Burns Day

On Burns Day in 1966, our Australian-born son David won the prize in his grade school class for reciting a Robbie Burns poem with the best Scottish accent in the class. Not bad, considering that when he'd arrived in Edinburgh a year earlier he had a Vermont Yankee accent overlaying the Australian that might have had a trace of London Cockney, or perhaps BBC English from living in London in his toddler year. He managed to cling to a faint trace of the Edinburgh burr for many years after we came to Ottawa - if I listen carefully I can sometimes still detect it. Rebecca's lovely soft Edinburgh vowels were buried deep in Ottawa Valley Canadian within a week or two, and Jonathan wasn't far behind in taking on the sounds of his surroundings. Accents are usually an indicator or our origins. My accent reveals my origin: despite living more than half my life outside Australia, I still speak as though I'd never left Adelaide. One reason I love Canada is that in this polyglot multicultural city I hear accents from all over the world, even last week in the line at the supermarket checkout, two youngsters discussing the contents of their trolley in pure Kiwi. I wanted to say "Don't let the prices rattle your dags" but I'm not sure if the phrase is still current, so I stayed silent.

And that prize-winning poem: Something about losing a "Toorie doon the stank," a marble down the drain. I wish I could remember more of it.

Rebecca, David and Jonathan just over our back hedge in Braidburn Park, spring 1968. By this time all three had lovely lilting Edinburgh Scots accents. Our home, 5 Greenbank Crescent, was the right-hand half of the middle house behind the kids.It was a splendid home, about 3000 sq feet, with a magnificent view south over the park to the Pentland Hills, as shown in the photo below, taken from our living-room window late on a summer evening, probably in 1967.

When I look at this photo and many others like it, of our home and its surroundings, and recall innumerable happy memories of those magnificent years, I wonder why we ever left Edinburgh. Well, I know why, and will relate the reasons in a future post on this blog.