When the Nazis invaded Poland in 1939, my father Felix escaped from Warsaw to Britain and fought with the RAF Polish squadron stationed in Scotland. Later in the war he met my mother Amelia, who was a nurse at Glasgow Royal Infirmary and in 1946 they married.
I was born in 1948 and for the first three years of my life I was a baby and a toddler. But from 1952, I have my first real memory…
After the war, my parents ran a small seaside hotel in Ayr on the west coast of Scotland. I remember that one day a hessian sack was lying on the kitchen floor, just where there had never been one before. It looked nice and soft but when I touched it I got a sharp surprise. When I looked inside to see what had caused my pain, I saw that it was filled with strangely beautiful things of a kind I had never seen. I took out the one that had pricked my finger: it was a highly polished steel blade with black leather grip and bronze hilt – a Nazi SS dagger. How this pleasant, soft, brown, hessian sack, lying on the linoleum-covered floor of a hotel kitchen in Ayr, could be full of shiny SS bayonets and daggers with polished leather handles I do not know. But this bitter difference between hessian and daggers is my first memory of being aesthetically aware.
“Dissociative seizures happen for psychological reasons rather than physical ones. Often dissociative seizures are how the brain reacts to thoughts or feelings related to present and past experiences.”
By the time I was seven we lived in the residential area of Newton-on-Ayr. My parents had worked hard in the hotel, and now my mother continued nursing part-time while my father worked as a nurseryman. They had been able to afford the deposit on a bungalow with a nice garden and a garage, (although we didn’t have a car.)
But Felix found it impossible to cope with what had happened to his beloved Poland. First the Nazi invasion, and then after the war this proud, creative nation absorbed and neutered by the dead-weight of the Soviet empire; and since the war he had not been able to return home because of the fear that he would end up in some Siberian gulag.
So instead, the brain of this brave man took refuge in dissociative seizures. I remember him lying on the bed, shaking and laughing uncontrollably before going unconscious. My mother the nurse, knowing the importance of preventing him from swallowing his tongue, sent me to get a tablespoon from the kitchen, for that very purpose.
In the post war years there was anti-Polish bigotry in Great Britain; and although there was also gratitude towards the Poles for having fought side by side with the British, nevertheless by the Fifties they were seen in some quarters as having outstayed their welcome. But whereas most allied forces could return home after the war, the Poles could not do so without risk. Undoubtedly the bigotry was a contributory factor towards my father’s seizures, and in 1960 Felix and Milly moved from Ayr to Edinburgh where they found a thriving Polish community.
But for me in the 1950’s, Newton-on-Ayr was the just the place to be a child…
Me and the other boys played kick-the-can in Seaforth Road or Gerries and British in the orchard. We talked and played football, golf and cricket in the park, and on long summer evenings, we went swimming in the sea. I remember one evening that the sun was just thinking about setting (sinking) over Arran, and the Firth of Clyde was flat calm as we swam about. But unlike the golden sands at Ayr, Newton had a rocky foreshore, and unfortunately this was also the place where a huge sewage pipe emptied the town’s untreated waste into the sea. As we swam, we were forever having to avoid dead ministers (which was the traditional Ayrshire name for floating turds.)
My Grandpa stayed with us after Grandma died, and he used to give me my nine pence pocket money on Saturdays. This was usually spent on Highland Toffee and Tobermory Tatties in the corner shop by the park. But in November we always went further afield, to McClusky’s the newsagent who stocked fireworks. It was always penny or tu’penny bangers that we bought, and the idea was to maximize the fun by amplifying the effects of the bangers. Of all the places you might think to stick a tu’penny banger before it explodes, wet cowpats in a field are definitely the most spectacular.
I don’t remember how or when I thought up the idea for a mortar that would fire a projectile (a bit of garden cane) from a metal pipe. Anyway, I had a couple of bangers left and had found a couple of feet of steel tubing in the garage. I got a bit of my dad’s garden cane and wrapped some of his electrical insulating tape round it, so that it would be a snug, sliding fit inside the pipe. Then in the field I buried the pipe at a slight angle up to its neck, and lit the touch paper of the banger; this would give me about five seconds before it went off. Quickly I dropped it into the pipe followed by the length of cane, and in a couple of seconds, thump! the cane was fired half way down the field.
