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.

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

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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