Sunday 20 January 2013

A life in letters: Hillfoot



A community on the outskirts of Bearsden in Dunbartonshire.

When we stayed at Westerton in the 1950s and very early 60s, I was a regular user of the public library at Hillfoot, relishing the books I found in the children’s shelves which backed on to the plate glass window beside the pavement. I loved reading fiction, immersing myself in imaginary worlds. I can still recall lying in bed at night reading, coming to the end of a story, and feeling sad at being compelled to step out of a dimension in which I had found myself so much at home. I’d pick up another book, and open it at Chapter 1. Invariably I would find the first few pages hard going. What sustained me was faith that the world this new book held out to me would be as satisfying and enriching as the one I had just left.

In contrast to my weekly family visits to the library, I found myself only infrequently at the Clinic, my second reason for remembering Hillfoot.  These visits were, however invariably painful, because that’s where I was taken for injections. ‘Is there no other way?’ I remember screaming, histrionically, as I sat on the bottom stair in the house, desperate to avoid a polio vaccination. I had heard somewhere that the serum was could be delivered via a sugar lump, a methodology which seemed infinitely preferable to having a needle stuck in your arm.  For me, however, there was no reprieve. 

‘I’m just going for a polio prick,’ I announced, seeking to minimise my fear by the manipulation of vocabulary.  My father smiled encouragingly. But in the bright clinical environment of the nurse’s room, the tears would flow, and I have an embarrassing recollection of having to be restrained on the black leather-covered seat before the business could be done.

I remember Hillfoot finally because up the hill, off Boclair Road was New Kilpatrick Cemetery where lies buried by baby brother William who died in the summer of 1955.

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