Saving the Flower Show

Best in Show about a village flower show is now a paperback on Amazon. It is part nostalgia, part light reading and was written because I had so much enjoyment from making advisory visits with my father to flower show competitors as a youngster. My father had grown chrysanthemums for the Christmas market in the thirties, still grew but didn't show and was regarded as an expert. He took me round on his advisory visits when he encouraged competition by complements and fake news of other contestants. The book is set in Miss Kirkwood's village of Cairndhu where an international firm want to take over the show for advertising. Miss Kirkwood is against that and inspires her ex-pupil, John Brown, to resist. John Brown, or Broon as he is known in the village, has other priorities, mainly making sure his chrysanthemums beat George Gillespie's. Gillespie bribes judges with fillet steaks and legs of lamb, of course, so it is not plain sailing, especially when the weather misbehaves.

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I like dogs

I'm always amazed at how life turns up incidents that might find their way into a book about Cairndhu. I met someone who had been on holiday in Cornwall somewhere and the family were terrorised by a cockerel from the cottage next door. It reminded me of the occasion when a dog took a dislike to my bicycle. I tried all kinds of things from going down the other side of the road, to walking the bike  but that dog heard me no matter what. It even jumped over the fence when I tried full speed ahead. The same thing happened in Zambia when I had a motorbike, only that time it was a three legged dog and it jumped an eight foot high hedge and chased me down the street. I've searched for the pic I have of our last spaniel but he seems to have wandered off and I found this of my wife when we were at the launch of the South African Americas Cup yacht that I had forgotten about

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Horses

When I was growing up, the farmer had a pair of horses for ploughing, harrowing, harvesting and pulling the cart. The milk was delivered by a kind of gig with big milk cans with taps on them to fill the jugs and bottles people left out. Nowadays they use machines that are three stories high to plough, machines that get stuck on narrow bridges and cause traffic jams. There are to be no diesel or petrol cars by some date I might not see but what of these monsters? They will need to trail a power station behind them and everything the cut will have to be used to generate the power. We face STARVATION unless we go back to a good pair of Clydesdales whose breath steams as they pull the plough on frosty mornings - I'm not going to spoil the picture by going into what noxious gasses they produce or what particulates they leave behind.

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Postman's Knock

 In Cairndhu, at Christmas, each Sunday School class had a party, where there were games like Postman's Knock and a thing called Be Baw Babity and The Farmer Wants a Wife, all of which needed a ring with someone inside. For the Farmer the person inside chose a wife then the wife chose someone to be the child and so on, until someone had to choose a dog. Choosing the first wife, if Tiptoes was there, was fixed - you got scalded with her look if you made a mistake and chose Jeany with the light brown hair. Several people were expected to contribute a party piece and Tiptoes recited Christopher Robin is saying his prayers in a VERY SWEET voice while we boys squirmed at a boy being portrayed in such a pansy fashion. There was also a girl who was taking elocution lessons and recited 'The bairnies cuddle doon at nicht wi' muckle fecht and din'. Why one needed to attend elocution classes to learn that, I never knew. I just hope the present day disco parties are as memorable as ours were.

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Kirk and Free Kirk

My boyhood friend, Rob, and I spent most of our free time together, except on Sunday. My family attended the Parish Church, The Church of Scotland, while his were members of the Free Church of Scotland. The differences between their theologies had long eroded but the antipathy remained. Our building had stained glass windows and a pipe organ and had been built from the stone recovered from the old kirk when it was vandalised at the time of the reformation. The old kirk had been on a low knoll that overlooked the old village but, by the time of the reformation, the village had grown away from it and it no longer dominated and the new kirk was built on a height that overlooked all but the 20^th century part of the village. I suppose the congregation’s first lesson of Sunday worship was that, like Moses, they had to climb up the hill to hear the word of God.

Rob’s kirk had no stained glass, that being a form of graven image, was down near the old kirk and had a small peddle organ, a modern introduction when the congregation was converted to singing hymns but not to the extent of having ‘a kist of whistles’.

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Raspberries

I bought some raspberries at the market on Friday - four punnets for £2. I told them I only wanted two but was told it would still be £2, so I took the four and gave two away. One of the recipients decided to get some cream and really enjoy the fruit, went home and poured the cream over the raspberries, still in the punnet. Of course the punnet, although plastic, had holes in it and the cream ran out as quick as he poured it in. It could have happened to me and it is that sort of daft episode I love to write about - just the kind of thing Broon from Cairndhu would do!
Talking of markets, my books were on special display last week and I had a T-shirt made specially for the occasion. Bees in my Bonnet, short stories, is on Amazon.

