Coffee? Tea? Let’s settle down for a long-ish read!
Dear girl in the photograph
Look at you sitting on the bench at the station with your little red overnight suitcase. Off to a birthday party in the city of Edinburgh from your small town.
Friendships were easy then. They were attached to school or college or a fresh new workplace. Different groups joined arms and skipped into bars, band performances, colleagues’ birthday parties – doing the conga with family members we’d only just met.
The photo I found, it’s me. Me. Little old me. In my most glorious years, though I didn’t realise it at the time. I found the photo whilst clearing my mum’s house, along with letters and postcards from my teenage years. And photos. Lots of them.
Despite the knockbacks and failure to gain entry to the journalism course I wanted to do (too young, go get some life experience!), I worked a civil servant job for a while, made friends, and reapplied later to go to college.
If I wrote down the things that I experienced in that office, you would think I was making it up.
Two ladies sat at a huge board with cubby holes: alphabetically filing little cards, people’s records. Hour by hour, only punctuated by the tea urn steaming beside them.
One wore the brightest of pink-red lipstick in a perfect cupid’s bow, her pale, thin face perfectly powdered, hair stiff in a style from several decades past. Now and then I heard a whimpering cry. The other woman kept her eyes resolutely on her work.
That office building held a palpable sadness: the weight of disappointments unspoken.
I came down with the most horrendous glandular fever. I was barely seventeen years old. My body was pleading for me to move on from that space, but I didn’t yet know how to.
My dad had told me to get into the civil service and work my way up. For him that would have been a glorious saving in his teenage years - his own dad died when my dad was only 14. He was the baby of the family with two older sisters who had long ago married and left home. He and his mum lost the house they were staying in as it was tied accommodation ( a house that went with the job). There was no safety net in those days. My dad suddenly became the man of the house. He had to become a fully fledged adult at fourteen years old.
They moved with his big sister and her husband to a farm estate where his mum then joined her daughter cleaning the “big house” and my dad helped the men with their chores around the farm. Fife has a lot of farmland. My dad did a few years in the mines then went into the paratroopers and that’s a story for another time. He probably viewed it as the making of him. I know now that in pushing me into what felt like a “safe” job he was trying to protect me. He wasn’t to know how crazy that office was.
I fled from that job at the first opportunity to a job in the west end of Edinburgh (Note 1) that was somewhat the making of me. I studied languages and geography alongside my day job, and for the first time was working alongside people with their own goals and pursuits outside of work. We sat together on Thursday afternoons with a language tutor. We spoke of dreams and travels. The boss cycled to work through the city of Edinburgh on a light- weight road bike, arriving in crumpled trousers, put on the tie and jacket he kept in the office, ready for the day. He was always dishevelled. A man well ahead of the times (this was 1981).
The business dealt with inward-bound travel to the UK and Scotland and I typed up itineraries for Canadians and American travellers who wanted to see our country in a few days via a literary tour (Shakespeare one day; the Brontes the next; then Burn’s Scotland). There were lots of available tours, but that one was particularly popular. There were others, like the whisky tour where the return journey was always very interesting due to the whisky tasting all day! I once taught a bus-load of people how to sing You Cannae Shove Yer Grannie Aff The Bus (coz she’s yer mammy’s manny) (*Note 2)
On one occasion the tour guide was ill and I was asked to be the guide. What did I know of history? I hadn’t studied it at school - Scottish history wasn’t actually taught in school - British history was.
Someone asked me about gargoyles on the top of a building in Edinburgh’s St.Andrews Square and I made up some plausible story that was, of course, total fiction. The tour driver winked at me and took over for the rest of the journey while I chatted with people.
I was good at chatting in those days. I’d chat to a stranger at a bus stop. I was fascinated by people and their lives that were different from mine. Those were also different times. Although, to be fair, I think in Scotland we still do chat with strangers at the bus stop!
I’d join in with the tour groups, on one occasion celebrating with a Canadian senior school’s pipe band who were in Scotland to play in championships at the Military Tattoo of the Edinburgh Festival. Their afterparty was wild. At the end of the night Fleetwood Mac’s Go Your Own Way was played on repeat.
It demonstrated to me how wide the world was. The possibilities. I was back.
That’s what is in that photo.
The expression on my face is wonder at the world, at the possibilities of everything in front of me.
The youthful knowledge and confidence that I could do anything. Let’s be clear here: I came from a small town at a time when we weren’t expected to do anything except maybe the same thing our parents had.
