On the snib

I remember the day the door to our stair on Warrender Park Road was removed by a builder and replaced by a new door, fitted with a closer, and an intercom and buzzer to let guests in.

The old door was solid oak, and painted blue--Edinburgh blue.  The new one was a laminate, hollow in the middle, red as a pillar box, but missing the letter slot.

A few days later, in an antique ship that had popped up on the street, I saw the heavy brass Georgian octagonal door pulls from the old door (centre pull from the front, left hand pull from the back), and the brasenose knocker, offered as architectural salvage, along with many another treasure that was still useful, but not where it belonged.

It would have been too hard to eradicate the crow step gables built by Dutch stonemasons, but one day they might yet turn up on the secondary market for some purpose as yet undefined.

And none of the changes helped Mary, the angel of the stair, stay warm in her flat.  Sure, she had scotch, and a granny's tartan from sitting by the fire, and a heavy ceiling to floor curtain pulled across her door--and a rolled up blanket stuffed under it--to stop the draft.  But the gap between the bottom of the stair door and the stone threshold, hollowed by centuries of shoe traffic and religious weekly washing by the house proud of Marchmont.  The original Houseproud of Morningside (an iron monger's or hardware shop), where I bought my daughter a Silver Cross play pram for her dollies is now a Home Hardware.  I don't know when the Mennonites returned to the Old World.

There was no fix for Mary, and for us, there was the mandatory--and preferably brass--engraved name plate for the door to our flat.  There was a matching brass letter slot in our door, which was secured by a Yale lock with a finger pull.

As a cheat when one of us mislaid a key, or when we were entertaining, we put the door "on the snib", or on the latch as non-Edinburghers would say.

On such occasions we did not see ourselves as the grown up versions of latch key children.  Nor were we inviting the company of Rosemary Taylor, the local Health Visitor, who came to visit in the months following the birth of our daughter Emily Frances.

A Geordie wife from around the corner (whose children and their living conditions had previously been inspected by Rosemary) told us Rosemary was "money for old rope".  We had binding twine, but no rope.  In any case, what we most needed was a spring to get an old pram working again.  Rosemary couldn't help us with that--an industrial spring maker in England did that for us on the strength of a telephone call--but did ask whether Emily was "walking backwards" yet.  I think we had mentioned she was standing up.  We never knew how to answer Rosemary--just as it was hard to respond to someone who inquired earnestly whether, when we turned our daughter over, whether she had a "blue bum".  Now, decades later, I learned that it is part of the folklore of Mongolian mothers that their babies have blue bums.

For my part, it would have been more apt, in the great age of Mad Cow, to know where Cuthill (pronouced Cuth-el) of Marchmont sourced his beef--or why he switched to venison, and eventually got out of poultry altogether.

There were many things that evaded my comprehension--or simply slipped from my notice at the time--along the hypnotic wind of Warrender Park Road.  And other things I remember but don't yet understand.  No need for Google to disambiguate--the Scots, good North Britons, use different words to refer to different things.

One evening in the iodine hour while the sun sets I shall write and tell all what is a wynd, what a vennel, what a spittal, what a close, and what a terrace.  In the meantime, I comfort myself that these things will never be replaced or find they way onto piles separated by nanny goat trails in a Grassmarket rag and bone.