THEIR HOUSE AT MURRAYFIELD was a 1930s house, a bungalow with discreet art deco hints in the plasterwork of cornices and in the design of the tiled fireplaces; solid and honest stuff with just a hint of something more ambitious, more design-conscious, a passing nod in the direction of the opulence of the Queen Mary liner or the streamlined zing of the last great era of pre-war railway design. In other words, modern in its day; and to our eyes, somehow quaint without being positively ancient.
So, if the Murrayfield bungalow was an inter-war-era time capsule (and it was), then Tom and his wife Mary (my grandmother’s sister) successfully managed to take much of that with them when Tom retired and they were obliged (it had sort of slipped their minds that the place was not really theirs) to move on.
It helped, clearly, in terms of continuity, that Golf Hall was another bungalow and that here too there were hints of the 30s in the wall tiling in the kitchen and the bathroom and in the designs of windows and doors. There were tiled fireplaces too. So the 30s bric-a-brac they brought with them, their fixtures and fittings and furniture, did not in the least feel out of place. An art deco teasmade (square clockface: very daring) that must have been a wedding present; a Bakelite wireless that seemed as big as a drinks cabinet. Clocks, lampshades, cutlery. Books, even — all of Tom’s books were musty and mildewed but, again, clearly not ancient. Cloth bound, their boards slightly warped, they spoke of manly pre-war exploits and pursuits, of fishing and cricket and of rugby and of the glory that was motoring. They spoke of a solid Conservative Scottishness. Tom was, after all, an elder of the Kirk.
In some respects, therefore, a happy transition. In other ways, though, it was all rather unsettling, an eldritch edge to the whole business, a notion that they had somehow fallen off the edge of the map, that they were dispossessed. Golf Hall stood in its own plot with a decent garden, which was nice; and it might have felt like a quaint little property, a cottage, if it had been located in a country village. But it was not located in a country village. Golf Hall stood in less-than-splendid isolation beyond the city boundary, set just back from a busy road: the Glasgow Road, in fact, a mile beyond the Maybury roundabout.
IT FELT LIMINAL, IN THE DARKEST OF SENSES. For a couple of miles at least along the south side of the Glasgow Road there was a high wall overhung by a dense layer of trees. This side of the road always seemed dark, gloomy and damp – and we were always aware that somewhere behind the wall and the trees was Gogarburn Mental Hospital, where the loonies lived.
The north side of the road was more sparsely wooded – and behind its verge of tree and hedge the land fell away in gently undulating arable fields to the perimeter of Turnhouse Airport. Golf Hall was on this north side, screened from traffic by a patchy hedgerow of bushes and trees.
Marginal and precarious, yet constricted: hemmed in by the busy main road, which was even then evolving into a dual carriageway feed for the M8. (To turn into the driveway, you had to cut across a stream of really fast-moving traffic, a manoeuvre that, in the end was to cost Uncle Tom his driving licence.) In all the years we visited there, I can remember only once going on what you could call a country walk. There were no rights of way through the arable land and each individual field was jealously fenced off. You had to walk a half mile or so down the Glasgow Road to find the sort of rural lane that you’d want to take a walk down.
IN SHORT THERE WAS, NO DOUBT ABOUT IT, something eerie about the place. Spooky and forlorn, a feeling that life’s borderline familiars, its disturbed and demonic souls, would be drawn to its isolation. Nature’s wild spirits.
And indeed Golf Hall did have a steady stream of odd people calling at its door. People, often bloody or hysterical or both, who’d been involved in accidents further up the Glasgow Road and had staggered or crawled in search of a telephone. And, yes, there was a steady stream of itinerants, vagrants, tramps, beggars. Travelling salesmen looking for directions, dishevelled strangers looking for petrol in the middle of the night. Tinkers and carnival folk.
Aunt Mary especially would be nervous when patients escaped, as they regularly did, from Gogarburn – and in that respect there was an Arsenic and Old Lace atmosphere about the place. Or something of the Wild West. They had the house at the end of the universe. Darkness at the edge of town. Weird scenes.
Mary always said jokingly, in that disconcerting way she had of seeming both heart-flutteringly vulnerable and almost cynically ready to embrace the inevitable, that they’d be murdered in their beds.
Perhaps it’s also true to imagine that the forlornness of Golf Hall's situation was given extra emphasis by the fact that that there was a plot of derelict land right next door. There had once been a building there – you could see the ruined traces of its walls and it had clearly boasted a cellar because there it was, exposed for all to see. It was a brick-lined pit, the brickwork still covered here and there with glazed plaster; a pit filling with moss and slime and mouldering leaves and the odd weed establishing a foothold through the foundation cement.
The pit was fascinating (in that it represented the dark innards, the secret heart of a building, a secret that somehow you felt you shouldn’t ever see because this exposure was an awesomely blatant form of nakedness) and scary too because you could imagine yourself falling in there and being unable to climb out again. No-one would hear you calling even when your shouts became screams. No-one, not even the inhabitants of Golf Hall, past present or future – even though, surely, almost by definition, they had their antennae finely tuned to the immanence of the macabre.
Elder trees grew in the derelict plot, a good three or four of them, each fully mature and richly productive. By late summer each year they would be bowed down with fruit, swarms of berries that had transformed miraculously from green to bronze to purple to shiny black. Uncle Tom harvested them each autumn and turned them into wine, which we would drink on his birthday the next spring. A friend who drank it one year whispered to me that it tasted of graveyards.
THE HOUSE TOO WAS COLD AND CLAMMY. The spare bedroom, where visitors’ coats were always laid out on the bed, smelled of damp and the perfume of old ladies. Or no, not perfume — more a soap or pot-pourri smell. It was always cold and forbidding in that tiny front bedroom, even in summer. In winter it made your teeth chatter and drew out plumes of your breath as you prepared to go home, coated, bored now and willing mother and father to hurry their farewells. It was an immensely bleak room, with its single weak lightbulb hanging from the ceiling within a dusty, floral-pattern, tasselled lightshade. If anyone had ever slept in that room, they would have been dead when they woke the next morning.
Golf Hall was flimsy, jerry-built. You could always sense that. Even as a child you knew you could almost punch a hole in the walls (in contrast, the Murrayfield bungalow was hugely robust, built like an electricity substation). But Golf Hall’s atmosphere of austerity was somehow appropriate. Although they had always eaten well, Mary and Tom had always flirted with asceticism when it came to the other good things of life. They represented a rough-hewn, honest simplicity, if that doesn’t sound almost sentimental. Nothing exotic here. For instance, there was little evidence of travel – or any other form of broadened horizons, come to that. The only trace of luxury was in the bathroom where there was always a cake, a large cake at that, of Cusson’s Imperial Leather soap. I loved the lingering smell of it on my hands after I had washed them.