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Old Meg she was a Gypsy

Miss Mowat, or a name like that, came for a year. Her big thing was poetry, not Admirals All, or Hiawatha, or John Moore being buried, but My love is like a red, red, rose. Slushy things like that. Even worse, she’d tell us we had to read it to a girl, to the giggles of the girls and the dour disapproval of us boys. We tried to think of some way to get revenge. It came from her own choice of big T, who could break wind, from either end, at will. She asked him to read Old Meg.

T started, ‘Old meg,’ poop, ‘she was a gypsy,’ poop poop.

‘And she went from town to town,’ poop, poop, poop!

As I say Miss Mowat left the school at the end of the year.

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Leprechauns and fairies

Living with Granny Clarke at the seaside, with two cousins only eight years older was a new world for me. I had written bits of things for school and a few tries at poetry, why, I can not explain, other than my mother's enjoyment of it and my father's love of quoting Robert Burns. Uncle John wrote poetry, drew cartoons and built model aeroplanes, which fascinated me. Unknowingly, Granny Clarke with her stories of leprechauns and fairy rings which were to be avoided at midnight or one was whisked off to Fairyland was preparing me for another school year. Whatever, my mother and I survived the trip and came back to preparations for the annual flower show and a scatty teacher called Miss Mowat, I think. It was her first posting and since she had come from among the fairies at the bottom of the garden somewhere, unused to laddies who knew what bulls were for, she never had a chance.

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WW2 travel

Because of the war, my mother hadn't seen her own mother for several years , so when things eased a little in 1944 she took me to see Granny Clarke in Northern Ireland. I intend to elaborate on her a bit later but for now let me tell about the boat journey. There were still U-Boats about and when we left Stranraer they started issuing life jackets. There was a sailor among the company and he refused to take one. When he was told it was for his own good in case we were torpedoed, the sailor said he didn't want to die slowly in the water or be burned when the oil took fire. He'd seen too many and he prefered to drown quickly. Naturally, I'd seen films where ships were sunk but this was close up and personal. The link, despite the change of name, is to an old family legend and the sister is Granny Clarke.

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Mineral awakening

While we were being introduced to Parliament, Rob and I still wandered about finding this and that. One day we were trying to catch trout with out hands, guddling, we called it, when I noticed some silvery flecks on a stone in the river. We hadn't been having any luck with the trout, who didn't seem to understand their role in the business so the silver flecks became the centre of attention.  We collected a few stones with these marvellous flecks and too them home. On the way the silver got a bit less shiny as the stones dried out but I was keen for my Dad to see our 'treasure'. 'It's Mica,'he told us, 'and it is in between the layers of those bits of stone. If you can find a big sheet it is worth something.' In those days, mica was important as it was used for electrical insulation in things like irons and the find started my lifelong fascination with stones and minerals. The boy is father to the man as the saying goes.

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Cairtndhu boyhood

Cairndhu is a fictional place but our village was much like it, mixed farming and small mines and everyone a character. The trouble is I get lost among the memories and forget the teachers. After miss Russel we had a newly qualified teacher, called Miss Johnson. She might have been new but she had been well trained and I remember learning things in her class. Which means it was disciplined and organised and didn't have the same possibilities for high jinks. She taught us, eight year olds, how parliament worked and having watched the odd session on TV, they could do with Miss Johnson to keep them in order and stop the nastiness. If we'd behaved in one of her 'debates' like they do in Westminster, the strap would have been in constant use. Still, they are adults and don't need disciplining like eight year old school children.

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Harvest time

I’ve told you that between our house and the pit there was a field, which the farmer cultivated. It was normally sown with corn or hay and there were corncrakes calling in it every summer. The farm labourers were away at the war and to get the harvest in before the weather broke – this was southern Scotland remember- the farmer called for volunteers from the local community. I was only a boy but I helped as much as I could, which was often to go for water for the men to drink. At the end of the last day, the farmer invited everyone for tea and, everything being rationed, I joined in. From somewhere the farmer’s wife produced slices of boiled ham, the smell of which was overpowering. When the ham was eaten and there was only jam left and farm butter left, one of the men put butter on a slice of bread and was reaching for the jam when the farmer stopped him. ‘Naw, naw, no’ two kitchens,’ he told the man. I suppose for the farmer, jam was the scarcity.

