The Winds of Change
For an Army family, our lifestyle had now become pretty settled. London had tried to get my father back, but thanks to some very powerful Scottish connections, we stayed put. We enjoyed living in the more rural environment at Culter, with its distant fells and sparkling burn.
My parents were even planning to buy or build our own home, preferably somewhere along the Old Deeside Road that we’d come to love, and I can still remember a variety of locations we looked at with the land agents: a lovely old high-walled garden, a disused stable complex, a new subdivision. I think that was at Murtle, but there was trouble with the laird over putting in a water supply.
My schooling was well settled and for the first time in my life I had one or two really close school friends. My best friend, a doctor’s daughter, lived on the corner of Baillieswells Road, Bieldside not far back along the Old Deeside Road. In winter we used to sledge down a narrow path to the bottom of their steep garden. I can tell from Google maps that it’s all still there…..
I was still pursuing art, if only on the sidelines, and it was about this time that I entered a small marquetry plaque in the Aberdeen Marquetry Club’s first annual exhibition held in the foyer of the Odeon cinema in Justice Mill Lane. It was exciting because I gained a mention, along with a couple of other top exhibits, in “The Press and Journal” newspaper. The plaque depicted a Common Snipe (Gallinago gallinago) coming in to land, inspired by a painting on the cover of a Scottish Field Magazine. It was a detailed work, every piece of veneer carefully chosen for its color and markings, and I still have it. I had done one marquetry piece previous to this – a store-bought kitset scene. Though the work was all mine, I know the success of this do-it-fom-scratch job owed a lot to my dad’s insistence that I select my veneers carefully.
But there were winds of change blowing in the British Army, and they began to rattle the tent flaps of our comfort zone. Word had it that men with long service would be the first to feel the axe. My father had served the Army for 24 years. So there we were – looking to settle but living in uncertainty.
In the midst of all this, for some reason that I can no longer remember, the Army moved us again – back into Aberdeen. We moved into an upstairs apartment of a terrace house in Desswood Place not far from my school, but we expected that this would be only temporary accommodation.
My parents were also looking into the possibility of emigrating to Canada. My dad knew that scope for employment for ex-servicemen in the UK was limited. The idea of getting away to a country with more freedom to prove oneself on merit appealed to him. Then one of the officers from the University Training Corps resigned and went to take up a post in Zimbabwe – Southern Rhodesia as it was then. Before long, he wrote to my father saying he had a job for him if he wanted to come.
We were emigrating to Africa!
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