I was born in an army hospital in a place called Tidworth, in Hampshire, England and lived there for about six months.
As I grew up in Scotland, I tried my best to keep the fact I was born in England hidden from my Scottish schoolmates for as long as I could but it did slip out at one point, which led to some jovial verbal bashing coming my way for years tocome.
I used to really resent the fact that my mother didn’t bolt across the border to give birth to me. Ok, it may have taken about twelve hours to get here but I’ve held shits in for longer, so she could have made the fuckin’ effort.
How could she be so insensitive to my whole future by giving‘berth’ to me in Eng-er-land?
She says that because my father was in the army, and I was born in a military hospital then I automatically take his nationality.….which is Scottish in this case and that’s official.
I think she may have just said that to dry my tears but at least it gave me my first line of defence against my schoolmates bullying.
They didn’t really buy it though and if ever I was in a slaggingmatch with one of them, they always had that up their sleeve to throw at me if I looked like winning.
I had to forfeit the battle as soon as my unfortunate place of entering this reality was brought into the equation.
I still maintain there is no English blood in me, even though I was born deep in ‘auld enemy’ territory.
My father met my mother while he was serving in Belfast during what is ‘affectionately’ referred to as, ‘The Troubles’. Yeah, people fighting over who has the chosen the correct version of an all-loving God is usually trouble, plural.
When people hear I am half-Irish and half-Scottish they usually say, ‘Ah, that explains a lot, your doubly nuts’.
When we left Tidworth we went to my father’s next assignment in Cyprus. We spent about a year there before mymother and I had to leave in a hurry as ‘the troubles’ between Greece and Turkey kicked off in a big way.
Apparently, the bus that was taking us to the airport was being shot at and bullets were flying through the window, I guess my mother felt a sense of déjà vu, as she fled another country.
We went to a flat close to a village called Dalmeny, where my father was brought up and where his parents still lived. The town’s name we moved to was South Queensferry. There wasno escaping the royal connections.
Not long after my father returned from Cyprus we moved to a three bedroom house in ‘the ferry’, which remained my home until I flew the nest at seventeen.
Unlike when I lost my virginity, in many ways, that couldn’t come quick enough.
Cheers!
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