From North Berwick With Love
The approach to my front door is down a narrow passageway bordered on one side by the gable end of the house, on the other by the neighbouring tenement. From the gate to the point where the path opens onto the garden is an unremarkable journey of no more than a few seconds.
But in that short time I am occasionally aware of the sound of my footsteps echoing off the walls of my house and the tenement next door. This only happens when the sun is shining, the sky is cloudless and when it does, I am transported back over fifty years to the Point Garry Hotel in North Berwick.
Or, to be accurate, a narrow passageway bordered on one side by the gable end of the Point Garry and on the other by the neighbouring house. My five-year old self is running down the steps in the sunshine of an early August evening, a cloudless sky, having been given the all-important task of summoning my father upstairs for tea from the hotel billiards room situated in the basement.
Like the path to my front door, it is an unremarkable journey of no more than a few seconds. But in that short time, I hear the sound of my Start-Rite sandals as they hit the dozen or so steps and echo off the walls of the Point Garry and the house next door.
An echo from a Scottish seaside town that has stuck with me for more than half a century.
***
There are a couple options if you’re driving from Edinburgh to North Berwick. The coastal route tracks the John Muir Way long distance walking path, through the Honest Toun of Musselburgh, sweeping past Gosford Sands, the picturesque village of Aberlady, Gullane’s golf course, Dirleton with its 13th century castle, before finally arriving in North Berwick.
Alternatively, and potentially quicker (although if speed is a priority, then the slow pace of North Berwick itself may not suit you), is the inland route which follows the railway line. This incorporates Scotland’s first experimental dual carriageway, a one mile dual lane stretch between Seton Collegiate Church and the outskirts of Longniddry.
December 1986.
I’m driving my father’s battered old and very orange Renault 12 with my girlfriend through the rain to North Berwick. She is leaving Edinburgh in a few days’ time to start a new job in Madrid. We’ve decided to spend a last night together, well, for a while at least, in North Berwick and have dinner, bed and breakfast at the Nether Abbey Hotel. Not exactly glamourous, but we were young. Or maybe it was just that I was unimaginative.
As we motor along the dual carriageway, Fiona turns to me and says, “I’ve got cold feet.” Hiding my disappointment, I say we can turn at Longniddry and head back to Edinburgh. But no, it’s simply that her feet are genuinely cold, and the problem is resolved by adjusting the direction of the car’s rudimentary heating fan towards her legs.
The relationship outlived the Renault, but both were finished by Easter 1987.
***
I have another memory of that stretch of road or perhaps, like the coal being delivered on that cold Christmas morning, a memory of my mother’s memory (“Of course, back then, it wasn’t a Scottish holiday”).
We, or they, let’s say we - why let facts get in the way of a good story, or at any rate, a story. Let’s say then, my Mum, Dad, Susan and me in the Singer Gazelle, every piece of clothing we possess packed into the car boot on our way to North Berwick for our summer holidays. I’m perched on the fold down central arm rest between Mum and Dad in the front, Susan in the back, no seat belts obviously. We’re motoring along Scotland’s first experimental dual carriageway, there’s another car some way in front of us doing likewise and between the two vehicles, a cyclist, or maybe several cyclists - a peloton - I can’t remember, it was a long time ago.
All of a sudden, one of the cyclists, or the only cyclist, piles into the car in front of ours and is catapulted into the air ending up on the bonnet of the other car, from where he slithers to the ground. We slow down and, because this is Scotland’s first experimental dual carriageway, we’re able to discretely move out to the right, pass the now stationary other car, the somewhat shaken cyclist - perhaps the rest of the peloton - and proceed on our journey to North Berwick.
If questioned – and my Mum definitely would have questioned him later – my Dad would have said that although he was a doctor, he was employed by Edinburgh’s Public Health Department in a non-clinical role, the other car had stopped, and in any case, he was on holiday.
***
Our perceptions of time and distance change as we get older. To a child a year can feel like an eternity but to parents, it might seem like only yesterday they were depositing their loved one at the primary school gates for the first time and, hey, now here they are anxiously waving goodbye as they head off to university.
As a young boy my world was generally restricted to our house and my school in south Edinburgh, and occasional visits to my aunts who, although they lived 450 metres away, we always drove to. God knows how we managed to walk the 200 metres to church every Sunday.
North Berwick was our regular holiday destination for the first seven years of my life and was - for me - far away. My granny lived in Aberdeen and my Uncle Jim and Aunt Yvonne lived in London; these places were further away. Our first summer holiday after North Berwick was a tour of Denmark which was abroad and as far away as it was possible to go.
The distance from Edinburgh to North Berwick is only 37km, 23 miles in old money. Not very far at all, indeed it’s now one of my favourite cycling routes and on a good day, wind behind me, hearty breakfast inside me, I can get there easily in under two hours. Depending on other traffic, driving there takes about 40 minutes and even in a Singer Gazelle 50 years ago, it would have been much the same, a bit longer if you stopped to attend to the victim of a road accident.
