Chapter 7

School was over and Andrew had more than a full week free until he needed to be in England. Given that he would be away for the following two, Andrew called June and they agreed to shoot her latest clothes on the Thursday of that week.

Leslie and Mhairi had plans to keep him busy for most of the week during the day. Now that Andrew was finally 18 years old there was a raft of paperwork he needed to complete to assume control of the various companies and trusts in his life, as well as finalise the investment in the distillery. It was fun to spend time with them as they worked their way through all the paperwork, listening to the explanations and trying to better understand everything. Leslie had an energy about her when dealing with the finances that was very reassuring. Three very young adults with significant amounts of money, either to their own name or for which they were responsible, needed someone with a passion for finance as well as a skepticism for a slick sales story. In the last three years Leslie may have grown the most of them, changing from wanting to be a primary school teacher into someone who embraced business and investing. Like Andrew, she had the memory of her sister as motivation to make the most of the opportunities that they had earned. Julian, Leslie and Andrew were going to spend the last weekend of July laying out a plan for the coming year, the last year of marking time, before Leslie could start full time as the Managing Director of the Trust.

As Andrew sat in Mhairi’s office that week he watched the interaction between the two of them. As the two directors of his company for the first two years and the two adults for the whole four years of the company, they had spent a lot of time together, especially dealing with people like Kyle Turner. Andrew thought back to that day when Mungo Drummond realised he was conflicted and dumped them off to Mhairi Connelly instead, a decision they had never regretted.

June at school had been a time of farewells, the transition from school to university very marked. Although Leslie and Mhairi would be in his life in the future, this was very much a transitionary phase of Andrew’s life. Finally an adult, full of book knowledge but still short of life lessons. He was comfortable with who he was as a man, what he had achieved and what he had planned for the future. Yet also knew that he was going to change, maybe more in the next four years than in the past four. One of the key things Andrew learned from his time at the CCF and his daily interactions with Pete was he was not a leader. Andrew was not even sure he could append yet to that sentence. He was not apprehensive about the technical aspects of the Royal Engineer camp but was curious as to how he would fit in. He just had to think back to his fight with the loudmouth Billy the previous year. Could he be a leader of men, a leader of people regardless of gender? Andrew knew he had got better, but it was not innate, it was a learned skill. He wondered if old Andrew lurked on his shoulder in moments of doubt. He would see.

He and Pete had their big end of school farewell in a quiet romantic moment along with 45,000 screaming Scots. Despite both of them loving the show, it was an odd event. They had been a couple of schoolboys who went to a small local live music venue two or three times a month. Often there were less than 200 people in the club. The Nite Club was packed the night they first saw U2 but the capacity was not even 500. Stadium gigs were so removed from that experience as to make comparisons meaningless. In the previous two years Andrew had seen two of the very best showmen in the world in Freddie Mercury and Bruce Springsteen. Freddie dazzled with his effortless control of 10,000 people, it was slightly unsettling how he made it look so utterly effortless. Bruce demanded your attention, produced a show through effort and sweat and had you hooked long before the end. Did Bowie captivate the same way at Murrayfield in late June 1983? Andrew wasn’t sure because it was never a gig that either of them reminisced about. He and Pete loved the show, came away happy at the end, and yet. What that day did perhaps more than any other, and the timing was significant, was cement the friendship between the two of them and set in place the foundation stone that we would use to keep in touch. Andrew and Pete were gig buddies, they went to shows, mainly small ones in venues across the city. Whenever he was home over the next four years they would go and check out the local music scene. It had started two or three years earlier and it was their preferred way to listen to music. Sure they went to gigs of bands that had made it. But they enjoyed turning up to small clubs and listening to whoever was on that night. It all started that summer and was in part a reaction to the first stadium gig.

Now that the undercurrent of potential nudity was gone with June the shoot with her was incredibly relaxed. There was a seriousness to it, she wanted flawless pictures to add to her portfolio, but the dynamic was so different to the previous times. Tony came through and helped with several of the shots, he stayed and took some additional shots to finish the roll so June had several different perspectives of her clothes. But it was a production line as June spent more time changing than standing in front of the camera. But over two and a half hours they got shots of all her clothes. With Andrew about to head south for two weeks, Tony offered to develop the film for her and would have the prints ready by the middle of the following week. As Andrew drove home he realised that it had been a job, he had been acting like a professional photographer. There was an assignment and he had spent the afternoon completing it. It was the first time that he just worked as a photographer, doing it for someone else rather than himself. It wouldn’t be the last time.

With that out of the way Andrew completed his preparations for the next two weeks. The Royal Engineers cadet camp was based in Tidworth for the first three days that year. He would be on base with the 22^nd Engineer Regiment, a Combat Engineering regiment of the Sappers, at their barracks at Perham Down on the outskirts of Tidworth. The cadets were taking part in a live firing training exercise, although his guess would be that their taking part would involve staying out of the way and shutting up. After that it was back over to Chatham for the final three days. Tidworth was at the south east edge of Salisbury Plain, and although at the edge of the largest training area in the UK was still easy to get to, at least compared to some of the training areas in northern England and Scotland Andrew had been to. He could get a train to Andover which was less than five miles from the camp.

