Conjuring Wildlife From Wood

Given what emerges from within its dusty walls, David Robinson’s workshop is distinctly low key. Almost invisible from the road, in fact, and unmarked but for a greying wooden sign. A pair of deceptively long conjoined sheds, half-buried in a riot of pink clematis, neatly tucked between outbuildings and his own stone farmhouse. Scored today by the unmistakable twang of John Lee Hooker. It lies just a few miles inland from the sea. Hemmed in on all sides by swathes of Lothian barley, but close enough to the beaches of Gullane, Dirleton and North Berwick that gulls wheel high in the cloudless sky. Inside, light floods through a translucent roof. It is achingly bright, hot, and sweetly fragrant. Redolent of fresh-cut sawdust, linseed oil, beeswax, and the high pine reek of turpentine. A smell that for me, means I am home.

At the far end, leaning over his cluttered workbench peering through half-moon spectacles, is my father – the UK’s most recently elected Master Carver – so absorbed he doesn’t even look up. The object of his attention is what I have come to see. An Otter Table is in progress.

The first such table was named for Otto: an orphaned kit, rescued, raised, and rewilded by Alan McKechnie, a great friend of my family’s, on the Hebridean Isle of Coll. Young Otto had been living wild for some years, but unlike most of his kind he had little fear of man. And one afternoon, whilst dad was fishing alone on a remote lochan, he appeared in the water not ten feet away. Waiting patiently, it quickly became apparent, for a spot of lunch.

“I stopped casting my fly and remained quiet and still as the swimming otter approached me. When he was close enough, I threw one of my trout to him; the fish was quickly consumed and he came to me for more, this time with paws resting against my waders and head stretched up towards my hand, until he was fed again. After rifling my fishing bag, he fished with me for a while, diving and swimming around my feet in a stream of bubbles, until we both decided it was time to move on.”

The remarkable encounter stayed with him, and back home in his workshop he sought to preserve it. First sketching, then painstakingly carving the otter and the lochan into a broad slab of live-edged elm – perhaps the most dramatic Scottish hardwood – forming it into the top of a unique table. Soon after, Otto sold at the Scottish Gallery, in Edinburgh. Snapped up in the first hour of the opening night. The startling liquid-like effect of the old-growth timber and the little otters’ whiskered face seeming to break through the surface of the wood, one of the evening’s undisputed hits. But despite its popularity, he wasn’t keen to replicate the work. Those who know him even a little will not be surprised to hear that to him, evoking another otter seemed “Almost like cheating.” Instead, he turned his attentions to the exotic. Swapping native wildlife for gorillas, howler monkeys, and marabou storks. Developing a series of fantastically detailed pieces for a local client: an intrepid traveller and avid nature photographer. Translating decades of treasured images (from the Amazon to Alaska) into maximalist compositions that blur the lines between furniture and sculpture.

But then the pandemic struck, and with it, restricted travel. Dad’s regular trips to the Hebrides – indeed to all the wilds of Scotland – were curtailed. Cooped up alone in his workshop, it wasn’t long before the yearning for the freedom of these places became acute, and he turned once more to his chisels. If he could not go to the islands, he would bring the islands (and their inhabitants) to him. Soon a menagerie of wild creatures began to appear on his bench. From osprey to octopus, kingfishers to crabs to capercaillies – and yes, eventually even a few more otters. The sleekit creatures surfacing stealthily, almost imperceptibly, and continuing to capture hearts. So much so, in fact, that now he can barely keep up with demand. “Little buggers scare the fish away…but people certainly seem to like them” he says, with a twinkle. Characteristically, this is something of an understatement. An image depicting one of his otter tables recently garnered over four million views on Twitter, in less than 48 hours. The resulting flurry of enquiries pushing his already swollen waiting list well into 2024. Perhaps as conclusive an argument as ever there was for a little more ‘Cheating’.

Carving of course, is not new to him; indeed, it has long been a part of his furniture making. A business that has operated from this space for nearly 30 years, with the help of my mum (Pat) and a loyal local following. Adding personal touches, mottos, and the occasional line of Gaelic sass to the kitchens, tables, chairs, and grand oak gates of unsuspecting clients. His skills and ambition becoming more sophisticated year on year. But only recently has it become his sole focus. The weight of growing popularity and of narrowing his gaze to the point of a chisel, something he is both excited and trepidatious about.

“Look, I’m delighted that the work is reaching people. But you know better than anyone I’m self-taught.” he says, emphatically, and with his tongue firmly in his cheek. “Most of these I made myself. This one was an old penknife. This one,” he holds up a huge steel gouge “a Land Rover suspension spring! I mean…what if people find out?!”

Before I can argue, he’s off – rummaging through drawers, coming up with an otter’s skull: a beach-find. Tiny, delicate and beautiful, bleached white by wind and saltwater, cradled in his callused hand. “There now” he exclaims, “never hurts to know what’s going on under the surface.”

In part, it is this fascination with form and function (dozens of sketches and photographs litter his bench) that makes his otters so successful. The way their bodies undulate above and beneath the surface. The cheekbones, eyes, and noses that seem almost to be twitching. An anatomical sensitivity that can be felt as much as seen. He is not so much trying to replicate nature, as bring it to life. Underpinning it all too though, is a passion for wood’s many faces. A careful selection of timber with character – and the furniture maker’s ability to work with that character – that really sets him apart.

Traditionally, woodcarvers seek out predictable timbers with tight even grain, and as few flaws as possible. For the really intricate stuff, the softer, crisper, and more uniform the better. (Lime, or Basswood is particularly common.) Basically, woods that will not so readily fight back. But when my dad first picked up a chisel, he had different requirements. The furniture he was making needed to be strong, durable, and beautiful. Out of necessity, he cut his teeth on the most dramatic, disruptive native hardwoods he could find. Scottish oak, ash, and toughest of all: elm. By the time he really started to take the carving seriously, intuiting that perfect balance of grain feature, density, scale, and colour had become second nature. But more than that, his keen eye simply couldn’t help but incorporate the extra dimensions the right grain could add – the timber’s anima, if you like – imbuing his subjects with vivacity, and a sense of movement that is his alone.

Out there in the world beyond the clematis, it’s more than just twitter taking note. His unorthodox work has been commissioned by Gleneagles Hotel, the Macallan, and Vacheron Constantin. And recently, with his induction into the Master Carver’s Association, he has even joined the ranks of Master Carver. (One of only 40 peer-elected artisans in wood and stone in the UK who can claim the title.) The accolade coming just days after he completed a commission bound for the Royal household.

The table in front of us is a mighty thing, over a metre wide and two inches thick, depicting a pair of otters chasing each other through the shallows. A romantic token from a husband to his wife. Though still in the rough form – not yet hand-sanded to the lustre of fine porcelain, the high amber glow of Islay malt – the spirit of the piece is already clear. And looking at the lithe outlines of the animal’s bodies and wakes sketched out in chalk – positioned that the grain might flow in and around them, as water might – it becomes more and more apparent. His success, it seems to me, has less to do with otters, or indeed with carving, than he might be willing to admit. After half a lifetime in the workshop, my father has finally found his métier.

