Erhalten Sie Zugang zu diesem und mehr als 300000 Büchern ab EUR 5,99 monatlich.
- Herausgeber: Old Pond Books
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
This title presents a series of childhood memories which are nostalgic, amusing and full of warmth. There were four children in this farming family, three boys and their younger sister, who often courted unintentional disaster at the hands of her brothers. Join Andrew in his reminiscences of Sunday school, school reports, secret hideouts and an almost-serious farm accident.
Sie lesen das E-Book in den Legimi-Apps auf:
Seitenzahl: 158
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2009
Das E-Book (TTS) können Sie hören im Abo „Legimi Premium” in Legimi-Apps auf:
Ähnliche
We Waved to the Baker
Tales of a rural childhood
Andrew Arbuckle
Illustrated by Graham Lang
Old Pond Publishing Ltd
Dedication
To John, Willie and Gina who shared in these adventures
Contents
Two Views from a Window
TODAY, as I sit down in my chair by the window, the river is full, sluggish and slow. That is its present mood. Over the past sixty years, I have watched the River Tay put on many different performances. It may be Scotland’s largest river, but on the lowest of tides it shows off its undergarments, the many sand and mud banks, as if some great sea god has pulled the plug. Then with a change of moon and tide, it can look massive and majestic, lipping over onto the rich farmland along its banks. I once farmed that land and so I recognise the truth spoken by a king of Scotland that this narrow strip of land between the river and the hills behind is a ‘fringe of gold’ around Fife. I see the fields where, before my working life, my father tilled the land with the large number of workers that were needed for the hardworking farming that existed half a century ago.
I close my eyes a little more and, slipping back into the softness of the armchair, distance myself from the immediate issues of my day. Daydreaming is one of the joys of life and I have at least sixty years of experience in doing just that, quietly closing the rest of the world off and thinking my own thoughts.
Today I see a small gaggle of school children walking along the quiet country road in front of my house. The road connects the farms that lie along the fertile strip of land bounded in the north by the river and in the south by a low range of hills. The children are dressed in the sturdy clothes that youngsters wore in the 1950s and, as they did in those days, they carry their school bags on their backs. Looking in one direction I see the farms where their mums and dads work and where they themselves live and play. Turning in the opposite direction I see the local primary school. It is a small, single-teacher school standing alone in the countryside, built to educate the children of the parish; a parish with only the church and the school as the social centres of its life. I see the children on their way home from a day spent learning the basic rules of spelling, grammar and sums. Having filled their heads with the no-frills education of the day, they are heading back to their no-frills homes in farm cottages or farm houses.
Home and school form the two points in the world of these children and every day, apart from school holidays, they meander to and fro between these two hubs. As they travel along they never form an orderly group. Sometimes one or two race ahead and jump on the fence wires along the road sides. Some are chatting to each other, no doubt relating stories of homework, playtime and school. Further back, there is a straggler with his school bag slipping further and further down his back, weary from the effort of a day’s learning.
Suddenly there is a commotion. One small boy, with straw-coloured hair that may have been brushed at one point in the day but is now very unkempt, has picked up a large stone at the road side and is creeping up to one of the girls who is unaware he is behind her. Quietly he tries to slip the heavy stone into her school bag. His practical joke is about to be achieved when another of the small gang alerts the intended victim. With his prank foiled, the scruffy little boy moves away from the rest of the group. He seems to be dreaming, dreaming no doubt of other mischievous tricks to play….
I was thinking that this was a rather good trick to play on Mary. If Cathie had not told her, then Mary would have gone home complaining about how heavy her school bag was and, even if I had not been there to see it, her mum would have opened the bag and found this big stone. I would have liked to have been there when that happened, but Cathie spoiled it.
What can I do now? I do not fancy jumping on the fence. I did that yesterday and Dad did not seem to appreciate my stories of how bouncy the wires could be. He said something about loose fence wires letting his sheep out onto the road and I would have to catch them if they escaped. I know it is not much fun to chase sheep as they seem to be particularly stupid animals and never do what you would like them to do.
I could go and check in the hedge to see if the blackbird is still sitting on her nest with four eggs in it, but Mum warned me to leave the nest alone so that the little birds can hatch out. Mostly I do what Mum says.
