All I remember.
January 1978, and we arrived in Kinloss, North-East Scotland where my Dad had been posted. We were due to live at a house (66 Abbey Crescent) in Southside, the Sergeants Married Quarters.
We lived there for three and a half years, when we moved to the nearby Officers Married Quarters at Burnside.
Everything that happened at Southside happened in the 1970s. This is obviously untrue. We left halfway through 1981, but I cannot, somehow, comprehend anything at Southside happening in the 1980s. I find it easiest to remember Southside as a winter place, remember it always in darkness, under snows and ghost stories and cold.
Southside was set in an 'L' shape. Looking at Google Maps it seems relatively large - three times the size of Burnside - though it is hard to tell. Memory dictates not that it was huge, but that it was labyrinthine. A warren of alleyways and obscure playgrounds and short uts, a secret geography.
Southside was surrounded by a high green fence, and surrounding Southside was farmland. A railway track ran along the southern length, behind out house at 66 Abbey Crescent. The sound of the trains could be heard all over Southside. The mirrors in our bathroom used to shake when the train passed by. There was a craze for a certain suoerstition during one period, that it was bad luck to have your feet on the ground when a train was passing.
Jump on anything, any piece of playground equipment or fence, just get off the ground.
Summers so far north in Scotland were dark-less. A few short hours of twilight-light in the small hours and that was all. I might have gone months without seeing night-time. Early to bed and wake long after the sun had risen. The coming of autumn and the lengthening nights were a big thing. Sat on the roundabout on the playground our house opened onto. Late August. Sombre conversations that the days were getting shorter, that soon we would be out to play when the street lamps came on.
I remember the first time I was allowed out to play after dark, when the street lamp first clicked itself on; that deep, satisfying red warm-up hue. It signified the night. Dancing round one of the lamps with Carl and my sister chanting 'the lights are on and we're allowed out to play'.
Long winters and endless snows, the playground deserted and sinister. Sat on my front step with Carl telling rude jokes and ghost stories, being too afraid to venture far from the house. Losing my Action Man Space Ranger helmet in the snow, being afraid of the punks on the swings.
The landscape of the playground. In the centre a wooden slide, underneath there were benches you could sit on. A concrete tunnel. A roundabout. Climbing frames. Clusters of logs that we said were haunted by something called 'the beaming eyes'. The swings. There was a rumour that there was a girl 'who had swung all the way round'. This idea terrified me, as if this feat had wrung some impossible change on the victim, as if the swings were alive.
Concrete ground.
Injuries aplenty.
My room at the front of the house, my first ever room with posters of the Loch Ness Monster and tales of true hauntings. For some reason, a picture of a 'poltergeist incident' with a floating drum seemed particularly terrifying. Falling asleep and dreaming about top trumps horror cards and Rom the Spaceknight.
I remember Sharon, our next door nighbour-but-one saying how she liked to sit in her living room and try to watch it get dark.
It is only over the last five years or so that I have started dreaming about Southside. The dreams are all remarkably similar. I am entering Southside at dusk, trying to penetrate to the heart of the housing estate, which is somewhere near where I used to live, even though we lived on one of the edges of Southside. The geography is often different; rivers run between the houses, there is a cafe, or the houses are surrounded by giant sand dunes. The street lamps switch themselves on and I feel an overwhelming joy that I am back at Southside under the light of the street lamps, and also afraid that I am not meant to be here because it is MOD property and I no longer live here.
I wake up before I come anywhere near Southside's mysterious and unmappable heart.
I wake up before I come anywhere near Southside's mysterious and unmappable heart.