David Robinson is an artist.

Home Fires

 Winter the year I was born was particularly harsh, and I made my entrance just shy of its shortest day. My parents were living at the time in a single spartan room; the only place in their home-in-progress with a floor and a roof. The room had no running water, or any plumbing come to that, but at least that meant the pipes never froze. What it did have, in the form of an old iron potbelly stove, was heating. And if they got it hot enough, for long enough (and if they got close enough), even on the coldest of nights it was sufficient to keep them warm until they retreated to bed.

 As with most things they begged or borrowed to re-build the place, the stove was far from new. But my father is a handy sort of man, and its lack of a chimney didn’t deter him for long. Using an old section of cast iron drainpipe, he fashioned a serviceable flue, which he thrust up through the ceiling. With no insulation, the pipe would get as hot as all hell (which was rather the point), but as the roof was little more than tar-lined felt over timber, and virtually begging to burn, to keep it from setting the house ablaze he directed it through an old metal biscuit tin.

 The night they brought me home – swaddled in my mother’s arms, in the passenger seat of a battered old Land Rover (with its siren blaring, because it had a siren, and because my father was at the controls) – try as they might they simply could not convince the stove to draw. This being the only source of heat, and the temperature inside close to freezing, it was a serious and urgent problem. With their first newborn to keep warm, in desperation they crammed the firebox with the most flammable things they could find: rags soaked in turpentine, newspaper, kindling, nuggets of coal from their precious supply. But nothing would catch.

 Getting up onto the roof was fairly straightforward because the rest of the house was still just a ribcage of exposed rafters. But it was three storeys up, steeply pitched and covered in ice. And of course, it was dark. Using a wooden roofing ladder and scuttling across the slippery tile battens with one hand gripping a torch, he made his way to the shadowy upright of the stovepipe and hauled himself upright. Peering into the pipe, he immediately discovered the problem. Having been concerned about hot fluttering embers setting his roof alight, he had added a capping of chicken wire, formed over the top of the pipe to limit the size of anything sparking out into the world. Months of soot had choked the wire, congealing and cooking into a solid black lump. What would you do?

 The first thing he noticed was the sound. Pulling off the soot-caked wire, there was an ominous whooshing roar – the sound of smouldering, turpentine-soaked combustibles being charged with a rush of fast-moving oxygen. Then came the spike of flame, lancing fully ten feet from the top of the chimney, its force and heat knocking my father onto his hands and knees, roaring orange and blue, kicking up a column of smoke, ash, and burning soot.

 Then, from below, he heard my mother’s voice shouting up from the window. ‘The stove is … glowing’. Singed, and not a little concerned, my father slithered back down the roof as fast as he could, grateful to be moving away from the roaring roman candle, but by the time he got back into the room, the stove was already far too hot to approach. And all that heat was rising. Even as they watched, the cherry red hue began slowly to inch its way up the cast-iron drainpipe, making its way towards the rafters.

Mr Young - Part One

Round the back of our house is a wooden deck, still only half-built but usable. Its timbers span the rocky pit we optimistically call a ‘garden’, easing the lawnmower’s torment, raising you up to the level of the sheep field beyond. A field shown on old maps as ‘the Quarry’. And when we return from our walking our dog, there is a man up there, sitting in a plastic lawn chair as if it were a throne.

The man is handsome, in a weather-beaten sort of way, somewhere in his mid-sixties and as solidly constructed as a second-row forward. From beneath the brim of a battered felt hat, two canny blue eyes survey the deck’s progress with professional interest. It is a look that lands somewhere between a smirk and a question mark, and a look I know only too well. Becasuse they’re my eyes too.

‘It’s dark and it’s wet out there, but we’re all still merrily barrelling towards each other at seventy miles an hour, barely a car’s width apart, using dead reckoning, mirrors, and our feet to keep us from smashing each other to atoms. Mark my words boy, in twenty years people won’t believe we did it. That we were allowed to do it. But weren’t thousands killed, they’ll ask. And we’ll say, ‘YES! So many people died!’

‘You’re early.’

‘You’re late.’

My father’s only luggage appears to be a small boxy rucksack, and while it seems improbable he’s not packing some tools as well, I reason they must already be stowed. But while a glance towards the car reveals a tackle box and a pair of flopping hip-waders propped against the wheel, there is no toolbox, and by the looks of it no tape measure clipped to his belt either. It’s troubling - and it’s on the tip of my tongue to mention it, before the merest hint of something off in his face holds me back. The drive to Achiltibuie is a long one though, almost all the way to the top of Scotland in fact, so we’ve plenty of time for enquiries.

Having anticipated his demands for ‘Breakfast?’ I thrust a bacon roll into his outstretched hand, dragging him away from my wife with some difficulty, and almost pushing him into the shotgun seat. I’ve agreed to drive the first leg, so my own breakfast is bolted before we even meet the main road, but I notice he’s still chewing thoughtfully, fifteen minutes later, as we clunk rythmically over the new bridge at Queensferry. Peering up at the ghostly web of pale steel, shrouded still by skeins of morning mist, between the crumbs and the towering cables I’m sure I hear him mutter: ‘it is…impressive.’ Otherwise we take in Dunkeld, Perthshire, and the fringes of the Highlands in companionable silence, accompanied only by the twang of acoustic blues and the rumble of a highly tuned engine until, approaching eleven, yawning and bursting, we pull into the carpark at House of Bruar.

‘Of course, I remember when it was just a tatty little hotel’ my father says, struggling up out of the bucket seat. ‘Mr Young and I used to stop in here for a drink, and I seem to recall you’d have to pour them yourself half the time. The landlord was always off doing something else, or pissed. Or both.’ I ask him what it was called back then, and he considers this carefully while eyeing the thronging crowds and shrieking children making a beeline for the enormous white building, swollen now to the size of a castle. ‘Oh I don’t know, the Bruar Hotel, probably.’ Which I have to admit, would make sense.

He pauses for a moment outside the doors, mustering the courage. As they glide silently open, so does my his mouth, the discomfort radiating from him in waves. The vast one-stop delicatessen, garden centre, café, gift shop and highland outfitters can swallow whole coachloads of tourists at a single bite, and it teems with activity. Peering into the maw, I can feel the dread grip of my own social anxiety closing its fist as well, so without a word we turn on our heels before one of us has a full-blown panic attack, folding ourselves quickly back into my wife’s low-slung sports car.

