Memory Lane again: 1973

If you go down to this path today, you'll be travelling into the past!

It's rained quite a bit, but I had the strangest echo from 1973 when I was processing this image.

In the summer of 1973, my mother, five siblings and I stayed a week at my aunt Anna's pink bungalow in Arisaig, on the west coast, opposite the islands of Rhum and Eigg. It was my last summer before convent boarding school, which I attended for eight years. I was nine, too young to realise that my father had, to all intents and purposes, left us; that our life was about to change; and we would have to leave our beloved house, and our life in Ireland.

To me, this week was a glorious week of freedom, of being carefree. (My mother was in fact seriously depressed, but she hid it well from some of us). I remember the highlights: playing on the shore just outside Aunt Anna's; going out in the boat; my first trip to the highland games; sleeping in the car because there wasn't room for us all inside; getting wet and coming in to drink cocoa and watch the Blue Peter summer special (they went to Mexico); making new friends who were boys; sitting out in the evenings on a giant rock, legs dangling, overlooking the road; my brother Ruaraidh making Angel Delight and talking about it in his sleep; discovering that long life milk came in Tetra Paks...

I suppose, in retrospect, that the week stands out because much of what came afterwards was disappointing: Catholic boarding school in particular being more Frost in May than Mallory Towers, and nuns in Scotland having a cruel streak that I had not previously encountered. And then there was the dawning realisation that none of us children could save our mother from a despair that lasted years.

Aunt Anna was my grandmother's sister, She was deaf, an artist (the daughter of the Camden Town Group artist Malcolm Drummond) and not nearly as strict with us as her sister! I liked her. She'd been a Carmelite nun, but had had to leave owing to health reasons, so she lived a pretty nun-like existence in Arisaig. After her death in 1981, her bungalow was left to one of her nieces or nephews. I visited it ten years later, and found the garden over-run and the pink paint replaced by tasteful white. There was no reason why it would ever have been left to me, but I grieved for its neglect.

Back in 2013, 40 years on ... wow, I'm so old! And this lane in Stroud leads to 34 Lower Street, not 1973. I crave your indulgence for this trip down Memory Lane, but I'm a writer, ]and, er, I quite like to be able to remember all this inconsequential stuff ! I've just discovered that it's called autobiographical memory, and is nothing to do with other feats of memory such as being able to memorise strings of numbers or know what you did ten minutes ago...

PS My reference to Frost in May is apposite, not just because of the subject matter, but because it snowed in many parts of England today!