A skeleton in the cupboard? No, ours is in the attic – Susan Morrison

Plumbers fitting a new bathroom got a fright when they accidentally stumbled across a ‘build your own’ human skeleton, writes Susan Morrison.

Even a half-finished model skeleton could give you a scare if you weren’t expecting to find it under your bed (Picture: John Devlin)

When we first moved in, Gordon Brown was still Prime Minister and my son was still at school. At the time, he was keen on one of those weekly instalment magazines where you get to build a model of something.

My son, that is, not Gordon Brown, although it wouldn’t surprise me to discover that Mr Brown is an avid collector of ‘Build Your Own Treasury Building’, a full-scale replica of 1, Horse Guards Parade in 9352 parts, including the office currently inhabited by that young Mr Sunak who looks like he should have someone waiting at the gates to get him home safely. Come to think of it, he has.

They work out pricey, those magazines. For a while they were flogging a Build the Titanic. The first instalment was an introductory offer of £1.99. The subsequent 7,452 weekly chunks of White Star Liner came in at a whopping £11.49 or something. If you scaled up the figures, they built the original for less in 1910.

I came up with my own Build-it-in-Bits magazine. I started freezing water from the Forth to build my own iceberg. Gave up when we needed room for the peas.

What happens to the last magazines, I wonder? People probably rush out in droves to buy the first instalment of Build Your Own Eiffel Tower in 7520 parts, then get fed up by part 7 or 8 when they realise that a model of the Eiffel Tower is a remarkably boring thing and what are you going to do with it when you’re finished, eh? Stick a light on the top and use it to brighten up a particularly dim part of the lounge?

Is there a warehouse full of the last bits of model Hindenburgs, Titanics, and Spitfires? Two years to complete the Spitfire Mk1, by the way. Just as well we weren’t depending on this lot when the Luftwaffe threatened our skies.

My son didn’t have an interest in the Hindenburg or the Titanic. He wanted a multipart magazine building the human body from the bones out. The first edition was a skull. Being a childrens’s educational production, the skull was more ‘Caspar the Friendly Ghost’ than ‘Hamlet’s Grinning Skull Pal’, and quite cheery in aspect.

It seemed to have about a million pieces, but I harboured the vain hope that, as he completed the final eyelid, he would be starting medical studies. Naturally, this didn’t happen. He got bored with the project by the time we reached the tibia, which, to be fair, is fairly uninteresting.

We’d already built the skull, spinal cord and pelvis. It lay under his bed for a while, where it gave me an occasional start until I moved it up into the attic.

It lay up there these many years, slowly vanishing under a layer of boxes, books and general household storage, until the plumbers fitting the new bathroom stumbled across the skull earlier this week.

Even a cheery skull can deliver a horror movie moment when it looms out of the dark, judging by the screams.

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