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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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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