The Whole World Behind Glass Bill Rectangle’s STENHOUSE and the Topography of Memory

Editor's Note: This is the English-language version of a review originally written in German for Lesering by Ute Pappelbaum.The German original is also available.

There is a fish tank built into the living-room wall, where guppies swim inside one of those self-contained worlds that fascinate children not because they are extraordinary, but because childhood still possesses the ability to discover immensity within confined spaces. Young Bill Rectangle watches the fish feeding, chasing one another and breeding until, one day, while playing with his small guitar, he accidentally strikes the tank. The glass cracks and the fish die. His father replaces the aquarium, but the memory cannot be replaced.

Almost the whole of STENHOUSE: Growing Up in Edinburgh and Beyond can be mapped from that aquarium, because Bill Rectangle is less interested in telling the story of an extraordinary life than in showing how a person is formed by ordinary things. His childhood requires no spectacular events to become significant; a living room, a patch of grass, a record or a bicycle can be enough to contain an entire world.

A Topography of Memory

Stenhouse is a district of Edinburgh, yet in Rectangle’s memoir it initially appears less as a geographical location than as a topography of memory, measured not in miles but in the distances a child is capable of travelling. The house forms its centre, with routes leading towards the Triangle, friends’ homes, parks, shops and eventually into the wider city which, although geographically present all along, only gradually opens itself to the child.

Rectangle writes particularly well about the way children learn a place through their bodies long before they understand it as a map: through legs and lungs, shortcuts and dangerous corners, houses, dogs, roads and the constantly changing question of how far one is allowed to venture from home. An unremarkable triangular patch of grass can consequently become “the Triangle”, acquiring a significance no official map could record. It is there that young Bill encounters the older Rosie Bell on her blue-and-yellow roller skates, and it later becomes a junction for friendships and journeys.

Perhaps this is one of the simplest and most precise truths contained in the memoir: childhood means finding a large world inside small spaces, and later searching for those spaces in the larger world.

The Ordinary Things

Rectangle’s memory consequently has a strikingly tactile quality, in which metal is cold, damp earth has a particular smell, carpet feels different beneath the hands from furniture, and a gas fire warms the face while the edges of the room remain cool. Rectangle himself describes this as “memory before story”, memory that exists before it has been organised into narrative.

This is where STENHOUSE is at its most convincing. Memory is not presented as an archive of neatly dated events but as a collection of objects, sounds and movements to which time has somehow adhered. The aquarium, record player, trainers, bicycle, roller skates, cassettes, VHS tapes and Commodore are therefore more than props for a nostalgic excursion through the 1980s and early 1990s; they record the gradual expansion of a child’s radius.

Music plays a particularly important role. The records belonging to Rectangle’s parents and older sister bring other possibilities into the house, while Gary Numan or David Bowie represent more than sound, carrying clothes, attitudes, images and intimations of a world beyond Stenhouse. Later, cassettes circulate between friends and Radio Forth connects bedrooms to an emerging Scottish dance culture, creating a network before the internet became an ordinary part of life.

When a Scottish Childhood Finds a German Melody

Something curious can happen while reading: a very particular childhood belonging to someone else begins to disturb one’s own memories. During STENHOUSE, I unexpectedly found myself hearing the old East German rock band Karussell in my head, a musical memory originating in an entirely different geographical and social world.

This is not a comparison suggested by the book, which is precisely why the resonance is interesting. Stenhouse is not East Germany, Edinburgh is not Leipzig, and Rectangle’s childhood is not the reader’s childhood, yet the description of somebody else’s small world can suddenly make an old melody audible again.

There may be something universal here without requiring us to pretend that childhoods are interchangeable. To regard childhood as a universal good does not mean that everyone shares the same experiences; it means that almost everyone knows those small spaces that once seemed disproportionately large. Each of us has some version of the aquarium, the park, the record or the apparently worthless object that, decades later, could not be replaced at any price.

When the Adult Steps In

Rectangle has a gift for strong images, although he does not always trust them.

The aquarium scene demonstrates the problem particularly well. The breaking glass, dead fish and physical shock experienced by the child are sufficient to communicate guilt and consequence, yet Rectangle subsequently explains the lesson contained in the episode and what it reveals about his character. Something similar occurs when he recalls seeing what he believed was a futuristic cat on a record sleeve: a wonderfully small example of childhood imagination is subsequently supplied with its interpretation.

This is the peculiar weakness of an otherwise engaging memoir: the adult narrator occasionally stands beside his memories like a museum guide worried that visitors might walk past an important exhibit without understanding its significance.

Yet this tendency to over-explain may itself belong to Rectangle’s project, because anyone attempting to protect something from disappearance is tempted to label every surviving fragment. Rectangle does not so much romanticise his childhood as attempt to preserve it. A patch of grass becomes a site of memory, a record becomes a marker of time, and an aquarium becomes a container for guilt, loss and affection.

A Small World That Was Once Everything

It is regrettable that STENHOUSE is not currently available in German, although readers with a solid command of English should find the original approachable. As a German reviewer, I occasionally find myself searching for the right words to capture a childhood so deeply rooted in Scottish life and yet so unexpectedly familiar. Rectangle’s prose is generally direct and accessible; what requires translation is not so much the language itself as the world of memories, places and cultural references it carries. Fortunately, these distinctly Scottish qualities have not been polished away for an international audience. Perhaps that is precisely why the book resonates beyond its own geography: we may grow up in different languages and landscapes, but we recognise something of ourselves in the small worlds we once called our own.

In the end, we return to the aquarium in the wall. Perhaps childhood really does mean discovering a vast world within small spaces, while adulthood consists partly of searching for those spaces in a world that has become immeasurably larger. In STENHOUSE, Bill Rectangle searches for them in streets, records, bicycles, cassettes and family stories, and sometimes explains too carefully what his strongest images already understand.

A childhood does not disappear because its world was small.

It disappears because, once, it was the whole world.

About the Author

Bill Rectangle is an independent Scottish author and publisher who grew up in Stenhouse, Edinburgh. His childhood during the 1980s and early 1990s, shaped by family, friendships, school, sport, music, fashion and early home technology, provides the material for his debut, STENHOUSE: Growing Up in Edinburgh and Beyond. The book was independently written and published and is available as a Kindle eBook, paperback and an approximately eight-hour audiobook narrated by Rectangle himself in his Scottish voice.