I'm standing holding a plastic cup which someone has just topped up with red wine and, unless I count the cup of coffee I drank when I woke up, I realise that this is breakfast.
I needed it.
I've just given a talk about the desire to escape and reinvent oneself which, coming from a village (population 4,800) was something I did myself when I left Scotland (though then the population was probably only around 3,000 -1, all of whom knew my parents). There's a comfort to be found growing up in a place like Cheers, where everybody knows your name, your mother's name and your grandmother's name, but I'm darned if I could see it when I was fifteen. It was like the social equivalent of an electronic tag on your ankle. It wasn't that much fun to be the 'lassie from the big hoose' or Big Jock's daughter when, if you were ten minutes late home from a dance he marched down to the hall and dragged you out in front of everyone. Yes, we all knew our neighbours, perhaps too intimately. Furthermore, those who didn't know you soon would. The minute you opened your mouth your accent would pinpoint more than just class but also religion and geography, while the mention of a name would immediately link you to a lineage that stretched back two or three generations. Invisibility was an unknown concept.
Moving to Oxford while still in my early, early teens, I loved the fact that I was just the Scottish girl. Yes, I stood out because of my accent and my strange habit of striking up conversations with people on buses, but from that the only thing that could be deduced was that I was from Scotland and either mad or friendly. In Oxford there was little to differentiate the two. It was assumed that I was probably Glaswegian - because that was in the days before Trainspotting alerted the country to the fact that not all people from Edinburgh spoke like Malcom Rifkind and were inherently posh. I didn't care. Glasgow was as good as anywhere as long as it was nowhere anybody had a cousin who might know mine. My surname meant nothing beyond being unpronounceable and just like the heroine of my novel I could be anything, or anyone I wanted. Obviously though my attempts to transform into Kirstin Scott Thomas didn't quite happen...
In the library in Scotland over drinks and nibbles, however, there's great comfort in being told by a woman that the only person she knew with my surname was 'Big Jock' - my father, as it turns out. Our dads used to golf with. And then there's Theresa - the woman who read my book and wrote to me asking if I would meet her for a coffee because she discovered that she and I came from the same village and subsequently, it washer policeman son who walked me through the gates at No 10. Not only do we come from the same village but it turns out she lived round the corner from me and her niece is married to my great nephew. It's a very small world. You see, this is why I ran away when I was seventeen but the past really does catch up with you, no matter how long you stay out of its way. And it's related.
I used to work in a library when I left school and a librarian in this one who remembers me when I was a teenager (who is now, like me, middle aged) starts running through the the names of people I once worked with: Wee Wull, Jean and Margaret, Gay and Audrey. I mention that I met my first boyfriend thanks to Margaret whose son and he were best friends.
'He was friendly with Brian Gilchrist?' She asks... (everyone in Scotland has an encyclopaedic memory for names) and I agree, though I hadn't remembered anything about him, or thought of him for years until she mentioned it. All I can remember about the boyfriend is that he was called Fred, was Italian and his father had a cafe in the next town.
'Di Resta,' She supplies, then corrects herself: 'No that was Whitburn. Serafini it would be.'
'Serafini!' What a fabulous name. Can that be it?
I later asked my sister the same question - wondering what the surname was of the people who had the cafe in a local town. She thought for a minute and then said, jubilantly: 'Wee Tally.' Yep, it's Scottish PC Hour, and your host tonight is...
I have no idea if that was really his name but nevertheless I'm almost doodling it on my exercise book. All these years later and I still get a thrill thinking about him. I wonder aloud what Fred (Serafini?) looks like now and remember how absolutely beautiful I thought him at sixteen and how I couldn't believe he would ever go out with me.
'Oh you might be surprised,' She cautions, not entirely encouragingly. I mention that after we broke up he started going out with the most popular and attractive girl in the village.
'Who was that?' she asks.
'Oh you know, she lived in Park View. Catholic. She had an older sister who died of Weils disease.'
She looks at me blankly, whether it's because she wants more explanation of the disease or the person I'm not sure. I decide to forgo the rats and stick to the girl...
'Oh you must know her. She was very pretty. Had bullet hard breasts (No I didn't say that but I remember one of her ex-boyfriends telling me that - this again, is why you don't hang around in a small village - no ruddy secrets). She died too.' (Ditto - reasons for leaving No. 237)
She still doesn't know who I'm talking about and shakes her head.
'She was my age, so a year older than you. Died of a some bowel disease...' (No. 238) I prompt.
She shrugs.
I'm about to keep on going, trying to prompt her memory of a girl, long dead, whose name I can't even remember myself because of a boy I dated three and a half decades ago - and then I hear myself.
Oh my God. I've been gone from this place all my adult life, yet still, I've turned into my mother.
