We all liked to be beside the sea
Tortuous car journeys. Packed ferries. Then blissful weeks of picnics, rockpools and reading. Fair Fortnight once triggered an exodus to the Highlands and Islands — now many of us are about to rediscover the joys of a Scottish staycation...
For many, if not most, of us, vacations this year will be a revival of the Fifties. Flying is going to be a costly, unpleasant business for the foreseeable future. Quite a few countries will not let us in – though it hardly matters when Nicola Sturgeon, right now, will not let us out.
All the Americas are off-limits, if you value your life – and we still are not allowed near hairdressers and the inevitable question, ‘Going anywhere nice for the holidays?’ – though it is probably just as well when most of us do not know.
After decades when many of us have thought nothing of flying abroad to somewhere pleasant two or even three times a year, 2020 is going to be the summer of the staycation. For the older, it will awaken, too, memories of past, exquisite social gradations – for where you went for rest and recreation said as much of your class, standing and income as your clothes.
Doctors and lawyers took a house in Tighnabruaich. For, say, teachers, there was Helensburgh, or the Isle of Arran.
If you ran a garage, it was Dunoon, and if you were the likes of a school janitor it was cheap and cheerful rothesay.
It was a very similar declension for Edinburgh (North Berwick, Largo, Musselburgh, Portobello) back in those days when Mum donned hat and gloves to go shopping and Dad wore a tie even on Saturday.
By the Seventies, for most, things had moved on, but my father was a Free Church minister and the Seventies, accordingly, were for other people. He had weathered the Sixties only by pretending they were not happening.
He also, being a Free Church minister, had high standing but no money. our holidays, then, summer after summer, was about a month on the Isle of Lewis, being passed back and fore between two pairs of grandparents, one of them born in the 19th century. But first, we had to get there.
For my mother, micromanaging a tenhour journey by land and sea from Glasgow for three small boys, her personal Free Church minister (and, one occasion, our hamster) must have felt like Hannibal preparing to traverse the Alps.
We always left on the Tuesday just after the middle of July – to the significance of that date we shall return – and the packing began on Monday afternoon, as my father retrieved the roof-rack from the garage rafters. I more than once tried to smuggle a bag of books, but was invariably foiled.
Our humble, mustard-yellow, limited-edition Jeans Beetle finally waddled off into Knightswood and to Great Western road so packed with our clothing and effects I could rarely move my feet – though that scarcely mattered in the early years, as my brothers and I were firmly doped with travel-sickness tablets.
Traffic levels under the Heath administration would now resemble the early weeks of lockdown, but to us the A82 seemed to be heaving as we did a stately 62mph along the terrible stretch by Loch Lomond into the unambiguous Highlands by Crianlarich.
The queue for the Ballachulish ferry was almost always too long for my father’s patience and, regardless of our wails, he would instead make a firm right turn and hurtle right round the loch by Kinlochleven. It only took 40 minutes, I think, to bypass the ferry, but to us it felt like an eternity.
Most of the road from Fort William to Kyle was boring, though that ferry could not be dodged, and so was most of Skye – which I have never thought much more than a knobby bit of land obstructing the free flow of waters in the Minch.
Finally, we reached uig for what MacBraynes then marketed as the ‘Hebridean Ferry.’ The good ship Hebrides was only two years older than me, but – with her teak decking and polished brass and little writing-tables and linoleum – had a distinct period feel. You could have filmed Murder on the orient Express aboard the Hebrides, though of course you could not have called it that. And boarding the ship was an issue in itself.
These days car ferries are characterless drive-through jobs with a yawning maw at each end. The Hebrides was a hoist-loader. A lift able to take four or five cars at a time went up and down, slowly, with an eerie hydraulic wail. When the tide was high and the traffic light she could turn around very quickly. When the tide was low and there were dozens of vehicles, it could take more than an hour.
By the time the Hebrides reached Tarbert, Harris – the poor old duck had the aerodynamics of a bungalow – it was invariably dusk.
In those days you were invariably struck by the prevalent peat-smoke, from every local hearth. We then had to negotiate what was then among the most appalling roads in Scotland – mostly single-track.
But at last – we competed as to who would sight it first – there was the little red light in the distance of the Lewis War Memorial.
We would skim what was then the edge of Stornoway and, five minutes later, we would be running down a path to fling ourselves into the arms of our paternal grandparents, who invariably remarked how much we had grown.
Nowadays, after such a journey, I would want to spend much of the following day repining in a dark room.
Back then, we erupted to life about seven in the morning. The first thing we clamoured
for was a tour of Stornoway harbour with Daddy (my mother really was repining in a dark room) and, that afternoon, we set off and across the island to the West Side and my other grandparents.
IT was like stepping back decades – little old bescarved ladies in black, a milk cow on every croft and, even then, many folk still living in traditional, thatched blackhouses.
The mid-July date was, of course, because of the Glasgow Fair. This was not a matter of carousels, hoop-la and a Ferris wheel.
Glasgow was still very much a manufacturing city and, rather than have one concern or another taking advantage of its competitors, it had of yore been agreed that every industry and trade that mattered shut down in its entirety for the last fortnight of July.
