Discarded artificial legs are not always welcome when your mother is entertaining
An interesting find in the woods should often be left in the woods
I was ten years old, still living in Edinburgh and attending the school my father had gone to until he was eighteen. I expected to be there until I was eighteen. At that age, the future tends to present itself as more or less endless repetition of the present. If you’re lucky, some interesting stuff will be thrown in.
I walked to and from school in those days, usually with a couple of friends who lived close by. Going took us about thirty minutes — it was mostly downhill — but coming home would often take longer, especially as spring turned to summer, the weather got better, and the late afternoons didn’t rush towards the darkness of evening.
The main reason for the delay coming home was the presence of the grounds of one of Edinburgh’s large mental hospitals. The hospital occupied a large swathe of land and there were sports fields and woods and tennis courts and even an orchard — in which I smoked my first cigarettes at the age of seven or eight. The grounds began about half way home. In fact, if I remember correctly, the school sports grounds spread to the railway line and then on the other side of the railway line began the grounds of the hospital.
Access to the grounds — and the sports fields and tennis courts — was open and not policed in any way. I played a lot of tennis on the courts and a lot of football on the sports fields. I suspect they were for the benefit of staff rather than patients. Either way, they were inevitably empty, although well looked after.
The hospital grounds, then, were a temptation hard to resist on the walk back from school. The woods were accessible straight from the road and it was often in here, among the undergrowth between the trees, that we would uncover real treasure. Real treasure usually took the form of discarded magazines, the contents of which gave us all an early education. It wasn’t called porn back then and the pictures were relatively innocent compared to what can be found easily on the web.
I remember a magazine called Parade, which was printed on paper like that used by Private Eye in the UK. Parade featured topless women. Topless women in grainy photographs. In retrospect the women looked like they were ready to model underwear for a clothing catalogue and were trying out poses before the clothes themselves had arrived. It was hardly thrilling, even to a ten year old boy.
Occasionally, though, we stumbled across a cluster of coloured shiny pages from a more ambitious magazine. Shiny pages were a guarantee of women with no clothes at all. Full frontal nudity. But even then, nothing was splayed and nothing shaved. Still nothing more than women standing or sitting or lying down. No action shots, as it were.
There was also the chance that an inmate of the hospital would be strolling the paths. We thought of them as inmates rather than patients — asylums was also still a common term to describe places like this — and imagined murderers and master criminals, expecting armed guards to be chasing through the woods after them. It was a great disappointment that we failed to find discarded straitjackets hidden in the nettles or behind a stately conifer.
What we did find one day, however, was a leg.
The artificial leg was heavy. Pink metal. Thick and heavy with a leather collar around the thigh and lots of strapping. We found it in the undergrowth in the lower woods, close to the football pitches. It was a vindication of all the time we’d spent searching in these woods for things to brighten the routine. It was better than the best dirty pictures — I was ten, remember!
Taking it home was more of a dare than anything else. Maybe if I had been on my own I would have left it there. There were three of us that day and we each claimed it but it soon became plain that the others were more concerned what their parents would think. I was less realistic and bagged the leg for myself.
When I got home, after pulling my new pet leg the remaining half mile home and receiving understandably puzzled glances from passersby and neighbours, I found my mother had friends round. They were drinking coffee in the front room. This was an unusual bit of socialising on my mother’s part.. It became a more unusual gathering when I walked in and pulled the leg in behind me. I think there was a scream, possibly muffled.
My mother’s sense of humour deserted her. Her friends looked at me as if I finally shown them the evidence they’d been waiting for to prove their long-held beliefs that I was a troubled — and troublesome — child.
It all followed a predictable course from there. The friends left, my mother shouted, and my father came home from work. He didn’t shout but made it clear that I was taking the leg back.
Secretly, I was relieved. I even believed my father when he told me that some poor inmate — that word again — was probably hopping through the asylum’s corridors looking for his misplaced leg.
I slept well enough that night, though. And in the morning I dragged the leg with me on the way to school and left it in the undergrowth as close to the spot where I found it as memory allowed.
When I reached school, the story of the reaction of my mother and her friends to the appearance of the leg among their coffee cups and cake made up for the loss of face in having to return it to the woods.
The story of how the leg came to be discarded among the trees will remain a mystery, of course, but for one afternoon it was the most exciting discovery of my young life.
