fascinated by the changes in my home town of Edinburgh and like to imagine my ancestors walking along the same streets as I do.