Twenty miles further up the A9, just as the barren moors of Drumochter’s high pass are beginning to give way again to flashes of lowland greenery, we pull off the road instead at the first likely turning we see. The singletrack is new to me, unmarked, and it quickly becomes very tight indeed, carving steeply between thick hedgerows and drooping firs before snaking across a stone bridge into a pretty little wooded glade, empty but for us. ‘Now that’s a bit more like it,’ my father says, and I’m inclined to agree.

Beside the entrance to a campsite still boarded up for the winter, I silence the rumbling engine and we lever ourselves up out of the car. The air smells of pine and petrol. There is faint desire path worn into the grass and we follow it, wandering back towards the bridge, and soon find ourselves scrambling down the steep bank. Towards the water’s edge, in the shadowy seclusion of the bridge’s stone arches, the tailwaters of the river Truim’s falls chortle past, and it is cooler here. Great flat stones emerge like the humped backs of whales, washed smooth by the river’s relentless attentions, making islands in its peat-brown waters. It feels as good a place as any for lunch.

Crouching, I spread out our little repast on one of the rocks. A little smoked trout, oily and rich dark orange with woodsmoke, oatcakes, soft cheese and cold beer. The rushhhh of the river muffles the crinkling of packaging. Somewhere in my peripheral vision, I’m vaguely aware of my father’s figure hopping between the islands. Without looking up, I can tell he’s looking hopefully, longingly into the limpid pools for signs of fish. Dreaming of his rods back in the car, the time of year, the sleeping trout he’s not yet allowed to try for. We’re well out of season, and we both know he'll have to wait for saltwater to get his fix. In the meantime, he can settle for some from a packet. Luckily, it’s the good stuff.

‘Not bad’ he says, lifting a piece of the oily flesh to his mouth with the blade of his pocketknife. ‘Not at all bad.’

It is mid-afternoon before we reach the coast.

***

My father was just twenty when they first crossed paths. With a pack on his back, a little camp stove to cook on and a beard that blew in his eyes in a stiff breeze, thumbing his way up the same lonely stretch we’ve just been travelling. Hitchhiking north, as was his habit, simply to see where the road might take him. Mr Young was making his way from his flat in Edinburgh to his tumbledown croft in the Nairnshire woods, and picked him up on the hard shoulder, not far from Aviemore. The two men soon getting along so handsomely that it seemed natural he’d stay the night, and then the whole weekend. A few years his senior, Mr Young was enigmatic, well read, mercurial, and impossibly green fingered. Fingers he would later put to good use as a professional gardener. Though at the time he was a designer, and he kept a shop. He drank a lot, but they were young and it was the seventies and everyone drank a lot. After that, my father visited as often as his university schedule would allow, putting himself to good use helping to rebuild the old place. Digging the drains and staking the fences, learning how to put together dry-stone walls, and how to empty whisky bottles. Gradually getting to know the like-minded locals: a self-sufficient lot, short on cash but rich in spirit. And what he found up there, in what was then a relatively untamed and affordable place to dip a toe in the crofter’s life, was community. Friends. Almost family. It wasn’t so very long after their first meeting that my grandfather died, very suddenly, and Mr Young helped to fill the void he left. It was at his funeral that I first saw my father cry.

We were gathered on the slopes at Port Appin, overlooking the grey sea lochs near Castle Stalker. Mr Young had long since sold on the place in Nairn, and we were now just stone’s throw from the treehouse he’d called home at the end. The birds and the fieldmice moving in as we ate our tiny sandwiches, making their homes amongst the second-hand paperbacks that lined its walls for insulation. With Mr Young’s born sons my father caried the coffin, and he stood that, just. But soon the weight of it all was just too much for him to bear. The two of us got utterly wrecked with the drink of course. I knew no other way to numb his pain - or my own at seeing him so heartsick. And then suddenly the emotion just bubbled out of him in a torrent. As if something long held back had ruptured. His strong fingers clutching my arms as he broke down and sobbed like a bear that’s lost its cub. Before the tears and my shoulder choked out his words, I felt him quake and roar like a part of him was being torn away. ‘They took John from me, and Andy…and now they’ve taken David!’

His people were few, and lately they had all been dying. And in a way, that is why we have come north.

***

The croft isn’t marked, but the battered old Land Rover parked outside is as good as a sign. White harled stone with a little fenced garden. Neat and carefully kept. Everything pressed down by the wind like finely-combed hair. The cottage is one of a few in a staggered line that ends where the road itself ends, half a mile further along the coast. Its mullioned windows look out past the contorted branches of a willow tree, onto a steep field and then a sliver of rocky beach below. The low dark mass of the Summer Isles glowers in the distance. I could throw a stone into the sea from the car window. Cursing the low exit, and with our heads ringing from the engine’s relentless rumblings, we dig out our kit and wander in through the garden gate.

How to Make a Whalebird Omelette

We had been sea kayaking all the previous day, looking for whales. Warm work in these latitudes, in July. Pete, the laconic Queenslander leading the tour, also managed the Thai restaurant in town. His thick-accented delivery of Chom Cha-Bahhh alone, reason enough to dine there (as if the perfect curry and complete lack of any alternative were not sufficient). Pete had come to Norfolk Island, as many Australians do, for the fishing. That, and the tax-free status. Staying for the lifestyle, and adopting the habit of most locals: filling his time and his coffers with a little of this and a little of the other. I had taken to him immediately, as we scrabbled over the high rocky shoreline, a treacherous coast that has made this diminutive Pacific outpost infamous to shipping for so many years, to the lagoon where he kept and launched his canoes.

Later, sunburnt and tired, limbs quivering from the yakka and the post paddle swim, we ate together, looking out over the sapphire waters of Slaughter Bay. My cousin Rob, his family; Pete, his wife and two girls. Spiced with a little of the island’s wild-grown greenery. The kids hard charging, and our damp hair knotted with salt. It was barbeque, and good. The beer cold and the breeze warm. The quivering tips of Norfolk’s towering pines waved lazily as the T-bones sizzled. Only a single ochre island interrupted a horizon line straight from Gaugin’s paintbox. ‘Phillip’, they said, as if that were enough.

Dusk closed in; the kids went home, the beer ran dry. Sated, and more than a little pissed, Pete offered to take the party back up to town. Rob demurred, surveying the empties, but we accepted gratefully. We were pissed too. Pete’s dog called shotgun, looked serious, so we clambered into the back of the Ute. It was open-sided, tiny, already piled high with cleared brush. Perching ourselves atop the springy bed of branches, our merry band strained up the narrow hill road. The land dropped away precipitously to the coast on our left, rising steeply to the right in the direction of Burnt Pine’s twinkling lights. Gripping the bulkhead for dear life, we felt the wind kick up, rustling the leaves and carrying with it the scent of the ocean, and something sweet, unnameable. From the driver’s window a hand emerged. It crooked, twisted, and reached back unsteadily towards us. I grabbed for the open can of beer and grinned…as a second can appeared.