At the time it appeared to me to be an almost unimaginably long journey. For one week of the three that we stayed at the Point Garry, my Dad would commute to his office in Johnston Terrace in Edinburgh. This seemed utterly incredible, that someone could travel all the way from North Berwick to Edinburgh and back in the space of a day. But my Dad was incredible, not in the sense of improbable to be believed – although often he was, like the time when decorating my bedroom, he told me that unless he got the pattern of the wallpaper lined up accurately, the police would come round and arrest him – but excellent, outstanding.
An excellent, outstanding father.
***
Despite – or possibly, perversely, because of - the often inclement weather, Scotland has a rich history of open-air swimming pools. These gradually fell out of fashion as cheap air travel enabled families to sample the delights of sunny Spain for their annual summer holidays but even now there are a handful still open.
The outdoor swimming pool beside North Berwick harbour closed in 1995 after almost 100 years, and it was here that my father taught me to swim. Or, to be accurate, to do the doggy paddle, later to be finessed into actual swimming by Mr Ramsay at Edinburgh’s Royal Commonwealth Swimming Pool.
The pool at North Berwick has since been filled in and is now a yacht park, but some of the changing rooms with their brightly painted wooden doors and a few spectator benches remain and, if you know where to look, you can see the holes where the diving board was secured into the surrounding concrete. The diving board where I was encouraged, no, bribed with the promise of an ice cream from Luca’s, to jump off at the end of each morning’s swim. I can hear my high-pitched scream, not so much at the fast approaching cold water (and boy was it cold) but the sheer excitement of it all. The pool has been filled in, but the memories haven’t been buried.
My Dad taught me a lot of things: how to swim, how to tie my shoelaces, how to ride a bicycle, how to do long division, but the most important thing I learned from him is that honesty, kindness and a sense of humour can get you a long way in life.
He had those qualities in abundance and they served him well.
***
The photograph is undated but some school headshots a few pages later in the album suggest that this is August 1972. Me, age 7 in my swimming trunks, my sister – clearly feeling the cold wearing a Shetland jersey and knee length socks – 14, and my Mum, well, it would never have occurred to me then that she had an age.
Nor am I certain where the photograph was taken. But I think it is likely to be the beach at Seacliff, a few miles east of North Berwick just beyond Tantallon Castle.
What is not in doubt is that the photographer is my father and although I have no memory of this moment in our family history, if I close my eyes, I can hear him laughing as he clicks the shutter release on his camera.
Fast forward 44 years, August 2016, a gorgeous sunny Sunday afternoon and I’m walking from Yellowcraig Beach to the harbour at North Berwick with another girlfriend. She stops, turns towards me, puts her hands on my chest, looks into my eyes and says “I love the way you laugh”. Or was it “I love the way you make me laugh”? Either way, six months later Julia laughs her way out of my life, no rhythm in cymbals, no tempo in drums.
Before the year is out, my Dad laughs for the last time. I loved both the way he laughed and the way he made me laugh.
In the days leading up to his funeral I come across a USB memory stick on which he has written my sister’s and my name. I assume that it contains nothing more than information such as bank account details, insurance policies and initially pay it no attention. But when I look to see what is on it, I discover the story of my father’s life in his own words – although thankfully not in his own appalling doctor’s handwriting.
Buried in the 90,000 or so words he records this short description of my parents’ first visit together to North Berwick, a gorgeous sunny Sunday afternoon, August 1949:
The only, but most important, thing I can remember of that day was lying on the sands soaking up the sun. I noticed Sheila had closed her eyes and I took the opportunity of leaning over and kissing her. She was rather taken aback, but fortunately I was not banned sine die.
***
December 2017
Those last 15 months, I should have been there for him more often but was too wrapped up in my own – and at this distance, seven years later, I realise, trivial - problems.
The call from Susan wasn’t a complete surprise. Or rather, the call was a surprise, the reason for her calling wasn’t: our father’s health had deteriorated rapidly, and he was barely conscious. Pausing to take in the news, I looked out of my office window. Through the rapidly greying winter sky I caught sight of my Dad’s old office on Johnston Terrace, where he had made that gargantuan daily commute from North Berwick all those years ago. I stopped work and made my way to the care home.
I looked around the room, the room which had taken so long to persuade him to move to but, once there, had strangely calmed him, helped soothe his worries and anxieties. On his bedside table, the image of his wife, daughter and son on the beach, smiling at him laughing as he took the photograph, a memory of the three people he held dearest, from North Berwick with love.
I noticed my Dad’s closed eyes, leant over the bed where he lay and, for what I knew would be the last time, kissed him goodbye.