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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