The banging woke me with a start, and I winced involuntarily, reaching for my watch. My shoulders were not used to the paddling. I did not remember them being this shade of crimson either. Bang! ‘Come on mate, open the bloody door, time’s marching!’ said a muffled voice from the other side of the timber. Muffled or not, it was a voice I knew. A strangely lilting mélange of coastal Fife and coastal Australia that could only be Rob’s. Creaking, I struggled from my bed and across the destruction of our room. ‘Get your clothes on mate, gotta catch the tide,’ the voice said, when I opened the door. I opened my mouth too, but Rob was already halfway back to his truck, so I closed it again. Rousting Marisa and pulling on a shirt and hat, I tipped back a pint of water and stumbled blinking into the glaring Antipodean sunshine.

In the clutter of Rob’s Toyota, Bruce Springsteen surging through the speakers and hemmed in on all sides by camera bags, tripods and long lenses, he explained. ‘Whalebirds,’ he said.

‘Whalebirds?’

‘Yeah, whalebirds…well, sooty terns if you want to be pedantic, but whalebirds’ll do. Weathers’ right, so Ol’ Pete’s taking us over to Phillip. Take some pictures, do a little fishing maybe. Last night you did say you’d like to see the island...’

My memory did some accounting, came up short, and I said, ‘Any chance of a coffee?’

He cocked his head and said, ‘Tide mate.’ and turned Bruce up. He sounded definitive.

The first thing that struck me about Pete’s boat was that she dangled in mid-air. Rob pulled up on the eastern seawall, jumped out. The tide was up. Pete and a big bearded man in a baseball cap and shorts were engaged in lowering a gleaming twenty-foot sport boat into the water from a crane mounted on the pier. It swayed on crossed slings. Two mighty outboards hung grotesquely, and rods like antennae protruded from its gunwales. The wind scoured ink into the turquoise water. It took both men to stop the boat from spinning as she descended, threatening to dash against the wall.

‘G’day,’ yelled Pete, over the growing breeze, ‘whadyareckon to a bit of boating?’ His face was flushed, but he wore the scars of the session as stoically as I hoped I did. From behind a whipping fringe of blonde hair, his youngest daughter peered at us. ‘Gonna get some eggs,’ she said in a high brassy voice.

‘Eggs?’ I said.

‘Yeah!’

We clambered down the weed-slick iron rungs in turn, leaping for the boat as the waves lifted her in close. Pete’s mate Keith grabbed Marisa, thrusting out a meaty hand as I landed heavily. ‘Always a bit of chop in the bay,’ he said, as we embraced. ‘Need to get out past the reef, then she’ll be right.’

Objects dropped from above. Lunch. Gear. Rob. ‘Woken up yet?!’ he grinned, clapping me on a tender shoulder.

With all aboard, Pete leant out to keep us off the wall. Keith idled backwards, turning with a big palm. Thirty feet from the sea wall he stopped; waiting with one hand on the wheel and the other on the throttle. We bobbed like a cork in the swell. Pete’s little girl stood between the two front seats. Three blue caps pulled low against the stiffening breeze. After nearly half a minute, at some hidden signal, he gunned the motor and we leapt forwards, bouncing and slewing through the grumbling tangle of pitted waves as the screws bit hard. Out beyond the coast the open water was the colour of new blue jeans.

‘It’s an island tradition,’ said Pete, rolling a cigarette as we skipped, revving, towards the low reddish outcrop. ‘Limit to what you can eat, fresh, on Norfolk. Don’t need me to tell you we’re a long bloody way from anywhere! So every year, for a hundred years or more, there’s been a harvest! Whalebirds: Onychoprion fuscatus. Never seen so many bloody birds in your life!’ The wind snatched at his hat, and he grabbed for it. ‘Not endangered or anything like that, and strictly done in season of course. Common sense not to take the piss. Bit like fishing…tastes like bloody fish an’ all!’

As we closed on the island, its strange reddish-brown colour intensified. A rusty ochre, tinged at the edges with curls of virgin green. More like Uluru and the deserts of the northern territories than the lush green tropics we’d left not ten minutes earlier. ‘Pigs.’ said Keith, catching me staring. ‘And rabbits…thousands of the little bastards.’

‘Goats too,’ said Rob, ‘back when this was a jail. So they’d have some game to eat – and to hunt. Ate everything though. Everything.’

‘No predators.’ said Pete, exhaling smoke from his nostrils. ‘In Australia…imagine that.’

‘Pretty soon there was nothing to keep the soil from blowing away,’ said Rob, lifting a bulky black Nikon to his eye, the shutter firing rapidly in quick succession. ‘Before you know it, a century’s gone by and six foot of topsoil’s in the wind. Trees too. Improving now, a little, a lot of regeneration. But it’s still a pretty inhospitable place.’

If Norfolk was where you got sent when you crossed a line in Sydney, and to get to Sydney you had to break the law in England…just how bad did you need to be to get sent over here, I wondered aloud.

‘Pretty fuckin’ bad, I reckon’ said Pete’s little girl.

Landfall was not straightforward. No natural anchorage presents itself, so a tricky leap from gunwale to slippery rocks, at what they call ‘the Stool’ is unavoidable. Again, we timed our exits carefully. Keith was not staying. Leaving us high, and for the time being dry, he spun the wheel again, piloting the boat away to indulge in an hour or two of the deep-sea lottery.

Pulling his shirt over his head, Rob cannonballed off the rocks into the still frothing wake. Pete, stripping to the waist, stopped for a moment as I shouted across. ‘Any sharks in there?’

‘Course!’ he laughed. ‘Silkies, whalers, hammerheads, blues, white tips, maybe a tiger. Little ones mostly though. Refreshing!’ he yelled, as he leapt in too, paddling around my wild-eyed cousin. Despite the bravado, they both dragged themselves out of the water pretty smartly.

Our scramble up the rocks was aided by a spiders’ web of ropes, chains and ladders, left long ago. We clambered up towards a single dilapidated shack, hunkered in a crook of the cliff. ‘Family shack’ said Pete, passing up a bag of gear, ‘the men come out here for a bit of a holiday, time to time.’ His voice was all but lost, as all around us furious birds began to shriek, driven mad by our unwelcome presence. The sheer number of birds was hard to credit. The noise was incredible. A cacophony that blossomed hotly, growing as we climbed. Everywhere their piebald bodies, like big, gym-hardened wagtails, swooped and cried; furious. Pete’s little girl seemed unaffected by the pandemonium. Bending to the ground she cupped a hand and lifted it to Marisa. ‘A skink!’ Bronze and handsome, the little fellow sat frozen in her palm. All about her head the angry birds, like irate fishwives, raged and bombed, but she seemed not even to notice. ‘You come out here a lot?’ Marisa asked.

‘Yeah.’ she nodded.