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Sunburned days in Cairndhu

In the summer, when we were boys, there always seemed to be days when the tar melted and bubbled during the summer. We went swimming in bare feet and burst the tar bubbles with our big toe.When we got home, we were suitably chastised for coming into the house with tar on our feet. Life was tough! It was even tougher the day Rob's big brother came with us. 'You can't swim, laddie,' he commented. 'Well, you'll either learn or sink,' he said and threw me in. It sounds desperate nbut the swimming hole hasn't very big and there were plenty about to pull me clear if I hadn't managed a doggy paddle. Of course we got sunburned and had to get plastered with camomile lotion in the middle of the night.

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The deer hunter

As boys in villages that could have been Cairndhu, we spent a lot of time in the woods with bows and arrows. We took a good deal of care making the arrows and on one particular day I had one with nice feather at its tail and a knitting needle at the point in the hope of surprising a rabbit. To denote what tribe I belonged to, I had adorned the head with a knitting needle and a piece of wool I had collected on a fence. As we crept along through the brown, dead lower branches of a fir I looked into the eyes of a full grown deer - rations of meat for a year. I took quick aim and let the arrow fly. As it passed through the fir branches, the wool caught in the twigs and got stuck. The deer looked at me disdainfully and walked away. The arrow would probably have bounced off but I realised, if it had stuck it might have festered and the dear might have died in agony. The main thing is, I still remember that magnificent animal walking away.

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Sunday School parties

In the village, not Cairndhu but it's proxy where I grew up, we all went to Sunday School at the Kirk. At Christmas each class had a party, where there were games like Postman's Knock and a thing called Be Baw Babity and The farmer wants a wife with a ring and someone inside, then the person inside chose a wife or a husband, depending on their sex, then the husband chose something someone to be the child and so on, until someone had to chose a dog. Choosing the first wife if tiptoes was there was fixed - you got scalded with her look if you made a mistake and chose Jeany with the light brown hair. Several people were expected to contribute a party piece and Tiptoes recited Christopher Robin is saying his prayers in a VERY SWEET voice while we boys squirmed. There was also a girl who was taking elocution lessons and she recited 'The bairnies cuddle doon at nicht wi' muckle fecht and din'. Why one needed to attend elocution classes to learn that, I never knew.

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As well as teachers, there were other professionals in the village.

I was surprised the other day to learn that medical research had discovered a direct connection between the smell of a person’s wind release and certain ailments. Why it surprised me is that sixty years ago Dr George McPheat told the women in our village that they must not clean and 'air' the sick room before he came as he could tell the moment he smelt the air what the patient was likely to be suffering from.

Dr George was quite a character, when my father went into the local cottage hospital for a minor operation sixty years ago, one of the men in the ward developed stomach cramps. While he was examining the man, Dr George asked the matron what the patient had eaten and was told stiffly, “Nothing that would do him any harm, Doctor. The food is very nutritious and he's had a spoon of castor oil to keep his bowels moving.”

“Ah,” said the doctor, “it’s a great thing the castor oil , I take it regularly myself, ---------------- once a year.”       

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Clydebank

By now WW2 was in the Battle of Britain and Sojer's games involved Rob and I following him as a pretend Spitfire wing chasing Messerschmitts, or being Dornier bombers  which Sojer shot down and we crash landed. He also escaped from POW camps with the help of the valiant resistance - Rob and I. He tried to get us to be the Gestapo trying to catch a spy but that was too far, as far as we were concerned and he played that game by himself.
It wasn't all fun. My father came home from work late one night and got me out of bed to see Clydebank being bombed. We didn't see the bombers but we could see the glow from the fires in Clydebank thirty miles away like a sunset. My mother hugged me and told me there were boys and girls and their mothers and fathers being killed by the bombs over there, which took a lot of adventure out of Sojer's games.
The picture is from the Daily Record.

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Grandfather

Best in Show was based on the competition between those competing in flower shows and while I have barely mentioned it in these chronicles, gardening was a large part of life in the village, especially during WW2. Everybody grew vegetables but one of the necessities of life for my grandfather was his tobacco and he started to grow his own. He'd been in the Royal Navy and always maintained a sailor could turn his hand to anything but how he learned to dry and make a twist in those days before the web, I don't know. The twist turned out to be a kind of black thick tarry cord, full of treacle and other secret ingredients although I doubt if there was any rum in the mixture. Mind you, he was security at the entrance to the army camp and perhaps he got some from a connection there. That would have been typical. If there was ever anyone who saw 'can't be done' as a challenge it was my grandfather.

