The Nessie Submarine

I am remembering a story I wrote at Primary School, many many years ago, in my dark blue jotter, on the scratchy cheap paper found within. It had terrible illustrations to go with it, radar traces, underwater worlds, the techno tech imagined by the mind of a ten year old boy in 1983.

It was all about an attempt to prove the existence of the Loch Ness Monster.

There was a submarine, and it dived to a depth of 58,000 feet in the Loch because there were secret trenches down there and I didn't have any idea of the real depth (700 feet or so) of the Loch.

The monster was 65 feet long – the exaggeration of childhood – and a long sea serpent kind of thing, drawn in dark green coloured pencil. The submarine was rocket like, and may or may not have been bright yellow – my head was permanently full of “Arthur C. Clarke's Mysterious World” at this time, endlessly read by me every time I went to stay at my father's house.

It was cramped inside, furnished in purple luxurious...er...stuff. There was barely room to move. I used to pretend to be inside it in real life, in my duvet, before my younger sister would crash in, in her annoying bundle of toddler life fashion.

As well as the Nessie Submarine, there was the Mattress Spaceship from a couple of years earlier. Me and a friend used to lie on the bed on our backs, with our legs up the wall in a kind of proper astronaut position. He always got to be Neil Armstrong, I was always David Scott for some reason, but then he was older, and half American to boot. We used to get signals from Houston, and activate various systems by pulling on the cord that switched my light on and off, disturbing the gerbils that lived in a cage on a high shelf, in constant fear of Tiggy the cat.

So, there my lifelong sceptical interest in crypitids and space began, in bedrooms and jotters, in the house of the artist and captain in Scotland, and in the imagination of an only child, in what for a while was a single parent family at what Doctor (not Mr!) Spock would have said was a crucial time.

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 04.02.14