Martian is the word that springs to mind, barren red and bruised purplish dunes. Otherworldly, certainly, and as unlike the lush tropical forests of nearby Norfolk as seemed possible. ‘Jacky Jacky,’ said Rob, breathing heavily, carefully placing an egg like bone china in his bucket, ‘the hill I mean. Named for the one convict who ever got off the island. Bullshit, probably.’ Clutching our own bucket, we reluctantly turned housebreaker too.

‘Just one from each nest,’ Pete cautioned. The nests, little more than indentations in the sand, or teetering allotments on narrow ledges, each contained three or four eggs: white with brown speckles, about the size of a Cadbury. I watched slack-jawed as Pete’s little girl, fearless we were realising, drove a tiny searching hand in under a nesting bird, sending it wheeling angrily into the smurfs’ torso blue of the sky.

As we wandered close to the edge of a cliff, ropes littering vertiginous slopes, and graffito carved by convicts bellowing down from the high red walls, I chanced to glance below. Crystal clear in the distant water, a huge green turtle drifted past. ‘Not bad, aye?’ said Pete, and I smiled…looking hard for pursuant sharks.

Back in the motel, I cracked a half-dozen of the speckled brownish eggs into a bowl and thrashed with a fork. The colour was vibrant orange. With a little butter I turned them until they began to curdle in the hot pan, serving the omelette with nothing; because we were young and sunburnt and poor. And Ol’ Pete was right…they really do taste of fish.

The Party

‘Take me back when times were hard, but we didn't know it
If we ate it, we had to grow it
Take me back when all we could afford was laughter
And two mules instead of a tractor
Take me back again.’

BUDDY & JULIE MILLER,

‘ELLIS COUNTY’

At five years old I was already well versed in the vivid physicality of fire. The way it stung your eyes and seared your face taut as a drumskin when you got too close. The damage it could do to your rubber boots when you rummaged amongst the embers’ burned-out tins and tangled wreaths of blackened fence wire for treasure. The smell of it, too. Overwhelming, ancient and quickening when hot, acrid cold and sulphurous in the damp of the morning. It was utterly magnetic to a small boy, in the way that filthy hazardous things seem so often to be. But to me it was simply part of daily life – how we got rid of things – and there was nothing at all unusual about a decent blaze.

Ours was down at the bottom of my granny’s garden, which bordered our own. A patch of scorched earth and delicate ash, smouldering near constantly, just beyond her rimed and cracked and much bombarded greenhouse. On dry days, when she deemed the wind to be right, she’d pitch on rustling sacks of leaves, cropped limbs of elder and the great fronds from horse chestnut trees – sometimes still wet and green as broccoli stems. They’d keen and hiss and sizzle, sending up a choking column of white smoke the keen-eyed could pick out as far afield as the village. Blowing too – with suspicious regularity – towards our downwind neighbours.

My father directed his efforts instead towards the industrial side of things. Burning the few meagre scraps from building or landscaping projects that even he deemed unsalvageable. Dragging the barely to the downright dangerously flammable to their fiery ends, as part of a passionate lifelong campaign to “square things away”. Rarely would he linger over it though. There was altogether too much proper work to be getting on with.

For my part, I’d collect and lob on resinous pinecones, fallen from the trees that guarded the boundary of our properties. Marvelling as they popped and crackled, sweet and hot as coals. Rocks too, and the bigger the better. Not of course for their burning qualities (they almost universally burn very poorly), but for their reliably clomping violence. The great clouds of ash and shimmering heat they encourage as they stoke and smash. Another particular favourite of mine – requiring much careful cajoling, a patience I had to work hard at, and a few precious minutes of parental inattention – was to encourage long sticks to ignite at one end, creating a sort of flaming torch. A way to hold the fire in your hand! As mesmeric an object now, I imagine, as it was the first time a trembling fist bore one aloft.

Sometimes, if there had been a lot of work going on and there was plenty to burn, one of them would get a really serious thing going. I’d watch in awe as the towering flames licked about their victims. Feasting on the carcass of an old chest of drawers, say, or a tinder dry Christmas tree. Sending that tortured pirouette of twisting black smoke and tattered newsprint into the sky. Threatening the greenhouse and the proximate fringes of granny’s scruffy berry patch. But come September time, when the mornings’ dew was gathering thick and chill as vodka in the scrubby grass, and all along the rutted lane the conkers were dropping like bombs, something on an altogether different scale to even these was beginning to take shape.

I had noticed it growing, of course, from midsummer. When the days on the coast of Scotland are still long and bright; and sometimes even warm, and the short wan nights never really dim down to full dark. But by now this big bastard was just impossible to ignore. And it had a name. Its name was the Bonfire Pile.

Doubtless my father’s penchant for the dramatic, and the fickle fates of the calendar played their roles, but the birthday bonfire tradition was born, I am sure, at least partly out of necessity. Newmains: the crumbling eighteenth-century farm steading where our tumbledown home was situated, was a community of perhaps half a dozen families, and for a time all were similarly labouring at renovations. These works generated significant quantities of combustible material, especially in those early years, and I can well imagine how welcome it would have been to have somewhere local to get rid of it all. And so the custom gradually established itself that all through the industrious months of summer and autumn, the neighbours would gratefully add their donations to my father’s growing pyre, stacking it with hundred-year-old nail-studded joists and beams, worm-eaten floorboards, dense baulks of creosote-soaked timber, lime-caked wooden laths and sheets of thin papery plywood – curled at the edges like puff pastry. Anything and everything that would burn. Torn from the guts of neglected barns, cottages, and byres. Such that, by the end of October – when the years’ warm days had all ebbed quietly away, the last crops were cut, and the loamy fields around us lay scalped and bare, and chocolate-icing brown – the pile had swelled to the size of a rickety two-storey house. It was going to light the sky for miles, and the little villain in me simply couldn’t wait to see the show. But wait I must. He wasn’t touched off until early November, Guy Fawkes night, and the old man’s birthday.

Up in the village – less than two miles away on foot, over the hills and rutted shale tracks of Kilduff farm, or a little further if you kept to the doglegged road past the Camburns’ and the Houlistons’ places, the stables and turkey farm at Appin – they also lit a fire in November. A communal thing in steeply banked fields beneath the hall, that the villagers built up for weeks. There were burgers and hotdogs and fireworks, thick stubbly clods of mud underfoot. Hidden children shrieking in the darkness. The magnesium flare and adders’ prickling hiss of sparklers, its phosphorescent graffiti burnt like neon signage onto your retinas. Teenagers shared palmed cigarettes and swigged illicit cider from plastic bottles. Mums turned their blind eyes, nattering, selling cold cans of coke from a bucket for pocket change. As all about them rockets whistled and popped and cordite hung on the dense autumn air like scraps of fleece on a barbed wire fence. Pretty well everyone turned out, their abandoned cars lining the verges most all the way up the brae. But on a good year my parents’ party was bigger and, for a while at least, better attended.