I could just go away and think, because when I close the rest of the world off I can just think my very own thoughts. Mrs Armstrong, my teacher, is always giving me a row for doing this. She says I am daydreaming and I am not paying attention. Teachers seem to know a great deal but they do not know about thinking. Often I am thinking about the tractors on my Dad’s farm, or I am thinking about whether Mrs Armstrong will realise I have not finished doing my sums or spelling. Sometimes I am thinking about what games I will play when I go home tonight or what ploys I will get up to during school playtime tomorrow.
Just right now I am thinking I see an old man. He seems to be looking at me from his armchair, seated by the window in his little house. His face is wrinkly like old people’s faces seem to be. His hair is sort of grey but it looks as if it was once straw coloured. It is rather untidy hair and I wonder if his Dad used to comb his hair when he was small like my Dad does to mine every day before I go to school.
If I listen, I think I can hear the old man’s voice and he is saying, ‘Remind me of the games and fun I used to have. Tell me the stories of growing up in the countryside fifty years ago, where men worked on farms and where youngsters played around farm buildings and local countryside.’
I think I might just do that.
Our Secret Hideout
THERE was no doubt it had a commanding view. Several hundred feet below us at the foot of the hill lay Dad’s farm. We could see exactly what was going on. My two brothers, John and Willie, and I could see the farm house where we lived. We could even see the washing blowing on the clothes line. John reckoned this was good because Mum could secretly send messages to us by hanging out the washing in a certain way. He had seen this in a comic he had read and he claimed it had worked.
Beyond the farm, the view was dominated by the River Tay. At this point it is tidal, constantly moving from being a full, fat, mile-wide river at high tide, to a patchwork of sand and mud banks at the other point of the moon’s pull. From our vantage point, we could also see across the river to the Sidlaw Hills and the flat Carse of Gowrie land where, on Sundays, we could often watch men parachute jumping from a big balloon tethered at the airfield. Dad called this a barrage balloon and said the soldiers were practising, just in case there was another war.
Back on our own side of the river, we could monitor the coming and going of vehicles along the quiet country road that runs parallel with the Tay. We reckoned the site we had selected as a secret hideout was ideal.
My brothers and I chose an ash tree that grew at the side of the wood. Halfway up its trunk two branches grew out horizontally and these, we decided, would form the platform of our highly secret monitoring operation.
The need for secrecy and guarding our property was obvious. As children brought up in the years following the Second World War, we listened to adults as they talked about the possibility of an enemy invading our country.
We reckoned that, as small boys, it was up to us to be ready to defend our country against this threat. We told ourselves the secret hideout was no game. Many of the men on the farm still wore khaki trousers and jackets from their days in the army or as volunteers in the Home Guard. When they stopped their work and sat down for a rest to eat their pieces of bread and jam and to pour hot tea from their Thermos flasks, they often spoke about being in the army. We listened to stories of how on one Home Guard practice night, the shepherd had managed to pull the pin out of a grenade but then let it fall at his feet instead of lobbing it away as far as he could and how his life had been saved by a quick-witted officer picking the bomb up and throwing it away. The men said that this all happened in my primary school where the Home Guard met every week to practise being soldiers instead of farm workers. When I heard this, I wondered if it would not have been better to let the grenade go off and blow up the school.
John, Willie and I listened to other stories about the sentries guarding our country and falling asleep at night after working all day at the harvest. We heard how officers would come out from the towns to instruct the local Home Guard; although we heard the men say that these people just liked bossing the local workers around.
The men pointed out to us where a barrel of fuel had been stored behind a big tree that grew at the roadside so that when the German tanks came along our country road this would be tipped into their path and set alight. Thus the invading army would be stopped in its tracks. I would have liked to see that, but it never happened and when I looked, all that was left of the booby trap was a flat concrete base.
Even if the enemy came in by plane they would meet resistance. The farm workers pointed out where telegraph poles had been strategically placed in all the flat fields by the Home Guard to prevent the enemy gliders floating quietly in out of the night sky.
