Life in Edinburgh, 1965-1969

This week I received the University of Edinburgh’s Annual Review where my name appears on the list of donors. I gave some money to the Usher Institute of Public Health in memory of Wendy. It’s a fitting gift. My memories of our Edinburgh years owe everything to Wendy for making that time so perfect, despite continuing money worries: we were "house poor" - bought a home slightly beyond our means, so had to scrimp and save in other ways, but didn't really, so we always knew it couldn't go on like that forever. Those years consolidated my academic reputation and our family life was so happy it was described by friends as idyllic. We had a superb home that attracted visitors from all over the world.  The section of my memoirs on our eventful years in Edinburgh runs to about 25,000 words. Here are some edited excerpts that describe our home and family life.

We flew out of Montreal (the nearest international airport to Burlington) across the Atlantic to Prestwick and went on by train to Edinburgh, on April 1-2, 1965. It was an easy migration compared to the earlier one by sea across the Pacific, an overnight flight and a short train ride. Wendy and I had firm convictions about professional and cultural gains: We had both lived previously in Edinburgh, she for over a year, I for about 4 months. I was familiar with and confident about the academic setting in which I would be working, and both of us thought we knew the country and its people. Our move was easy because to some extent we had been living almost out of suitcases since we arrived in the USA. We had acquired little that we could not discard and we had put down no roots. It was quick and clean, though not perfectly clean, thanks to Rebecca’s airsickness and temporary separation from her suitcase and clean clothes.

At first the adjustment was harder than we had expected. We discovered that there were subtle cultural and behavioural differences between the Scots and the English, with whom at first we identified more closely. In that respect Scotland was a foreign country, not “coming home” to the culturally familiar setting of “English” life that we had enjoyed in our year in London in 1961-62 and I had experienced in London 10 years earlier. However, by the time we left Edinburgh five years later we had long since got over adjusting and had begun to feel more Scottish than English. That feeling has grown stronger with time and many return visits to the UK. 

 Our Edinburgh home from Braidburn Park and from Greenbank Crescent.

 The allotments in the Park were removed during our first winter, as shown in the next photos.

 Winter snow on the Pentland Hills

 

We soon settled in and after we bought our lovely home at 5 Greenbank Crescent in Morningside and acquired a few bits of furniture, our roots began to penetrate the secure and friendly Scottish soil.  Rebecca and David went to school and after recovering from the shock of segregation into separate playgrounds for girls and boys, they began to do well and to acquire the soft,  attractive Edinburgh burr in their speech and, more important, the foundations of an excellent education. Our home was superbly situated, backing on to Braidburn Park, with acres of rolling parkland over the hedge at the bottom of our garden, a bubbling, gurgling little burn (stream) for the children to play in, and a splendid view south to the Pentland Hills. It was in many ways the best home we ever had, and in many ways our years there were the best, undoubtedly the most family-oriented of our lives. I have nothing but pleasurable memories of that period of our home and family life. Sometimes I wonder why we ever left the lovely city of Edinburgh. I'm sure if we had stayed another 2-3 years we'd never have left there!

 Wendy, Rebecca and David at a farm, East Lothian

 D & R beside Forth rail bridge

 Wendy and Jonathan beside Firth of Forth

Those were years in which reading aloud from the children’s classics was a regular and for me perhaps more than for the children, a wonderful experience, bonding us as well as giving me the excuse to reread Winnie the Pooh, The Magic Pudding, Wind in the Willows, Charlotte’s Web, Treasure Island, then, finally and new to me, The Hobbit and Fellowship of the Ring. By the time we came to that, both Rebecca and David were reading very well themselves and were too impatient to await the family readings together in the evenings, so they took off on their own. These books, part of the family heritage, had mostly come with us from Australia across the Pacific then across the Atlantic.  Now we sent for several more boxes of books that we had left behind in Australia and a few pieces of furniture, a child sized seagrass chair, the desk my mother had commissioned to be made for me to use in my consulting room when I was a family doctor, a mirror I had bought at the Angorichna TB sanatorium in the Flinders Ranges, and a few other bits and pieces.

 David on wharf at Dunbar Harbour

 Our VW camper van, snugly housing all of us on a bleak day beside Loch Lomond

(below)

Migrating with a family is difficult enough, migrating with a large library is even harder, but books are such an essential part of our lives that gathering them together again under one roof was like a family reunion. Recovering those books and putting up shelves on which to place them made 5 Greenbank Crescent feel like home. Like other houses along Greenbank Crescent, ours had a ground floor front parlour for best behaviour when visitors called.  We also had a much nicer ground floor living room with wide bow windows facing Braidburn Park and the Pentland Hills. Because this room faced south it got all the sunshine, especially in winter when the sun was low in the sky.  We furnished this with comfortable chairs and a battered Victorian chaise longue that we bought for a few shillings in a lane sale. In our first Edinburgh winter, a bonding experience for Wendy and me was the many hours we spent re-upholstering this, and it became precious despite being uncomfortable to sit on. We brought it along with other furniture to Canada. We lived and entertained innumerable visitors in that room. We turned the front parlour into a children’s playroom where we had a rope ladder and trapeze suspended from the ceiling, a model speed car circuit on a trestle table, and numerous toys scattered all about. It was a very popular room among our children and their playmates. The kitchen had a window looking out on the park too and a second toilet and wash basin by the back door. Next to the kitchen was a large dining room with a coke stove and an overhead clothes drying rack, very desirable in the damp Scottish climate. A small room opening off the dining room had been used by the previous owner as a dark room for photography; it became a dumping place for many things. A cupboard under the stairs was another storage area.  Upstairs were our bedroom and David’s with windows facing Braidburn Park, Rebecca’s large bedroom with its own hand-basin and a distant view of Edinburgh Castle, a smaller bedroom for Jonathan, and a spacious bathroom. At the top of the stairs was a huge, lofty skylight which we enclosed with corrugated perspex sheeting in the vain hope of reducing heat loss into that high empty space after we put in a gas furnace and hot water radiators to make the bedrooms less frigid in winter. Altogether our home had about 4000 square feet, the most we ever had I believe. There was space between the upstairs ceilings and the peaked slate roof for several more rooms, and some homes identical to ours on Greenbank Crescent had undergone this conversion. We might have done this too if we had stayed there for life, perhaps to create a self-contained part of the house that we could have rented to generate income, but we didn’t and nor so far have other owners who followed us. 