The parties began before I did. Before there was a bonfire pile or a working toilet or a roof on most of our house, or a telephone come to that. Friends and acquaintances just knew. Come time to revel, they’d arrive en-masse from the Lothian’s little villages and farms. Trickling in from Gilmerton, Gullane, Aberlady, Direlton, Stenton and North Berwick. From Edinburgh, some twenty miles west, or much further afield. Sometimes making a long drive from distant reaches of the country, safe in the knowledge they were always welcome to stay at the big, rambling stone house for days – weeks even. So long as they were willing to rough it a little, and if my dad had anything to do with it, to pitch in.

They’d come by car or on foot, or on the train. At the time this was often the London train, bound for Berwick and the border: too long for the little platform at Drem, some half mile down the winding road from our front door. Bemused passengers would watch as a patchwork of longhaired twenty-somethings in flared trousers and turtlenecks lifted windows, twisted doorhandles, and leapt out like beat poet lemmings into shadowy verges. Guitars strapped to their backs, carry-outs clinking, and lit Gitanes already clamped between moustachioed lips.

There are dogeared stories of lotharios clambering up onto as-yet stairless balconies with giggling companions in tow – drawing up the ladders behind. Of broken bones and impalements, and bawdy three-day drinking sessions. And of one particularly imaginative party animal, whose great trick was to haul himself up onto the high oak beams of the unfinished kitchen and lie in wait, before leaping bodily from his eyrie to crash down on the heads and shoulders of the unsuspecting. Shrieking.

As I got older and my parents entered their late twenties, and their friends had young children of their own, the behaviour became a little more civilised. But only a little. Hundreds still made the pilgrimage every year. Often weaving their way unsteadily on moonlit tracks and stubble, after the fire and festivities up in the village had burned away. It was tradition. And my dad, loath as he would be to admit it, has ever been a competitive soul. Short of burning down the house, once he knew there was an expectant, appreciative audience, there wouldn’t have been much to limit his ambition for the scope of the enterprise. Pleasingly efficient too, to get the year’s socialising out of the way in one fell swoop, leaving the rest of it wide open for the important business of serious graft.

As the big day approached – in what little time remained between working two jobs and building our house and keeping a weather eye on the little boy roaming wild and trying to light damp sticks on fire, my father prepared. Supposing he got a dry couple of days, sufficient that the grass might actually come up for air, he would hack away at anything not knee-deep in dirty red bricks, abandoned rusting machinery and mouldering stock trailers. Mounted on his father’s old sputtering ride-on mower or pushing a battle-scarred Flymo the colour of terracotta tiles. With a curved bladed machete and a sickle – a huge thing he kept fine honed with an old hand-cranked stone, a remnant perhaps of some long-ago farmer – he’d swish at the low branches and sturdier weeds, piling the cuttings down at grannies (presumably to harass the neighbours, when the southerly was blowing just right). This achieved, he’d rake ineffectually at hardpacked ground, case-hardened by a century’s discarded field stones, until his back was stiff, and his hands were cramped and raw.

Indoors, perched on a rickety wooden chair, he passed down the heavy glass demijohns of purplish-brown homemade wine to my mum, from their home at the back of the high cool pantry shelves. I’d watch with interest, ominously curious it occurs to me now, as the two of them drew out samples of the strong-smelling stuff with a long rubber tube to examine it. Peering together at little reddish glasses of it in the light. Swirling and swigging it back to see what was still potable. Wincing and gurning and cursing and laughing.

Both his standards and his mood seemed always to become more relaxed as the inspection progressed. And at least once, as the job stretched out and the little chinking glasses, and great round-bottomed demijohns jostled for space on the table, I remember seeing him lying on his back on the wooden floor, the blood-red liquid snaking down the rubber tube directly into his mouth. Grinning like a madman.

There were of course tasks which demanded we stray from the property. Usually, for the school bus, the post office and the like, this meant a twenty-minute hike, vaulting puddle and pothole with my mum, or clinging to the rail of the pram, up on the step like a dog musher. But when my dad took the wheel, I’d ride shotgun. Grinning first at the spectacle of his pleading, as he cajoled, begged, and finally threatened the cold family banger into stuttering life. Together we’d visit the local farmer, Jimmy Miller – from whom, for a time, we also sourced our milk – or one of the Steinberger brothers, at Appin: to borrow the low rectangular haybales that served as benches. Webb’s or Charlie’s places, if he needed something hundred-proof, armour plated, or illegally incendiary.

Graced with a rare few minutes of leisure, he’d reach for the tobacco. Plucking a pinch of the dark brown Bergerac from his leather pouch, dextrously rolling up the with the fingers of one hand as he drove – a great trick, and one I never got the knack of myself in later years, despite the many hours of trying. I’d be called upon to hold the wheel steady for the final moment, as he glanced down and lit up. Hearing the tinny metallic snap of the Zippo and the crunch of the flint. Smelling the sweet waft of petrol and the fragrant skein of pluming smoke that was – until my sister was born and he quit, cold – as much his scent as rain-soaked waxed cotton, stewed coffee, sawdust, and effort.

The kitchen windows looking out onto all these activities had once been barn doors. Great, wide, arching affairs, big enough for horse and cart to fit through. Many years earlier, one of the first jobs of the renovation had been the removal of their sagging timeworn lintels, the fitting of newly made redwood window frames, and their careful glazing. Significant undertakings for anyone in walls a metre thick, and certainly for a self-taught builder like my father. His solution had been a typical mixture of imaginative and theatrical, and I think its expediency speaks volumes to his particular process. At the time, you see, he owned a part-share in a 1950’s Austin Champ – a sturdy, ragtop military off-road vehicle, with a crank-handle start, machine gun mounts, and an engine with all the subtlety of a metalworking lathe – which tended to live at our house. Calling this into service, and with a block and tackle and a series of cleverly devised tilting wooden frames to pull the load straight and even, he worked it so he could, without support, simply draw the immense timbers out like rotten teeth. The wide knobbly tyres biting into the grass, torque, and sheer tonnage of the Champ making light work of the heavy job. Doubtless cackling from behind the wheel at the spectacle, and his own cacophonous savoir faire.

Ensconced behind this wall of new glass – smiling and composed, despite the herculean task ahead – my mum prepared party food for an army. Wrapping countless fist-sized potatoes and priapic yellow corn cobs in foil. Amassing great mountains of homemade coleslaw and vibrant orange grated cheddar cheese in dubious seventies earthenware bowls. Hard-boiling thousands of eggs.

From meat hooks, driven deep into the adzed oak beams (the leaping beams) she retrieved the dangling steel cooking pots, clay serving jugs, and flat brown cast iron casserole dishes reserved for just these times, scraping away the thick layers of dust and doghair that had accumulated like fur. She’d dice and bake and bubble for hours. Boiling hams, big as dart’s players’ torsos. Concocting the hotpots and potato pies of her Lancastrian youth, deep in the bowels of her cantankerous solid fuel Aga. Marrying layered potatoes and onions and stock, and peppery mutton – heavy on the tooth-shattering bone – to make wondrous, rich, fatty concoctions that melted in your mouth, and speared out your fillings.

