In Memoriam

I like to come up to my son's bedroom occasionally and read. It's a nice loft conversion and it's quiet, with sometimes the only noise being the gentle patter of rain on the roof windows or when his beer fridge cuts in. It's a real boy's bedroom although at twenty one, going on twenty two, you'd think it's time he put aside the Star Wars posters ... or the special issue light sabre lying on its mount next to the certificates he got for being his high school sports champion three years in a row. He's a boy (I know he's a man but I always think of him as a boy) who likes to hold on to the past.

It's not always pristine but he's usually pretty tidy and the general impression is one of organised clutter. His shelves are filled with things he's collected over the years and which he cannot bring himself to throw away. Every small thing is invested with some precious memory of some special occasion. There's the baseball he bought when I took him and his brother to Yankee stadium; the golf ball wedged in a rock with the legend 'Play it as it lies' from our visit to the USPGA headquarters in Far Hills, New Jersey. A lot of the books we bought for him, but which he never read because he was never much of reader, are here because he hasn't the heart to throw them out.

In a corner is the Captain America outfit that his best friend, Jack, wore to another pal's 21st birthday party two weeks before he was killed in a road accident. There too are Jack's football training shoes, the left one worn out near the instep where he contacted the ball to make it curve goalwards. He was good at football and so many other things. There's his old fleece that he wore almost every time we saw him when he came by our house on the way to a bounce game at the park. I went with my son after Jack died to his flat where he picked up these mementoes of his best friend. He buried his face in the fleece and cried so much and I tried to comfort him. And all I could think of was how I would feel if it was him and not Jack who had been taken away and I do not know if I could live with that pain. We have to live with our selfishness.

And now I cannot bear to look at that picture I took of the two of them that night, my boy dressed as Superman and Jack as Captain America. They looked - it's so cruelly ironic - invulnerable. But our children are not invulnerable and bad things happen. I am blessed, I know I am, but I am also afraid.

Berry Picking

Berry-picking, said Allie. It seemed like a good idea to me even although I had only the vaguest idea what it meant. At fourteen most things to do with happenings outside the boundaries of Inverclyde seemed to me wonderfully exotic. A weekend camping trip to Dunoon was an adventure and a summer camp to Torquay seemed like a trip to another continent.

My mum didn't have much but she always did her best to get together enough money for us to go to the summer camp. It wasn't going to happen this year; the hard times were even harder and in that year of 1963 Allie and I were not going to be part of the expedition to England's south coast. We would miss it; the adventure of the long train journey, getting off the train at Torquay in our kilts and, rucsacs on back, canteens clanking, marching in step from the train station to the bus station to catch the bus to Watcombe. And the campsite, on a hillside just above Watcombe Beach was perfect. A paradise, with beautiful girls on the beach and a general store where we could buy John Players Tipped without having to worry about no-smoking laws for under-sixteens.

But in fairness to our widowed mothers Allie and I decided we couldn't afford, or we couldn't ask our mothers to afford, to fork out for the cost of the fortnight in Torquay; we would strike out on our own, maybe just hang around the local Scout camp, which was free and only cost the fare on the bus to Inverkip. And then we had a stroke of luck. One weekend we were mooching around the local camp headquarters hut and for some reason we were allowed into the back storage area unsupervised. Scrabbling on to the roof of the lockers we came across a tent, a nice condition Black's Good Companions two man job. Without a moment's anxiety we had it out of the hut and pitched on our site as if we'd owned it for years.

In those days of canvas tents you had to waterproof them, so that's what we did and now being owners of a tent we could go somewhere. Which is when Allie suggested berry-picking. It seemed to make eminent sense. We could earn as much as a pound a day! At least that was what Allie said and he seemed to know all about it, having been told about it by someone who knew someone who had been there a couple of years ago, maybe. Actually I didn't hesitate; Allie was about a year older than me, and generally took the lead in whatever scheme we were involved in. So we set to making plans on how we were going to get to Blairgowrie, the epicentre of berry-picking; fortunes awaited us.....