Rebecca with Boomer

We acquired other things that bonded us as a family: a Volkswagen camper bus that held all of us sleeping under the one roof so we could go off together on exploratory camping holidays; and we acquired a dog, Boomer, an adorable Labrador puppy who soon grew into a large, exuberant dog requiring huge amounts of exercise that exhausted us but left him always ready for more. Later that would become a problem.

 View from Rebecca's window to Edinburgh Castle

Edinburgh has so much to offer! It is an ancient and beautiful city, rich in history and tradition, capital city of Scotland, attracting tourists from all over the world. The outstanding, venerable medical school attracts aspiring and established scholars from around the world. Consequently in our Edinburgh years many visitors came to our home and to my office in the Usher Institute. We should have kept a visitors book, but we didn’t even think of the idea until we had left for the academic and tourist backwater of Ottawa five years later. We have rich memories and photos of many who visited us. We were never lonely in Edinburgh, thanks to the steady succession of visitors. And of course we made lasting friendships among our neighbours.

Mini-regatta on the Braid burn

Our cultural life blossomed through membership and regular attendance at the Traverse Theatre, then in its early days, based in a tiny loft near the upper end of the Royal Mile a couple hundred meters below the Castle. We were there during the great years of the Traverse Theatre, years that saw the opening performance of plays by Harold Pinter and Tom Stoppard, and the beginning of the careers of actors who became world famous.  Margaret (later Maggie) Smith, Michael Caine and Nichol Williamson were the best known. Rebecca and David went to a Saturday morning theatre school for a while, and had drama lessons, though it didn’t help them to become actors, from Margaret (Maggie) Smith.  The theatre held fewer than 100 people, and at intermissions the audience, actors and members of the theatre staff rubbed shoulders quite literally, quaffing ale together. It was a unique and wonderful theatrical experience. 

 Wendy and kids at Dirleton Castle ruins

 With Ray Last at an Oast House, Prestonpans, East Lothian

We explored the British Isles in our VW camper bus, but we more often headed south than north after a few discouraging experiences with Scottish mists, torrential rains and swarms of midges. It was easy on our summer holidays to get across the Channel, cruise in the camper bus along the road beside the Rhine and cross the Alps into Italy where we camped twice in summer on a wide sandy Adriatic beach near Venice. We explored the Scottish Borders and a little of the West of Scotland south to Galloway and as far as the northern end of Loch Long, north of Loch Lomond; we went south into England through Stratford to the New Forest, Stow on the Wold and Bourton on the Water in the Cotswolds, and another time we went all the way to Cornwall and Land’s End. We went to London a few times too. There were innumerable day trips to favourite places near Edinburgh, Dunbar and Tantallon Castle on the North Sea coast south of the Firth of Forth, the ruins of Dirleton Castle east of Edinburgh, across the Firth of Forth into Fifeshire to St. Andrews where the children were more impressed by the sinister bottle dungeon than by the Royal and Ancient Gold Club. All we missed were the northern Highlands, but that was a big miss of course. The furthest north we got was only a little way past Pitlochry, and on the west, the country north of Loch Lomond and glimpses of the Isle of Iona. We never got to the Isle of Skye or the Great Glen (Loch Ness).

 Tantallon Castle ruins and Bass Rock

 Looking north along Loch Lomond

Wendy and kids, Princes Street, Edinburgh, 1969

John, Wendy and Jonathan on a windy Autumn day,

about October 1969 shortly before leaving Edinburgh

Because more people were leaving than arriving in Scotland, furniture was cheap. Very good quality but battered chairs, tables, etc, were available at "Lane Sales" where dealers got rid of less than perfect pieces at ridiculously low prices. We got a splendid dining table with extra leaves to seat up to 16 people, and chairs to go with it, for 5 pounds and a lovely piano for 10 shillings. We brought the piano to Canada but unfortunately its hammers and other essential moving parts were glued together, and in the harsh extreme Ottawa climate the glue dried out, fractured, and the piano's innards disintegrated. We gave it to friends who wanted to use the frame to display indoor plants, and bought another piano so Wendy could continue to play.


I'll say more about my professional activities in Edinburgh and elsewhere in the UK, the beginning of my 'international' life, and about our travels in those years, in future posts.