As I’d not yet developed the deft touch required to avoid my chores, whilst also avoiding trouble – and as idleness was never presented as an option – I too did my part. Carrying a blue plastic mixing bowl, and swaddled head-to-toe in a mud-stained puddle-suit, I’d follow mum out into the woods. Sheltering behind her legs as she unlatched the high gate of the chicken wire enclosure. Warily eyeing the dozen or so glossy-red monsters that I knew lay within. We’d pick our way around the perimeter of their lair, sprinkling feed on the scratched and balding earth to distract the little brutes, then steal together into the henhouse: a patchwork shed built of old doors and scrap timber – salvage deemed too valuable for the bonfire pile.

Sometimes the eggs were still warm, brown, and spackled with hay and shit. Occasionally still under a chicken. She would make quiche Lorraine with them. The great, buttery-yellow cartwheels with the little salty pieces of fried butchers’ bacon and sauteed onions in their cases of rich pastry, that were ever a speciality and a favourite when company came calling. Because they went so very far with so very few purchased ingredients.

On the morning of the big day, Pinto, our old piebald collie dog (who was experienced enough to recognise the signs) burrowed and squirmed beneath the furniture. Her whimpers running to low growls as the final touches were applied. Dad straightened bales and screwed closed doors, sniffed the sky for signs of rain. Made mum laugh with close whispered jokes I was too young to understand. He’d drag out the adjustable lintel props from the back of his little workshop, screwing them into place to re-enforce the longer beams. Outside in the shadowy angles of the vennel where the sun couldn’t reach them, he stacked slabs of McEwan’s export to cool, vibrant in its distinctive red tins. “Shetland Roses” he called them.

In the final lull before the storm, in some quiet corner, scales would softly resound. Mum, tuning her nylon-stringed guitar, singing quietly to herself as she looked out the favourite records and tapes, and snuck a last cheeky silk cut before the festivities began.

On account of the heat it would generate, the fire itself, which by now looked like a mighty beaver dam, was set some twenty yards back from our own thick stone walls, between the brick pile and the woods. In truth, these were little more than a windbreaking strip on the edge of the fields. A ragged canopy of drooping horse chestnut, elder, Douglas fir, bonsai-looking Scots pine and gnarled spiny blackthorn, brightened here and there by the vivid citrus flash of rowan or holly. But what it lacked in scale, it more than made up for in intrigue.

A shadowy kingdom, albeit one knitted together with nettles, tangled blackberry and great spidery networks of creeper. Its dark recesses home overgrown dens, rope swings, submerged corrugated iron and decomposing Land Rovers. Overseen by villainous rooks, thimble sized wrens, strutting chickens – and the mixed bag of whiskered little opportunists who scrounged from their table. I was protective of the place, in so far as a little boy can be. Because it wasn’t only the fire that threatened.

For the bigger rockets and the Catherine wheels, dad would hammer long wooden pikes into the stony ground, first using a steel spike to raggle the holes. But to settle and manoeuvre the smaller incendiaries his trick was to fill a rusting wheelbarrow with red building sand. Into this the shafts of rockets could be thrust, mortars would sit more evenly, and flames would dampen and extinguish more quickly. When the time came, late in the evening, long after the plastic bottle of petrol had gone on – sending the bonfire up like a rocket – he’d slip away into the shadows. A squeaky wheel and the bobbing cherry of his cigarette the only telling signs.

The pause that followed seemed always to go on forever, as he rolled the mobile arsenal past the expectant, and by this time well-lubricated crowd. The hush was a growing, electric thing. But I knew well that metallic tink and crunch, the low roar and blue-orange tongue of the blowtorch catching that followed swiftly on their heels. In my memory the air seems almost to have moved in a collective intake of breath, as the fuses were strafed and the shrieking fizzing sparks began to fly.

The Apprentice

Unlike my first real job, the previous summer – where my departure had been hastened by some particularly ill-timed words, an un-hinged deputy manager, and the threat of real and immediate stockroom violence with a clawhammer – the Castle Inn was warm and convivial. Possessing the sort of nicotine-stained charm that has long since been replaced on Scotland’s golf coast by identikit gastropubs and the ivy-walled vanity projects of celebrity chefs. It was close enough to home to take the bus or even walk in desperate times, they paid in cash, and despite my lack of experience the manager hired me on the spot as a barman, waiter, and general jack of all hotel trades. Best of all of course, it was blissfully clear of hammer wielding Granton psychopaths.

After I had finished school at 18, unable to decide where or even if to go to university, and frankly sick of structure and authority, I drifted. This I did under the guise of a gap year. But truthfully any trips I took were strictly pharmaceutical. I picked up odd jobs, tried my hand at door-to-door sales for one truly dreadful afternoon, and even attempted to sign-on before my middle class conceit got the better of me. All of it quickly forgotten in a haze of fragrant numbing smoke. None of it stuck. And thoughts of higher education faded imperceptibly away. My parents, as they had always done, looked on patiently, allowing me to make my own mistakes, and trusting to my judgement. But for an insecure teenager with a worrying keenness for the bottle, setting up shop behind a bar was never going to be the healthiest of decisions.

As many country pubs were in those days, the Castle was little changed in three beery decades. A coaching inn that would forever wear its horse brasses and tacit codes of tribal conduct with a sort of militant, luddite pride. Nestled in close to the walls of the eponymous castle, in the pretty coastal village of Dirleton, some 20 miles east of Edinburgh. The first few weeks there I worked the day shift. Cleaning the bar area, re-stocking the shelves, trying to get to grips with the subtleties of the till and the real ale pump taps. This wasn’t cocktails and highballs, but tall murky pints of real ale and short clinking measures. Prawn cocktail and smokey bacon, and wine in either of the colours. But I could light up whenever I chose, indoors in those days, and the work was reasonably autonomous most of the time and I liked that. Music was at the barman’s discretion too, and things like that are important to a young man. About the only thing I couldn’t tolerate after a few weeks was the boredom. But I soon found that a refreshing mid-afternoon pint of cider smoothed things out considerably.

It was a mixed bag that swished through those heavy doors, day to day. Most seeking community, as well as a dose. The caddies came in early, making their rounds of the pubs which bordered the Lothian’s famous links courses, supping medicinal pints and saying little. Eccentric, windburned and fit as fiddles, they always put me in mind of hobos riding the rails, or sly taciturn poachers one canny step ahead of the keeper. Ruddy faced landlords and ranging barmen from other dominions arrived a little later. They generally drank more deeply from the trough though, so perhaps this explains the hours they kept. In any event, they were infinitely more loquacious than the caddies they offered curt nods of greeting, often to the point of irritation. Setting the brass water tap on the bar running to cool as they strutted in, they’d crow at me, ‘Young Master Robinson! Aye but you favour your faither wi’ that beard your developin’…Pint ae the Best, if you’d be so kind, Ha ha!’ Signalling for the accompanying dram with hungry eyes and subtly quivering fingers. (Never too early to slip one down, but certainly too early to mention.)