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Knights and Maidens

I keep forgetting this is just background about life in villages like the fictional Cairndhu and getting engrossed in childhood memories. Those memories are sometimes romanticised, or as Mark twin said of his autobiography, some of it is true. Anyway, I've mentioned Tiptoes, our fairy queen and I need to show not tell, what she was like. From time to time, a few of us would gather near where Tiptoes lived and would be drawn into her fantasy world playing Statues. It was a kind of game where each person formed a statue to represent a character or event and Tiptoes would be a princess locked up in a tower waving her hanky to summon rescue. The next boy was expected to look like a knight on a white charger riding to her aid. She would then be seen graciously knighting the poor individual. Looking back, it surprises me that any of us boys, more likely to pull pigtails than be soft enough to carry a lassie's school books, ever took part in the charade.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1535417188

Canadian Tigers

I'd hate to give you the impression the weather was always ideal for hill walking in South West Scotland. I could control it in Best in Show but n real life it was unpredictable. On days when even Rob and I didn't want to go out, his mother read to us in front of the fire, like that picture of Walterr Raleigh. She read from a big volume called The Settlers in Canada, which was much like the Swiss Family Robinson, only in the snow. After hearing about the family adventures and the bravery of the boys in the family, Rob and I were naturally going to go to Canada. The same thing happened when we discovered a photo of an uncle of his with his foot on the head of a tiger he had shot in India while with the Forestry Commision. The tiger had, of course, been eating locals at an alarming rate until Rob's uncle took it on. After seeing the photo, we decided we would go to India and save people from man-eating tigers. In the end, he joined the railway and I went down the pit!

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Boys often want to be like their fathers and I was no exception. Dad was in the mines and entitled to eight tons of coal a year, dumped on the pavement in front the house. It had to be carried into the coal cellar, inside the back door, with buckets . First was the lumps to make a kind of retaining wall, then came the smaller stuff thrown in behind. As the small got used up it was hard to reach and I went into the cellar with the kitchen shovel and pretended to be Dad in the mine. As I shovelled, I could smell the sharpness of the dust and wipe my dusty hand on my forehead and then have a bath like Dad. There were no showers on the small mines until the Coal Board took over, so Dad came home dirty and bathed before he ate. He never came to the table dirty no matter how hungry he might have been after the occasional double shift - there was a war on and people didn't worry about working to rule much at that time; many, like Dad in the ARP, had a second responsibility and didn't get much leisure time. Mining villages are often portrayed as grim and ugly, but ours was set in some lovely country.

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More Teachers

After Miss Robson our next teacher was a small bright, neatly dressed woman called Miss Russell who lived with her sister and had always whistled as her childhood party turn. I knew this because my father told me,

                              The next one to sing was wee Jean Russell,

                              She couldnae sing, so she started to whustle.

Despite this, like many country people, she was remarkably well informed. She told us how the school children had given pennies and collected silver paper to finance the building of HMS Belfast. She told us how Spitfires were built. She who told us how terrifying and obscene a telegram from the War Office saying a husband or son had been killed could be. We saw the effects for ourselves as time passed.

By now,  WW2 was three years old and the classroom windows had brown anti-shatter screens stuck on them and smelled of the glue used to stick the screens to the glass.

Officially, she taught us tables, but she also allowed the boy at the front of the class to sleep.

For some fault, or maybe for maintaining my innocence, I was sent to the front of the class beside him. I felt it my duty to try to keep him awake; how could he learn otherwise? He didn’t take kindly to that and I was blamed for the resulting disruption. At the time I was upset by the injustice, but realised later that there was little chance of rest in the hovel the boy lived in and Miss was making allowances. Thankfully, his old place of residence has long since been bulldozed.

A Land fit for heroes has it's origins in those days and those teachers who had lost sweethearts in WW1.

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Cairndhu boys

Cairndhu - Rob and I wandered all over the hills and the moors beyond among the nesting larks and lapwings and black headed gulls. His father was a postman, whose route was the outlying farms and shepherd's cottages. If we needed a drink we drank from the nearest burn, ignoring any creatures that might have done something unmentionable or even died upstream. If we felt hungry, however, we went to a shepherd's cottage and asked for a drink of water. The woman would ask who we were and Rob would explain he was the postman's son. 'You'd better come away in and get a scone and cheese,' the woman would insist. IN exchange she would get our version of the latest news. 'Has Mrs Jones had her bairn?' 'Aye, she has but it wasn't a bairn it was a twins.' 'Oh my,' the woman would exclaim. 'And the doctor said nothing about it.' No doubt she got the right story from Rob's father.

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Mine dump playground

The waste dump, or bing, as we called, like the dull one in the picture, was always there and it's slope an attraction for sliding down on bots of cardboard or even  a decent bit of wood but I got a stiff lecture from Dad any time I ventured near the thing. While there wasn't much coal in it to burn it did get hot and many years later I saw what it could be like the second picture. Apart from the gas it produced we'd have been roasted alive if it had collapsed under us. Strill, I suppose we could have broken our necks climbing up to rooks nests.

