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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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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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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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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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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