Offshore oil workers, flush with cash and bright as new pins after two dry weeks on the rigs, could appear at any time. Sprouting suddenly, like mushrooms after rain. The Baron for instance, gives a good indication of the breed. A long and ever smiling man, rail-thin and sketchy as a Quentin Blake illustration. I never did discover what he did out there in the deep, but that was just a side thing of little import. His real vocation was with us: emptying litre bottles of spiced rum, whole kegs of strong lager and packets of Superking cigarettes with the grim and studious dedication of the consummate professional. This he did dutifully, from opening until closing, for 14 days and 14 nights. Chasing each short confectionary blast of rum down with a swig of frosty ale. Puffing at a cherry on his cigarette-end until it glowed like a bright red bullet. Before eventually being poured back into the taxi that brought him, broken and gaunt (but still smiling) at shift’s end.

There were those that somehow scraped a living on the margins: cash-in-hand builders’ labourers, scaffolders, gardeners, plasterers, and those you sensed it was safer not to ask. Always finding or cadging the money to drink and smoke and place bets from somewhere or other. One I remember sitting around a plate of chips at lunchtime: a single meal shared out into three meagre portions with his wife and daughter, that he might still afford the double digit pintage required to pass the afternoon peaceably. Another, a very quiet, sincere, oil-stained mechanic, uncharacteristically losing all equilibrium when the Tennent’s ran dry, and his finely calibrated system was faced with processing 10 pints of evenly spaced, but fractionally stronger lager. To disastrous effect.

This being the country, there were gentry too. Or creased and wrinkled had-been’s and burgundy-trousered would-be’s, anyway. Mingling, at times uneasily, with the rougher sorts at the brass footrail. We didn’t discriminate though. From first to last orders, we did our damnedest to finish off the whole shrivelling cabal. Despite our best efforts though, they bravely withstood all we could throw into them, and thus it remained largely funded from their pockets. Because of this we served at their pleasure, and didn’t they just know it.

As is the way of these things, there was another side to the place, too. A softer, more congenial side, of the sort that BBC sitcom writers used to like to colourfully paint on Sunday evenings. This lay directly adjacent to the public bar, through a pair of tea-coloured doors – or a narrow corridor behind the taps – in the lounge bar. Here we served hot, hearty meals and tankards of cloudy real ale to tourists, and to those locals that came to eat and to treat themselves, rather than to smoke and drink, and render themselves down into bitter stock. As the afternoon shadows lengthened and the coal fire crackled in the rough stone hearth, the local dog walkers began to filter in to greet each other, preceded by fat labs with lolling tongues and a ravenous hunger for anything carbon based. They were a friendly lot, by and large, fond of the good scotch, the low lights, and the middling steak and kidney. To a man or woman, they respected the borders. All were careful never to stray too close to the public bar, where the serious professionals were marinating.

One night, after I’d been working there for perhaps three or four months – long enough, anyway, to have developed an insidious little afternoon-drinking habit – I was working the lounge, and somehow contrived to find myself alone. There was a party in the function room: a big, fiercely lit hall-like space towards the rear of the place, with an echoing hardwood floor like a gymnasium. It’s possible, probable even, that my fellow staff members – most of a similar disposition – had gradually slipped into the throng, leaving me to cover both bars myself. I knew a lot of the guests certainly, most of whom had come by taxis and buses from the nearby town. I’d even gone to school with a few of them. Fortunately, there was no fixed bar in the function room. It led instead off a wide doglegged corridor, past the ladies’ toilets, to the lounge. This meant that all through the night a constant flow of cheery drinkers would stream into my world – as I would into theirs – but that I could continue to dart back and forth into the public bar as and when I was required.

As the evening progressed, I steadily tipped back more and more illicit cider. Nothing too serious, or at least I didn’t think so, but sufficient to smooth away the edges. But as the music volume crept slowly skywards, the lights dimmed, smoke thickened, and the revellers moved onto harder substances, the energy grew contagious. And soon whatever might have passed in me for professionalism had evaporated entirely. I even snatched a kiss from a girl who’s name I will not mention. What I failed to remember of course, was the bright, quiet public bar – bristling, indignant and understaffed – running perilously dry just a few short feet away. Then, in the toilets, I ran into Simon: a very friendly, if somewhat befuddled local drug dealer. My drug dealer, as it happened. Simon was weaving around, smiling to himself, in excellent spirits. Doubtless buoyed by the absolutely first-class profit-making opportunity the party presented. (Though there may have been other, less entrepreneurial reasons.) He greeted me with a sort of semi-glazed recognition, and then two notable things happened. First, I watched as, with all the exaggerated care of a drunk looking for his door key, he attempted to extract what I could only assume was an ecstasy tablet from a column of white pills, wrapped in a twist of cigarette paper – fumbled it, and goggled in alarm as it dropped into the urinal. Second, we locked eyes, and he laughed, and then I laughed too, half in horror, as he retrieved, examined, and dried the errant tablet on his shirt tail, slipping it back beside the others. Casually and, in hindsight, probably to keep me quiet, he said, ‘Better give that one to someone else…but you’ve been working hard – here – why don’t you have this one?’ handing me another tablet from the wrap. It seemed in the moment as if it would be unforgivably rude just to pocket the gift. So I swallowed it.

The Castle had been my parents local, once upon a time. Before I was born, and whilst my early running costs were still manageable enough to allow for such luxuries. They used to say that on cold nights the decision as they drove home from the primary school where my mother taught was always the same: a bag of coal for the little potbellied stove (which would first need to be scraped free of ice and cajoled into life), or a tall beer in front of the fire at the pub. Indeed, they were regularly to be found nuzzled in the familiar embrace of the public bar. Almost certainly with some of the very men I was now staring goggle-eyed at, my pupils like dinner plates, the chemicals fizzing in my bloodstream battling with the muscle-memory of pulling an acceptable pint. As yet another glass shattered loudly on the cold steel of the beer-tap. And the glottal tick-tock of the old bar clock echoed loudly in the silence of the public bar.

I limped along for a while after that. Too fond of the easy supply of drink, the bad food and the comfortable familiarity of the work. Unsure where to turn next. But that evening effectively called time on my hospitality career. Even half-drunk or fully stoned I was still just sensible enough to realise I didn’t want to end up watching the time pass through dimpled windows. As the fire flickered and the old men wheezed out the same tired jokes, and my stomach grew, and ambition withered beneath a foetid blanket of stale cigarette smoke. But I’d no earthly notion what I might do next. And then fate stepped in.

Or rather, my father did.