What was complicating things was that the Wednesday of the following week he had to be in Milton Keynes for three days for the final review of his computer science project as well as all the final paperwork. On Friday July 15^th he should be notified he had his degree if everything went to plan. Another thing off the list. It seemed to make no sense to come back to Edinburgh on the Sunday to turn round and head straight back south again two days later. And just to add one final wrinkle into all this travel, Andrew had a ticket for Supertramp at Earl’s Court on the Saturday preceding the Royal Engineer course. If it was possible to get a band even more unfashionable in 1983 than the ELO then it was Supertramp. He had been soundly and repeatedly mocked by anyone he had asked to see if they wanted to come too. Pete and Leslie had spent weeks giving him shit about going all the way to London to see Supertramp. So he was on his own.

It was time for his first road trip. He was going to drive to Milton Keynes on the Friday, dump the car at the Open University campus there and get the train to London that night for the gig the following day. Then a train to Andover on the Sunday at the start of the camp and back from Chatham at the end. He would spend a couple of days playing tourist and get the train back up to Milton Keynes in time for his review session, with a long drive home at the end. It was a lot of pfaffing back and forth but it avoided dealing with the car in London.

Friday morning Andrew was up at his usual time and had the car loaded and ready to go. He would see his parents in a couple of weeks but until then he was off as an adult for the first time. His parents were not even awake when he set off, their disinterest ever more being matched by their oldest son. 12 hours later he was checking in to his cheap little hotel off the Cromwell Road. He had parked the car at the Open University campus after an uneventful journey and taken the bus over to Milton Keynes station. Now here he was, 18 with money, no parental supervision and ready to see what London had to offer. A lot of drunks was his main impression, although the curry house was fine and the pub with live music was okay. Andrew was not a teetotaller nor a prude when it came to drinking but clearly his Grandma’s dependence had made him leery of drink, and then the sad, desperate drinking that he saw at Harry’s farm those two New Year’s also stayed with him. There were a lot of people, very different in life and outlook to those farmers who drank with the same grim determination. Soldiers and university students were among the biggest drinkers in the country, so his next four years were going to be interesting.

Brian Campbell had given Andrew the secret for getting good service at a bar. Waitress service was very rare in the UK and so everyone went up to the bar to get served, as a result the bar was always two or three people deep all waiting to catch the barman’s eye. The other thing the UK did not have was tipping, you got your change and you kept your change. Brian told him the key to good service was to tip the barman a couple of quid at the beginning of the night, knowing that he would look out for you for the rest of the evening. With beer only 75 pence a pint a couple of quid was a reasonable tip. That night Andrew had arrived too late to adopt that tactic so instead went for the bullshit tactic of being tall with long arms. It makes the short people fighting for space at the bar so mad but it works all over the world. Stand at the back, hold out your money and shout ‘pint of lager when you get a minute mate’ and lo, miraculously a pint of lager doth appear. Okay, there is a little bit of exaggeration there but not much. The only thing that worked better were a pair of D-cups and a low top. It also works well if you are drinking something simple, like a pint, which is quick and easy. But this was how Andrew ended up meeting Manon and Yasmine. He was standing at the back of the room, beer on the table, people watching. The band were no more than passable and struggling to keep the crowd’s attention, or at least his. While doing his bully trick at the bar for the third time he felt a tug on his sleeve from in front of him and looked down to see both the good cop and the bad cop staring back. The bad cop, later to be identified as Manon, looked like she wanted to punch him in the balls. The sweet smile of the good cop, Yasmine as he later found out, had the look of someone who had other plans for his balls. Andrew didn’t know whether to get a hard on or go turtle instead.

“Since you seem to be much better at getting service than we are, could you get us two gin and tonics please?”

Andrew had to process the sentence to capture all the missing consonants. That they were French was in no doubt as soon as she opened her mouth. He smiled and two minutes later they were standing around the table trying to carry on a conversation. They were in a packed pub, the band, as always, were too loud, Andrew had a thick Scottish accent and the pair of them had even thicker French accents. Fortunately the band finished up and headed off for a 20 minute break and gave them a chance.

“Thank you for the drinks.”

This was Yasmine now they had at least got as far as names.

“You are welcome, I wasn’t playing fair shouting over the top of everyone. Being this tall has its advantages.”

Manon had thawed somewhat and smiled in acknowledgement. Over the next 10 minutes they found out the essentials about each other. They were both 22, newly graduated from university in France. They had decided to come to Britain for a month and travel round about. This was there second day in London and they seemed to be enjoying themselves. They had heard of Supertramp and were surprised that Andrew had come all the way to London to see them. That led into a complicated explanation of the Royal Engineer course but he got the gist of the point across to them. After that it was a fun night of mild flirting and help on picking their itinerary. Did the evening end with a suitably debauched threesome in one of their hotels? Of course not. They were nice women who flirted with a young man and got a couple of free drinks. Andrew gave them his phone number and told them to give him a call if they made it as far as Edinburgh. When he left the pub that night he had no expectations of ever seeing them again.