I had one banger left, so I lit the blue touch paper and popped it into the pipe quickly followed by the cane, which got some way in before jamming. “Och! It’s not so good this time,” I thought as I tried to push it further into the pipe. When, thump! the banger went off, projecting the missile straight at the palm of my hand. I could understand it being a blackened mess of blood and carbon as I ran home.
It seemed that I always had to go one step further than was sensible, and sometimes it ended in catastrophe – like the time I replaced the rubber sucker on the end of an arrow in my Robin Hood outfit, with a darning needle from my mum’s sewing box. I’d seen the movie and I knew that Robin did not have rubber suckers on the end of his arrows, and I wanted to shoot my arrow into trees too. Instead, I shot it into my friend George’s leg by mistake. I still remember him shouting on my father. “Mr.Bonnar, can you come here please…”
By the time I was in year P6 at Ayr Grammar School, my class mates knew that I was ‘good at art’…
… and so, with Christmas time approaching, Miss Campbell had given us the art project of making our own Christmas cards, using the technique of lino cutting. On the first day she produced all these 5″x3″ rectangles of lovely thick, brown lino, and our task was to carefully use the lino cutting tools to incise the designs we’d prepared previously. Of course being ‘good at art’, I had soon finished a spectacular picture of a snowman and Christmas trees, with the words ‘Happy Christmas!’ emblazoned below. A lot of my class-mates were pretty impressed with the neatness of the lettering, and because these cards were going to be printed for mums and dads and aunties and uncles and friends (in other words they were important), a few girls and boys formed a queue to get me to cut out the words of greeting onto the lino for their cards.
I felt pleased with myself that day I can tell you, and it wasn’t until next day, when we started printing, that I remembered that everything in print is a mirror image of the lino cut – and that I’d forgotten to mirror cut all the ‘Merry Christmas’s’ on peoples’ cards. I took some verbal beatings that day.
I took immediately to chemistry at secondary school (which by the way was Trinity Academy in Edinburgh.)
It started innocently enough when Milly and Felix bought me a Merit chemistry set for my fourteenth birthday. They wanted to encourage my fledgling interest in chemistry, and were willing to put up with any bad smells that might come from my bedroom. How could they have known that they were actually kick-starting my life as an artist and philosopher! Well, look for yourself, is the chemistry set not a sculptural thing? Never mind my thrill at anticipating the chemistry experiments – the sheer surge of aesthetic mystery I felt in the relationship of soft blue cardboard to hard glass test tubes marked me for life. It was the hessian sack and the SS dagger ten years on! And look at all these brightly coloured chemicals – borax, copper sulphate, manganese sulphate, sodium bisulphite, and the gloriously named ‘potassium permanganate’ and ‘zinc nodules’. Wait a minute, I’d heard these names before in Mr. Turpie’s chemistry class at school.
Mr. Turpie was a good and patient teacher, and although he could tell that I was not cut out for chemistry, he nevertheless encouraged me. And when he saw that I had bought a book on organic chemistry, he immediately responded by raking around in the back of the science room cupboard and hauling out a micro-distillation unit, which he presented to me.
But unbeknown to Mr. Turpie I was a boy on a mission. I mean I knew that I did not have the patience to be an organic chemist – I just loved the paraphernalia and the sheer sculptural quality of the glassware. I was also pestering the good folk of the Lothian Laboratory Supplies Co., who very kindly cleared out all their old test tubes, flasks and beakers, put them in a box and gave them to me for a song. In addition to all this glassware, when I asked if I could buy some hydrochloric acid, they let me have me a gallon of it, concentrated, in a winchester bottle, which I took home on a No.11 bus. I remember sitting downstairs on the long seat that faced backwards, right behind the drivers cab. You might picture me at the age of fourteen in my school shorts, balancing on my knee a gallon bottle of concentrated hydrochloric acid that sloshed about every time we went round a corner. I got some strange and worried looks from the other passengers.