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Cinemascope

Cairndhu, Cinema, James Mason, Bette Davis, Gene Autry, Lone Ranger, John Wayne, Zorro, Wee Breella loved the cinema, especially a romance or a thriller with a damsel in distress. The films were shown in the Miner's Welfare Hall. On Saturday afternoon it was a serial, often Zorro. On Friday evening the serial was more adult and could be The Lone Ranger. One wet Friday evening, a crowd of us were sitting at the front giving of the smell of wet boys, the Lone Ranger serial was finished and in place of the Gene Autry film that was supposed to be in the canister, the projectionist found he had been sent a drama with James Mason in it. We watched for a while but got bored and began to fidget.

Wee Brella was already upset with Mason. She been warned to keep quiet after getting up to shout to the heroine, Bette Davis, or someone similar, to ‘get away oot o’ there’ and to threaten Mason with all kinds of violence.

Fortunately, the screen was on the back wall of an elevated stage that separated the front seats from the screen and, even standing on tiptoe, Wee Brella could just get her arm above the stage, high enough to shake her umbrella and threaten Mason but she couldn’t get near enough to the evil James to hit him where it would save poor Bette.

She was sitting in front of us and her shouting added to the commotion we boys were creating. The Welfare Committee member who was on duty came to warn us all to behave but when Mason felt it was time to push Bette Davis off the cliff, we were cheering him on.

Our shouts of encouragement were too much for Brella. She lashed about her with her brolly and about a dozen small boys collapsed in a moving jelly of yelping and giggling arms, legs, and warm bodies.

The projectionist stopped the show and the lights came on to allow the duty member of the Welfare Committee to restore order.

Wee Brella got a caution. We were banned from anything but Zorro, cowboys, or pirates, or John Wayne winning the war, and the projectionist checked very carefully what was in the canisters after that. 

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Wee Brella at Football

Let me introduce Wee Brella. With her umbrella, she could have been the model for Mary Poppins. She was passionate about two things, romantic films and the local football team. One particular Saturday, despite the fact that they all knew each other, the two local teams were trying as hard as they could to kick lumps out of their opposite number. The referee let most of it go - for diplomatic reasons. It wasn’t unknown for a referee who gave the opposition needless fouls and especially penalty kicks to need a police escort to get him to the bus stop. The river was handy and remember, there was a war on.

That particular day, one of the opposition forwards was giving a good-looking young lad from our village the run around. Our lad just couldn’t get a decent tackle at the forward, either to get the ball, or maim the forward enough to slow him down. It really was a man’s game in those days.

This dribbling round our lad didn’t fit the script as Wee Brella felt it should be.

The ball came out just in front of her and the forward came to take the throw-in.

‘What d’you think you’re doing, makin’ oor Billy look daft?’ demanded Brella.

‘It’s no’ me, he’s doin’ it all himself. Billy couldnae take the ball off a haystack,’ the forward told her, smiling at his own humour as he stepped back to take the throw-in.

He didn’t do much more that day. Maybe he was suffering from concussion from the clout wee Brella gave him with her umbrella.

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WW2 Eggs and Tomatoes

Instead of just telling how I wanted to write about a village like Cairndhu, this is turning into the story of my childhood among the gardeners of the village. My grandfather lived in the top house in his street and rented the plot next door on which he had built a greenhouse and a chicken run. Both were a boon during the war years, not just for us but for the local community. Gramps sold eggs and tomatoes and I was called in to feed chickens and pollinate the tomato blooms with a rabbit's foot. Pollinating was a springtime job and was often welcome if the weather was cold because the greenhouse was heated and always cosy. The chickens chased after me and pecked at my ankles when I had the feed bucket, and occasionally got cross when I discovered an egg hidden in the long grass at the edges of the compound. It was those eggs that were suspect and reserved for family use. Occasionally one was rotten and that put me off eggs for days - not for weeks - everything was rationed. If a hen stopped laying it went into the pot and was sometimes soft enough not to need mincing to make it edible.

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Teaching junior school

After the motherly Miss Drafan, we passed into Miss Robson's class. Miss Robson was another of those who had no chance to marry because of the lost generation of young men in WW1. She was more of a benevolent 'Grande Dame'. She was tall and slim and dressed in long clothes, smelt of scented soap and started us with numbers.  This was before the psychologists became involved in teaching and we learned by boys and girls standing in a row in front of the class.  There were no apples or oranges for illustration and none of us could remember having seen bananas.

