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.

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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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