I tap into that youngster in the photo now and then. More often nowadays. Try to remember where that confidence of youth came from when there was not one person encouraging it. There’s a kind of Scottish thing where you’d be chastised if you “got above your station”. I think it is a uniquely Scottish thing. Don’t show off. Don’t be too bright or be too smart. Certainly don’t dare to be too loud about it. Approaching proper adulthood, I pushed that notion underfoot. Where did that confidence come from?
Then I remember. It came from a place of fierceness deep inside me that I defiantly refused to extinguish.
It was like a bright ball of pure burning white light.
Decades later sitting at my dining room window, I recalled how little I had in those days, but for the lack of material things in life, I had an imagination as big as the moon. From nowhere, came a memory of an outfit I wore over and over again because it felt so “me”. I remember it distinctly.
Tweedy trousers with a tan leather belt (I used that belt for decades), small Cuban heeled leather boots that were so comfy. I wore a cotton ivory blouse with lace trim, tiny buttons, and as a top layer a soft fair-isle knitted waistcoat in pastel colours. I wore a long string of little amber beads knotted half-way down, so they hung in place, swung as I walked. Sometimes a small scarf tied nattily at my neck. As singular items they were unremarkable, but together…they were a “look”. My hair, all long blonde and shaggy waves blew off my face in the wind. My “look” filled me with confidence.
In the streets full of brightly dressed early eighties-clad youngsters taking over from angsty, dark punk rockers, I stood out as different.
I don’t quite know where that inspiration came from – a kind of Annie Hall look? Fleetwood Mac’s Stevie Nicks? Absolutely no idea.
It was the girl in the photograph.
At the time, I was applying (again) to get into journalism college and perhaps I thought it gave a serious look, a bookish, writerly mood. When I walked along the street in that outfit, I felt confident. I felt like me. And only me. Then I didn’t feel like me for a long time.
Journalism didn’t suit the sensitive side of me. I discovered far too early on that I was not there to write “the truth” but an editor’s version of the truth (or the owners). I heard horror stories from other young reporters of experiences that had traumatised them – one being sent to door-step a bereaved family’s house for a quote, under no illusion her job depended on it. She was a woman and that’s why she was sent. The Editor no doubt thought it more likely the family might respond to a female. Oh, the days back then. For real.
I was good at writing reports. I had a front-page feature spread in a local paper, along with regular reports as a freelancer, including one in the Edinburgh Evening News which felt like the pinnacle at the time for small-town me.
This wasn’t the type of thing I wanted to write though, and it was killing me. My cheerful, chatty spirit was taking leave as I retreated into myself, and it would take me a long time to recover.
It wasn’t the industry that did that to me. It was the impossible standards of my own dreams. I had set a high expectation for journalism and it failed me.
I did return to creative writing when my children were younger. Yes, somehow amongst the chaos of organising a busy household and working part-time, I still found time to read and to write.
Years later at one of the most emotional times of my life when I was caring for my elderly mum, I scribbled away in the moments in between. I wrote several novels. Started writing short stories. And now. Now, here we are.
The fashions have turned full circle and on a recent trip over to Scotland’s capital city, Edinburgh, I noticed white blouses with lace trim everywhere: finely knitted jumpers and waistcoats, tweed trousers, and Cuban heeled boots.
Reader, I bought them all.
Not in an attempt to reclaim my youth, but because they fitted me well and I look dammed good in them. The boots are not burgundy though. The boots are metallic and shiny. I never would have dared wear them back in my youth.
(Photo by Jackie Morrison. My gorgeous boots!)
I’m back. The same but better. Still me. Definitely me.
And I’m writing.
Dear young girl in the photograph – good to see you are still around. Go get them, tiger x x
If you reached this far, thank you from my heart.
Thank you, dear Subscriber, I appreciate you being here x x
*Note 1: The West End of Edinburgh where I counted down the hours to leave work via the church chimes. It was the eighties… I always had a concert or some exciting performance to rush off to! During a few short years I’d seen David Bowie play at Murrayfield, Edinburgh, Freddie Mercury front Queen at Ingleston in Edinburgh, and Simple Minds play an absolutely bouncing crowd in Edinburgh’s Playhouse.
*Note 2: Ye Cannae Shove Yer Granny Aff A Bus (You cannot throw your grandma off a bus), because she’s your mummy’s mummy. A nursery rhyme sung by Scottish children on bus trips! Or by supporters at a rugby match!!!
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