      When it came to subtraction, six minus two for example, six of us stood in a row and two went back to their seats. She asked who was to be subtracted and it was usually boys because one or two of the girls came close to tears when they were chosen. Maybe she was more of a psychologist than we knew because she taught us not to pick on the vulnerable and to treat young ladies with respect; not that Grace, or Tiptoes as my dad christened her as she always looked ready to tiptoe through the tulips, needed any assistance over respect. When she deigned to speak to us, she ordered us rough rude boys around like a fairy queen.

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Cairndhu in WW2

Cairndhu- WW2 had started when we went to school. Because of the shortage of paper, we had slates with a slate pencil that made marks on the slate. If you made a mistake, all you had to do was wet a finger and rub it out, which was handy if you felt your neighbour had a better answer than you.
Our early teachers were maiden ladies who might have been married if a whole generation of eligible young men had not been killed in WW1.
The first of these ladies, motherly Miss Draffan, wore brown woollen clothes that she knitted herself and smelt vaguely of moth balls. She gave some of the less fortunate children their first touch of gentleness and encouragement.

      While anyone who dared to talk when she was saying something was 'shushed' by the class, those who might struggle with a word like ‘cat’ or ‘mat’ would be given stage whispered help. If you got help, you had to decide who was right, usually a girl, because there were sniggering boys who thought it was funny to mislead you.

      Miss Draffan had a complement for everyone's scrawl on their slate. There were special pencils for the slates and as the quality deteriorated as a result of the war, they could be made to screech across the slate. Girls didn’t do things like that, of course, their mission was to call out 'it was Jim Scott, Miss'.

       After some laborious copying of letters with tongues stuck out following progress, the slates were put neatly in the corner as only a class of five year olds can; the boys closely supervised by the girls, who straightened any slate that was out of line.

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When the war started in 1939 a few of the men, especially those who were in the territorials went off to France but coal was important for all sorts of things, the railways used it, electricity was dependent on it, the steel industry needed coke and the result was that most of the miners were exempt from army service. Some even turned miner to escape going away, though, at that time the mines were not particularly safe. For us boys it produced films about heroes and one boy, two or three years older than Rob and I was particularly affected. We had our pwn fantasies about cowboys and indians and the French Foreign Legion, which included Laurel and Hardy, of course and we lived those out enthusiastically but when this older lad wanted us to pretend, we knew it wasn't real and despite his enthusiasm, couldn't get into dive bombing ships, or being commandos at all. Dad saw him once throwing a pretend hand grenade at a pretend tank and he got the nickname of Sojer. We had Polish soldiers camped in the castle grounds and, of course, Sojer discovered an imaginary spy among them and wanted us to sneak about to find out who it was. Fortunately it was tea time and we were too hungry to become spy catchers.

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As wee boys we were noisy and one fine sunny day when one of the men who lived among us was on night shift and was trying to get some sleep we were whooping it up below his window. He gave up at last and opened the window and pointed an old WW1 rifle at us and shouted, 'Who must I shoot first?' As we ran off squealing we could hear his wife admonishing him for frightening bairns. How he had retained his rifle after 1918, we never discovered but he was one of the local worthies and some of his escapades nudge their way into a book now and then. The home guard were practising creeping down the burn across the road from the houses one day when he took charge and, using us as a decoy, (you can imagine how we got into the spirit of the thing), outmaneuvered and captured the trained troops of the 'enemy' in the wood across the other side of the field. The officer's swearing was something to hear! Real Dad's Army!

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I wanted to reflect how happy childhood had been for me in a Cairndhu type village but as I mentioned there were low points in the life of those villages and those are better reflected in Miss Kirkwood's story in A Land Fit for Heroes, which was written in memory of all those ladies who lost fiancees in WW1 and took to teaching. They gave us such a warm start to our schooldays that I felt they needed someone to recognise their contribution. Don't think it is doom and gloom, village life is always like tartan or a tweed, a healthy mixture. I had hoped to interest a literary agent and one does one's best but life is full of these little disappointments.

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Life in a village like the fictional Cairndhu had its downs as well ass ups. Three of us including my friend Rob were playing at  being a military band. Our drums were a mixture of one with diagonal stripes like the real thing, a plain red one and mine, with Mickey Mouse, Mini Mouse and Donald Duck chasing each other round the rim. The other two took turns at leading but when I insisted it was my turn to lead I was told Mickey Mouse drums always come last. Even at that age I could see the logic. I've since worked in some real Mickey Mouse operations and the logic still holds true. I suppose it all comes under the heading of Character Development.