By this time, in my tiny bedroom I had already set up the micro-distillation unit and attached it to a vast and very beautiful array of glass tubes and flasks. This was to be the beginning (and end as it turned out) of my career as a pioneering organic chemist. Do you remember the potassium permanganate and the zinc nodules?…
Thoughts on being a Boy Scout…
I had been in the Cubs and Scouts when we lived in Ayr, and so it was just natural when we moved to Edinburgh that I continued my Scouting. As it happened, we bought a small attic flat right upstairs from the Group Scout Master of the 13th Waverley (YMCA) Troop – one James S. Spencer.
The 13th Waverley of course was the best Scout Troop in Edinburgh, and I have nothing but fond memories of the summer camps and of our trip to Denmark. Here’s a photo taken by Felix in 1962, of myself and Spencer just before we departed for Copenhagen…
I have no idea what the duties of a Group Scout Master are, but I can’t imagine that they include belting the hands of a 14 year old boy in order to get him to stop biting his nails. Although he had my parents permission, there was other stuff too which they didn’t know about and which I won’t describe here, but which leads me to believe that my nail biting was just an opportunity for his self-gratification. But in my mind I can separate him entirely from the rest of the 13th Waverley, which I loved, and by the age of 16 I was the leader of the Lion Patrol.
As part of my preparations for the 25Km First Class Hike, I was to take the Lions on a short walk in the Pentland Hills, just to the south of Edinburgh…
The plan was that I would lead the patrol of five scouts aged between 11 and 16 years, due south from the Bonaly Training Centre, climbing the White Hill before turning East and descending through the plantation, then back to the centre. About 4 Km. Easy.
I don’t remember much about the ascent, I’m sure that the views of Edinburgh to the north were just grand. All that is etched in my memory is the five of us capering about on the descent through the plantation (or so we thought) when suddenly we saw a man further down the hill. He seemed to be a soldier and in his hand he was waving a red flag. He was running up the hill towards us shouting, “You idiots, you’re walking down the middle of the firing range!” In our fooling about I hadn’t noticed the ‘KEEP OUT’ signs and the big red flags. I had led five young boys into the receiving end of Dreghorn Rifle Ranges.
Nobody got shot, but I still bite my nails.
Notes for trombonists…
I started my secondary education at Trinity Academy exactly one week late and wearing a lovat green suit – because of which I was given a trombone to learn and not a viola. It was a lovely old Boosey & Hawkes silver plated model which had seen better days for sure, but nevertheless after I’d steam-cleaned the layers of caked mucus from its interior, I was able to produce a squeaky fart or two.
Situated at the end of the first floor corridor – as far away from other classrooms as possible was the tiny room of Mr. Miller, the brass instruments teacher. He was a crusty old gentleman, whose evening job was to play in the orchestra pit of the Kings Theatre. I remember that during my trombone lessons he chain-smoked Capstan Full Strength cigarettes, and although I knew where he was as he shouted at me for not practising enough, by the end of the lessons it was difficult to see him or the sheet-music through the smoke. Nevertheless, I stuck with the trombone because it got me out of history class, eventually becoming third trombone in the Edinburgh Secondary Schools Orchestra.
Modest Mussorgsky’s ‘The Great Gate of Kiev’ has a number of fanfares, in which the brass section is seriously exposed… with nowhere for an un-practised and therefore clueless trombone to hide. And as if this wasn’t enough, on the day of the big concert with no less an eminence than the Queen Mother in the audience, the three trombonists were to be sitting on a raised stage at the rear of the orchestra. I was so terrified that not one note could I produce. I mimed the fanfare.
I have only ever once played in an actual rugby match …
Although the first fifteen of Trinity Academy played many games of rugby during my time (that’s me sitting third from the right) only once did we ever play an actual game of rugby football – a match so perfect, between two teams so perfectly matched, that for a few moments in 1967, the game of rugby was revealed as a sublime entity.
It’s not important to say who the other team were – they were just like us, fifteen different characters cast in a uniform passed from generation to generation. What is important is that on that bright Spring morning it didn’t take long for us to sense that something special was happening: the competitive value of the game receded as each team was mysteriously choreographed by the other to understand the very idea of rugby.