By this time the men had a captive audience and they elaborated on how they used to fire at enemy bombers flying over to the big industrial towns in the West of Scotland. Just before they went back to work, one of the men looked at the river and said, ‘That’s where they will come in.’ This left us boys believing that such a possibility really existed. That was why we needed a secret hideout, so that we would be ready for any invading force.
Neither John, Willie nor I ever actually got around to working out why any enemy would come to our particular rural part of the country, remote as it was from any strategic or economic centre.
However, we raced back to the farm to get the necessary tools and material for making the hideout. There were old wooden battens in the wood pile but they looked too heavy to carry back up the hill and we decided to pinch some much lighter spars from a broken gate instead. Then it was round to the tool shed to borrow a saw, hammer and a handful of nails. The men were working around the farm but we could not reveal our plans lest they were caught and tortured by the invading enemy and forced to reveal the whereabouts of our hideout.
Some of our enthusiasm wore off as we lugged this load of building equipment back up the track that meandered up the hill. We had read that those who had climbed Mount Everest had made several camps en route, so we had several stopping points for rest. However, we eventually got all the gear up to the selected tree and started to build our hideout. In addition to hammering in a few nails for steps up to the branches we then cut down a few smaller branches to give an unimpeded view down river. Next, the flooring was laid, though that may sound grand for the half-dozen pieces of wood that were put down and then nailed together. We soon had a bird’s-eye view of our small world. Willie was the first look-out and he soon reported seeing the baker’s van turning into the farm, then stopping at the farm house. Rather traitorously, I wished I had asked Mum to buy my most recent favourite food, a raisin-filled slice of cake that the baker called a ‘fly cemetery’. This was rather a strange name because I never saw any dead flies when I was eating it. I was feeling hungry but John said, and it must have been true as it was also in my comics, that soldiers in the armed services often went hungry. I resolved to leave a ‘fly cemetery buying’ message the next time I had to be on sentry duty on the same day as the baker’s van was due.
As our hideout building was carried out in the quietness of the summer, when crops were growing and harvest was still a month or so away, the men were doing odd maintenance jobs around the farm. We could see them checking out machinery, getting it ready for the busy harvest period. We could also see others painting the shed doors and roof-gutters around the steading, as this was required by the landlord of the farm.
Our first surprise sighting was seeing the farm student who had been despatched to clear out the guttering on the roof of the main part of the farm steading. Out of sight of the farm grieve he seemed to be lying back motionless on the roof pantiles. We could not see if his eyes were open, but we noted down in our spy notebook that we suspected he had fallen asleep.
That was the excitement of the secret hideout. After another day or two looking in vain for an invading army that never seemed to come over the horizon, we grew tired of all the vigilance and gradually forgot our secret.
At least we forgot about it until several months later in our Christmas holidays when we were despatched to help the cattleman feed the cows grazing the field on top of the hill. As we bumped up the farm track sitting on top of a load of turnips, we looked up at the hideout. The ash tree had shed its leaves so our secret was cruelly exposed to friend and foe alike.
Sunday School
THREE large pennies were clutched in each of our little hands. There were four of us: my little sister Gina, older brothers John and Willie, and me. Between us we had one shilling which we thought might have bought a considerable amount of chocolate or sweeties the next time the grocer’s van came to the farm.
However, Mum had already allocated the money. ‘There is one penny for the bus to the church, one penny for putting in the church collection plate and one penny for the bus coming back,’ which, I quickly worked out, meant we were financially no better off at the end of our regular Sunday morning trip than we were before it. Mum assured us we would be better children after the minister spoke to us at Sunday school, but I did not see how that could be.
We really were well behaved as we waited for the bus. This was partly because the stern warnings from Mum about looking after our good Sunday clothes were still ringing in our ears and partly because where we stood to get the bus was still very much in view from the kitchen window.
The bus rattled to a stop and the door was opened by the conductress, who seemed to resent small people boarding her bus as it interrupted her quiet peaceful Sunday morning run in the country. She did, however, come back to where we were sitting in the bus and by turning a handle on her little ticket machine she soon produced tickets in exchange for our proffered pennies. We then played at sliding back and forth along the wooden-sparred seats. The spars were quite slippy from the many hundreds of bottoms which had sat on them and occupied our minds until the conductress pressed the bell and shouted, ‘Flisk Church.’