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I shouldn't have described our house. It was small, only two rooms and a kitchen, but I don't want to create the reaction that several people have had to This Boy  and have them feel sorry for us, or feel how courageous we were to overcome our back ground, or think we were deprived. It was home, a place where we had the love of our mothers and the wisdom of our fathers. We were sorry for those who lived in ten room mansions with a governess, who barely saw their mother and whose fathers were remote figures they barely knew, and who had to go to boarding school and fag for bullies. Our common room was the moorland where the larks spiralled up into the sky singing a welcome, or the field above which the lapwing was doing acrobatics in the air, or the wood where the deer and rabbits lived and where you might glimpse a fox sneaking along or hear the rooks argue. It wasn't deprived, it was home!

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On wet days we played inside. Bob’s parents had a chaise-long in the back room, one of those couches with an arm at only one end that you see Cleopatra lounging on to eat grapes. We tried sliding down the big arm but it was covered in a kind of velvet material and didn’t slip so we looked about for other things of interest.

In a drawer or cupboard, Rob found an officer’s revolver from the Great War but, fortunately, there was no ammunition – sooner or later, we’d have tried a shot, maybe at the farmer’s bull in the empty field behind the houses. How Rob’s dad had acquired it we never found out but his dad had been wounded at the Somme and there was a copy of a newspaper picture of him being guided to the ambulance that I’ve seen in books and on TV now and then.

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Ice cream in Cairndhu

Ice cream in Cairndhu. When the summer came, I remember standing with Rob staring through the big plate glass window into what we called the milk bar, where they sold Ice Cream. We didn’t have money for ice cream so we were just staring in. Inside, a wee lad called Pat was leaning over the high counter watching the old man who owned the place make ice cream.

The ice cream machine was like a deep mixer with a sort of bin that they poured the ice cream mixture into and it went round and round until it was properly chilled. The bin was then taken out and put into the refrigerated hole they served the ice cream from.

In any case, Pat Broon had a school cap on and, as we watched, his cap fell off into the mixer. I’ll never forget the look of absolute disgust and frustration on the old chap's face as looked at Pat, shut down the mixer and delved into it to get the cap out.

He pull out the cap and slapped it, full of ice cream, on to Pat’s head. Pat started to howl and rushed out of the shop and ran away down the street.

We watched him go.

‘I don’t know what he’s bubblin’ about,’ Rob said. ‘He got all that ice cream for nothing. He might have stopped and let us have a lick.’

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Cairndhu and Tom Sawyer

Cairndhu and Tom Sawyer - It snowed, proper snow, deep and soft and all the bairns went sledging in the steep field just up the hill from our new house. It had a fence round it but the fence was in poor repair, posts missing and wires hanging all over the place. I just ignored it.

I’d borrowed my absent cousin’s sledge, a lassie’s thing, not the long one I could lie flat on that my dad made from thick planks with runners from the blacksmith,short and I sat up like a girl as I went racing down.

It was grey and driech, I don’t know a decent English translation for that, dismal, isn’t strong enough. Anyway, things like fence wire were invisible and I’d forgotten about it until the fence took me by the throat and I recovered staring up at a boy with dark curly hair, who asked, ‘Did you no’ see the wire?’

My throat was too sore to answer.

That’s how I met Rob, my own Tom Sawyer and became a kind of cleaned up Huck Finn. His sledge was a high carpet covered machine, a real super-de-lux sports model that was the fastest in the village, Rob told me that, so it was true. He took me in hand and, as he raced down, I sat on his back and fell off laughing as he made a sharp left turn just before the fence. 

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Our house looked out over the end of the tarred road; beyond us there was only a farm road. It looked as if it had been Macadamized with bigger stones below fine grit when the Douglas estates had kept what was known as the Mountain Drive in repair but it had deteriorate over the years. Anyway, beyond the road was a fence, then a burn and then the open field, green when it was used for pasture, dark brown and full of good humus when plowed golden brown and full of the rattle of corn crakes when hay or the corn was waving. Beyond the field was a wood of deciduous trees. Just in front of the wood was the mine dump. It wasn't large nor did it intrude on the view, it was just there. The field sloped to the left at a shallow gradient but on the right, or top side, it increased quite suddenly and that's where the other children were sledging when it snowed and I met Tom Sawyer.

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I remember taking an oath to myself that instead of finding the new friends my parents had obviously promised I would make at our new home, I would remain loyal to the two wee boys I had been friends with. My mother tried her best and invited the daughter of a bowling friend of Dad's to come to play. She had red hair and was a bossy boots and all it taught me was to beware of red headed women and bossy girls. I still spent time at my grandparents because Dad had to help with the tomatoes, the chickens and the big garden but I began to lose touch with the other two. Then it snowed! 

