I still remember a story told me by my father about the Shetlands, of a Sunday in his youth when he rowed the ship's lifeboat up to the old whaling station in Rona's Voe, seals popping up around him as he whistled a tune. That was before the war when the skipper, his father, still observed the Sabbath as a day of rest. Much later, in his old age, he got a job as fishing skipper on one of the research vessels out of Torry. He toured the less-frequented waters of the Hebrides, the inlets of the west coast and sailed on expeditions that took him north of the Arctic Circle to places like Tromsø Fjord and Franz Josef Land. It was a soft touch for a fisherman, for his wage was no longer dependent on the catch.

   Looking back to the Aberdeen of my early years, I was fortunate indeed to have had aunts, uncles, lots of cousins and both sets of grandparents. The sea, in a real way, was my heritage, as my father, grandfathers and two uncles, all fishermen, had their skipper's tickets and it seemed my destiny to follow them. I knew what an otter board and a whaleback were and that a trawler with its mizzen up was a lame duck and that the Sobs of May in springtime expressed the pain the sea felt in its returning fecundity. Names at the supper table: Stornoway, Lerwick, Lybster or the Broch, were safe ports in a storm, while the Davis Straits, Iceland and the Faeroe Islands spoke of long trips to distant fishing grounds with some degree of hardship on the way.

   Among my father's brothers, there was one who thought he could flee his destiny. A lay preacher by inclination at twenty, and soon to be married, he left home without notice and went deep sea as an engineer. Afterwards, whatever length his absence, he would reappear on the doorstep of his father's house and be welcomed like the prodigal he was. Over the years, the house became a repository for the trove of the seven seas, for, when he came home, he brought gifts from places visited along the way: silk from China, tea-sets and curios from Japan, a fez from Suez, antimacassars from Aden, sheer stockings for his sisters from the USA. I still have a whale's tooth from South Georgia, a sawfish's saw from the Mississippi and a teak elephant hauling logs, its tusks made of ivory, from Thailand. Once, home from a trip to Corpus Christi with a load of high octane, he told me that a tanker carrying that stuff had to go it alone, for, if hit and travelling in convoy, the flames could betray the positions of the ships around it.

   As close as I ever got to a life at sea was early on, when I was four and a bit. Granda had taken me downtown to the Torry dock, where, after warning me to be careful, he left me to amuse myself on a trawler's deck while he went below for a dram. The air on the sun-warmed deck was thick with the sea tang of the nets, of oak bark caulking, oil and coal. Gulls sat desultory on the piers and rails while the rusted hulls ground together on a gentle swell. Idly, I tested the power of the grinding by gingerly placing lumps of coal between the rails. Seeing them crumble, I squirmed at the thought of getting my fingers caught.

   But the sea was not to be my lot for in 1942, when I was eight, I suffered the trauma of a mastoid operation. It was the time before sulpha drugs and the infected bone had to be removed by brute force with hammer and chisel, the pain like being savaged by a bear. This retrospective view, not possible at the time, is a reasonable comparison. And there was no giving thanks for surviving it, as that never crossed my mind, me more concerned about being stone deaf in one ear. In a matter of weeks, the loss of my directional hearing put an end to my piano lessons, ruined my learning capability and precipitated me to the bottom of the class.

   Meanwhile, even though I was safe from the greater woes of the world, 1942 was far from finished with its dirty work. My mother, dying of cancer, was removed to a sanatorium. This crisis was foreseen, for my maternal grandparents had already taken me in while my younger sister remained at home in care of an aunt. Her husband, like my father, had also gone to war.

   Growing up as a boy in Aberdeen during the war, virtually fatherless and fairly undisciplined, was a wonderful time. With most of the men gone, both boys and girls enjoyed a freedom of movement never experienced in peacetime and my grandparents, perhaps remembering the days of their youth, allowed me to roam the surrounding countryside at will. The riders were that I not consort with bad companions and be home in time for meals.

   I found the old, country estates surrounding Aberdeen, with their walled gardens, ponds, woodlands and wildlife, a fascination. The wonder that filled my eyes when I discovered the grounds of the Macaulay Institute is still with me, for there I came upon a grove of three or four sequoias, serene, red-barked giants, soaring high above the native species and probably planted in the 1700s. Not far from them, I was surprised to recognise another non-native, a Cedar of Lebanon, one of the same species used by Solomon in the building of his temple.

