SMELLIE, IAN (1937 - 1983) - In her Harrison Poe memoir, Pamela's narrator, Patsy, make a ruefully humorous allusion to the death of her dentist. 'Mr Adison' was driven to suicide by a series of adolescent pranks perpetrated by Patsy and her friend Megan. This apparently pointless digression struck a chord as I recalled that Pamela's childhood dentist had died in similar circumstances. Discreet enquiries revealed that the real life Ian Smellie, already afflicted by the dark moods common to members of his profession, took his own life after being besieged by prank callers. This brought to mind the a spate of phone calls I received at the same time. One, I recall, invited me to travel to Glasgow in order to be interviewed for Blue Peter. Others arranged meetings with non-existant informants in a variety of undesireable locations. On each occasion, the realisation that I had been duped was accompanied by suspicious skirls of distant laughter.

According to Smellie's surviving daughter, he was demoralised by the resurgance of taunts, based on his surname, that recollected the miseries of an unspeakable childhood. "Children can be cruel," she rationalised. This is undeniably the case, but how does it reflect upon a grown woman who reflects upon the offences of adolescence with such callous indifference?

 

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