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Normally stories about mining communities are doom and gloom. I don't remember the one I grew up in being like that and I want to give you a feeling for what it was like growing up in a place like the fictional Cairndhu. My earliest memory is of making my way from my grandparents house where we had been living, to our own house about five minutes walk away. Both were council houses, my grandparents semi detached and had been home to them and their four children. Two rooms and a boxroom upstairs, front room and kitchen downstairs with a coal cellar and bathroom with running water and a flush toilet. Our own was two rooms and a kitchen with a coal cellar and bathroom, also flush toilet. The back room was big enough to take two double beds and still leave space to move around in. The kitchen had a small pantry, the sinks, the hot water tank and a clothes boiler which I think had been fired by coal and the flue connected into the chimney from the big black range in the front room. My mother did everything on that range, cooking, baking, frying, making jam, everything. It was always lit because it heated the water and there were no showers in the small mines around the village until the mines were nationalised. Dad would come in black from underground and bath before he ate, He never ever sat down to eat dirty.

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I've been under stress with a winter cold and feeling like little more than boiling an egg and I'm repeating what I wrote in the Welcome to Oakhaven blog but I'm rather excited about Bees in my Bonnet being published on Amazon. The short stories were in my files and I decided to clear up. Broon would enjoy one or two of the tales, especially the last tale in the book. The blurb ffrom the back says "Reading the stories in Bees in my Bonnet you see glimpses of life, like being at a big wedding. The bride is lovely but will she become like her mother. The Best Man can't make up his mind which of the two bridesmaids to dance with. You get an unexpected grin from a grumpy old man and hear a child giggle somewhere."

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Since the market garden was sanctioned and even promoted by Miss Kirkwood, Broon feels he will not be expected to make a major contribution on the Flower Show committee but Miss Kirkwood is determined he will do his duty and continue to be a leading figure in the community. It was he who talked to the other villages about having a premier league competition between the best from each village and they, especially the snobby Cluggie people will not allow him to let things just drift and melt away. Nor is Cluggie, in their opinion an appropriate name. One of the houses is called Dalriada and with several new mansions being built beside it, they feel it reflects the character of the village more appropriately. The locals still remember it being little more than a blacksmith's house and smiddy, or, as the Cluggies refer to it, a smithy.

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I've been taking my books to a local market and was asked if I'd be prepared to be a committee member. I agreed but it seems there are some reservations. One of the present committee read Best in Show and, while they enjoyed it, after reading the Flower Show Committee scenes, is worried the Market Committee will appear in another volume. Despite a firm resolve to avoid using friends and acquaintances as characters, traits and little idiosyncrasies are what make a character believable and the only knowledge I have of those comes from watching people. Broon, for example, is a conglomeration of many people and his attitudes and reactions come from memories of a mixture of people in the circumstances he finds himself in. I suppose it is the amalgamation of several people's personalities that gives each character complexity and depth. Jinks isn't always a joker, nor is Gillespie without some saving graces, he is married to Betty after all.

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I thought it was time to make a start, so the first 500 words of the sequel are written and, of course, Broon is being rushed into something with his usual, Dalmighty, what does she want now? They've gone to look at the bramble patch and found the brambles are ripe and the young ones will be organised to pick them.

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In the woods

IN Cairndhu, Broon will still be reluctant to go and dig over the bramble patch in the sleet but Spring is on the way and the snowdrops are out, reminding me of days in the Cairndhu area courting my wife.
The spring is coming,
I see it in the morning,
Snowdrops white among the trees,
Yellow tips on daffodil spears,
They'll soon bloom,
I see them from my room,
But still I long,
For the blackbird's morning song,
Memories of woodland walks and dreams,
And everything love means.

I love pictures like the one below. What is in that hole? A mouse or a hedgehog?

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I had a nice complement about Best in Show the other day. An acquaintance told me he was enjoying the book, he doesn't read much these days but the short episodes with something always happening is ideal for him. Not only that, the names are easy and he doesn't have to turn back to fins what Solzetchovic did, or who his uncle was. I prefer that kind of comment to being nominated for some high literary reward. Literary novelists write caviar, I write porridge, porridge is for everyday. I'd still like to get a literary agent, though, as a salesman I am a good gardener. I tried to get a local picture to add to this but with this snow - and it's just powder puffs, but cold I've put in one of a King Protea from Pniel, near Cape Town.

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