   The greatest escape for me was the fantasy land of the cinema and, as I was denied pocket money, I would sometimes steal a few bawbees from Granny's purse, enough to buy me a ticket. Gusting wind with rain squalls is typical of weather in Aberdeen and typical were the movie-goers on a Saturday night who would queue despite it. Shuffling in from a rainy blackout to sit with hundreds of other wet beings and to be suddenly faced with the grandeur of Monument Valley was always a stunning transition. Of course Pathe News would jolt us out of it with frontline battle footage and convoys under U-boat attack. A lone tanker, its load of aviation fuel igniting in a mile-high flare, would remind me of how close to home the war really was.

   I was well aware it was being fought for I had already seen Spitfires attack and shoot down a Heinkel over my street, the empty shellcases rattling on the slate roofs. One bright and sunny morning, I and two of my friends pretended to fire off rounds at a plane flying overhead. Suddenly ack-ack shells started exploding around it. It took us a few seconds to understand that it was a real German bomber, that it was escaping our fire and that the game was over. An underground shelter was excavated in an empty lot at the street's end where the neighbours would crowd in after the first siren. One night during these alarms, I was left forgotten in the house at the foot of the stairs listening to the screams of falling bombs. The screams always seemed to stop before the bombs hit the ground. These were falling a mile or two away in Torry but I still remember the quiet before the explosion and feeling the ground tremble in its wake. Finally, my father, who was home on leave, remembering me, burst through the front door and hustled me off to the shelter.

   Granda, in the aftermath of one such raid, drove me over to Torry to witness the destruction. There were some incongruous effects caused by the bombs. Flats with their fronts blown out still had china sitting undamaged on their mantle shelves, ceiling lamps swung gently in the breeze, chairs sat on sofas as though carefully placed there while the debris-littered front garden had a crater in it that could have swallowed a truck. What amazed me most was the intimate look I had of the interiors, private spaces suddenly made public.

   It was a Saturday morning in 1942 before my grandfather took me down to the harbour again. There I was surprised by a tall, stout and forbidding barbed wire fence that had been built around its whole perimeter. He showed his pass to the guard and we made our way through to Commercial Quay and the fish market, a long shed that was windowless to the streets but wide open to the harbour. It had a sign on the Market Street door advising it was prohibited to women. I queried Granda about this but got no satisfaction from his reply, though, later, I found out for myself.

   The transition from quiet street to busy harbour astonished me. Dozens of trawlers were being unloaded of their catches at quayside while others shunted for position in the harbour pool. When I saw an old trawlerman in his seaboots, dangerously balanced on a deck rail, the golden stream as he relieved himself arcing in the sunlight to the sea below, I knew then why women were forbidden entrance to that hallowed world of men.

   At another time, entering by the same gate, we took a long walk down Albert Quay. We passed a destroyer tied up at the dock and at the end of Point Law found an armada of ships lying low in the water, all with numbers instead of names and painted grey. Long, smoothly-rounded submarines rode side by side with the famed MTBs, Rolls Royce-powered, flat-decked motor torpedo boats, as threatening a collection of war ships as I would ever see in my life. I had one then that was a windup toy. From the confluence of the harbour and the Dee, I could see a bunker over at Girdleness, its guns pointing out to sea.

   One day, come November of 1942, my grandparents packed some things in a bag and said it was time I visited my mother at the sanatorium on Countesswells Road. I was very unhappy about this as it was a thoroughly dismal day, with blustering winds and showers. They ignored my complaining, happed me well against the damp and sent me off. I dawdled along in fairly melancholy fashion, in perfect mood with the weather, wondering the while what my journey was really about.

   I met no one on that lonely road and little traffic. Behind its drystone dykes, highland cattle browsed in the fields and an occasional magpie flashed in the trees. Further along the way, I caught the stink of Macdonald's pig farm whose owner's son I knew at school and at one point I passed a beech wood where an obstacle course of barbed wire was strung low between the trees. Meant to test the Home Guard, it also served as a playground for boys like myself and a great place to have the backside torn out of your breeks.

   After an hour or so, I recognised the driveway with the buildings of the sanatorium lit up at its end and saw my mother standing, limned in the door of her unit, a blue peignoir wrapped tight about her. As the fear of contagion in those days was fierce, she walked out in the cold, rain-spotted dusk to meet me. I protested that she would catch her death but, ignoring my plea, she took the bag and, without touching me, led me back to the road. It was too brief a moment and I only recall that, among other things, we recited the Lord's prayer together before waving goodbye. She, like an apparition, watched me turn away, while I crunched back tears and headed back into the murk. Though my grandparents knew it, I was unaware it was the last time I would see her alive.

   She who was who I could not hold, died of cancer before Christmas. My sister and I never grieved her death and brutal as it seems to me now, my father, who was in Africa, could not come home for the funeral.