A life in letters: Twirly park

There was an oblong of grass equipped with a small slide at the end of the terrace in Aird Avenue, Inverness where our daughters grew up. It was bounded by concrete paths, house gables, and by the wall to the rear of a row of garages which, despite the Council’s best efforts, was usually graffiti-scrawled. The ground sloped ever so slightly, but enough to give a child pulled across it on a plastic sledge after snowfall a momentary thrill. To this open space Rebecca and Bethany could wander unaccompanied from an early age, but it was not particularly stimulating.

There was another better equipped park about ten minutes’ walk away, and so requiring parental accompaniment. It was in Balloan Road, opposite Greyfriars Free Church, along a path protected by concrete bollards one of which was crowned for years with an old grey rubber tyre. There were swings, the earth beneath each seat hollowed by a generation of kicking feet, a nondescript climbing frame, and the piece of equipment which was of most interest to the girls. It consisted of a wooden upright, surmounted by a rotating cross-beam from each end of which a seat hung on a rope.

One girl would sit on each seat; I would push one of them, the cross-beam would rotate as I pushed, and the ropes wind round the central upright, so that each child rose higher in the air.  When the mechanism had, in this way, been ‘wound up’. I could stand back, letting it unwind, slowly at first, but with rapid acceleration. For a blissful minute Rebecca and Bethany spun through the air, screaming.

‘Again!’ they’d say. ‘Again!’  From their perspective the enjoyment was maximised when someone else did all the work.

It was with reference to that piece of equipment that the Balloan Road Park was referred to in our family as ‘The Twirly Park.’  I must have spent hours in total there under skies grey and blue, resolutely pushing bottoms on seats in love. One evening as the sun was setting in a blaze of orange, a balloon floated diagonally across the park from the north west, very high over the tiered roofs of Morvich Way, gloriously free.

When the girls were teenagers, the device was removed, a victim perhaps of some safety-conscious edict, and was replaced with some rather tame skate-board ramps. But forever in our family that patch of ground across from the Free Church will be ‘the Twirly Park.’