Such was the ensuing exodus that, well into the Sixties, what is now CalMac ordered practically their entire Clyde pleasure-fleet to Bridge Wharf and the Broomielaw for the first Saturday of the Glasgow Fair – and, at Ballachulish, all three little ferryboats (one was normally held in reserve) had to operate flat out all day.
We never travelled on that date, I think, partly because it was uncomfortably close to the Sabbath but also because it would have meant sharing the RMS Hebrides with most of my father’s congregation.
Partick Highland Free Church was born only in the 1920s and initially as a ‘mission’ for the hundreds of Lewis girls who, after the Great War, swept to the city and ‘into service’. By then, only Highland and Irish women were prepared for the long hours and scant pay of life as a maid, cook, or scullion; and, in that ugly age, most West End families would not dream of employing Irish.
But where Lewis girls are known to congregate, you quickly get Lewis lads – pouring into jobs in the docks, in the Albion motorworks, the Springburn locomotive works, the Meadowside Granaries, the cross-Clyde ferries and so on.
By the Seventies (when my father still had to hold three Gaelic services a week) there were many married couples, a second generation and the first smattering of a third, and attendances of 600 were not uncommon.
Except during the Glasgow Fair – when all services were held in the ‘Small Hall’, which easily accommodated 40 people, such had been the flight home to Lewis.
My memories in detail are, of course, typical only of a Glasgow Highland demographic that has now largely gone: even by 1980, most families in the congregation had moved out from Partick’s tenement canyons to the likes of Bearsden.
Yet I think all of us have very similar memories in principle.
The first is that, in those days, a holiday was essentially just a change of scene.
People did not, for the most part, loll about drinking and sunbathing (the latter something for which, in Scotland, we admittedly enjoy very little practice) and few could afford entertainments or were prepared to waste their money on them.
MY mother worked as hard as ever on Lewis. My father was always asked to preach somewhere, whether he wanted to or not. We ourselves took pleasure in such things as heading into town to see the ferry coming in, or enjoyed rather picnicky meals in the garden – hot, delicious Stornoway beef links in a roll – as the sun poured down.
The second was how a child then could find such joy in simplicity.
Even now, I could still quite contentedly spend hours on end on one of our glorious island beaches with a bucket and spade.
I loved everything about country life, its friendliness, its bustle, its Sabbath stillness.
More than once I helped bring the peats home, helped in haymaking, relished running to the top of the croft for the day’s milk from the cow next door (it was always warm, very creamy and in a redundant whisky bottle) and rejoiced feeding the hens and collecting their eggs.
But, until my teens, I struggle to recall any occasion when I ever had to spend any cash (and that was usually on the day we left, for in our final week we made the rounds of innumerable greataunts and grand-uncles and it was then the custom for doting old relatives to give a child, in such circumstances, some money).
Who needed money when the days were bright and long, there was the lonely moor to explore, hills to climb, rivers and lochs to fish and, at night, my grandparents and their tales?
THESE were replete with thumbnail sketches and deadly Highland understatement. ‘And so the child came to them on the boat from Kyle with a label round his neck like the chickens – ach, the poor woman, she wasn’t wise.’ And, always, something to read, even if it was only the Weekly News or the Woman’s Realm or – better – old cowboy stories acquired, long ago, by a late uncle of whom no one then spoke and I could scarcely remember.
And, third, the sheer and incredible freedom children everywhere then enjoyed – the more prized in an age when schooling was of a strictness, even a violence, today’s younglings cannot imagine. We had one standing order throughout the entire holiday, any school holiday, though it was frequently repeated regardless – ‘Away with you out from under my feet and don’t come back till dinnertime...’
In the autumn, there was brambling; by 13, I was confident enough to cycle way out into Yoker and enjoy the spectacle of the Renfrew ferry and its clanking chains – and this, surely, is what childhood should be: daily exploration from a safe base.
There were two important differences from our age, of course – in the Seventies, there were far more children in Scotland than there are now, as can be seen at a glance everywhere by all the shuttered or repurposed schools. There was also hardly any traffic.
By the time I was seven it was my job every weekday to go and buy the evening paper, quite alone.
That meant crossing Queen Victoria Drive – and, nearly 50 years later, I now quail when I have to cross it as an adult.
I do marvel, sometimes, recalling certain exploits, that I never drowned in the Knightswood burn, foundered in a bottomless Lewis bog, got marmalised by the ‘Blue Train’ – that I was never electrocuted, or assailed by a pervert.
Admittedly, that was an age of ‘Public Information Films’ pitched at children and deliberately calculated to scare the bejapers out of you. (I still cannot see a derelict car in a loch – still not uncommon in the Western Isles – without remembering the Spirit of Dark and Lonely Water, as so sepulchrally voiced by the late, great Donald Pleasance.)
I owe much to my schools. But I owe much, too, to how I was shaped, in mind and body and spirit and in abiding confidence, by all those distant days of holiday, in all their liberty and privacy – and, for the most part, without money and without price.