Around the Rowan Tree, Day 14

The children in their wild excitement at being in a new place always seemed to want to throw themselves off a mountain or into a ravine or find a boat with a hole in it

For all the good sides of Clunes I was glad just the same when it was not available for rent the next year. It had been fun but a lot of work as well. Next year we found another place from The Courier. Further away this time, in the West Highlands on the Morvern peninsula. “Further to go but only three bedrooms, Margaret,” said Ronald.

This place suited us to perfection. It was quite a bit off the beaten track with single track roads and passing places leading to the village of Lochaline.

Not long after we arrived for our break someone said to us: “Oh so you’ve come back to visit your old home have you?”

We didn’t know what he was talking about. We asked him what he meant. “Your name is Gillies, isn’t it? Well you’ll find a lot of the people here are also called Gillies; Gillies or Laurie.

“That is because they are the people who are left of those evacuated from St Kilda in the 1930s.”

The man explained that the people were brought to what was thought to be one of the quietest and most remote parts of Scotland so that they would feel more at home.

Forgotten

Many of them, unfortunately, died of tuberculosis. “Your house, Larachbeg, I think I am right in saying, was built for them. Certainly they lived in it.”

We all loved Lochaline. Ronald took the boys fishing in the forgotten hill lochs, while I lay in the sun in the wild grassy garden that someone had once loved with its diverted burn, old apple tree, irises and rhododendrons.

Overhead flew innumerable, huge dragonflies with gold and black striped bodies, for all the world like small helicopters.

There were plenty of birds and butterflies for me to watch, always a hobby of mine, and there were walks round the loch to the ruined castle of the Lord of the Isles. Half way along there was an abundance of fossils.

Down on the beach too there were all sorts of rock pools for the children to watch and study.

When you first approached them all was still but if you sat quietly for a while all sorts of shells and things began to move.

We’d break off a stem of sea thrift and tickle the ruby red sea anemones into spreading out their numerous arms, fooled into thinking that the tide was coming in with more food.

The children were fascinated and spent hours on the rocks.

At lunchtime we would sometimes have a bite to eat in the one and only hotel, always an excitement for children, eating out with sometimes an impromptu concert thrown in, given by the local lads playing fiddle, accordion and mouth organ.

My definition of a good holiday was to get everyone back in one piece.

The children in their wild excitement at being in a new place always seemed to want to throw themselves off a mountain or into a ravine or find a boat with a hole in it that would sink. But, in spite of everything, I enjoyed these holidays.

When the children were all young, like mothers everywhere, my own forms of recreation were pretty thin on the ground. I read about people who didn’t think they were fully stretched.

That was never my complaint.

Stretched

I always felt fully stretched with little ones at home. They seemed to sense the moment you weren’t thinking about them and act accordingly so I didn’t even read much until after Kathleen went to school.

But I did have some simple things that gave me a lot of pleasure.

“I’ve got a surprise for you,” said Ronald to me one day, not long before Lindsay was born. “It’ll maybe arrive when I’m down the fields ploughing, that’s why I’m telling you. Don’t send it back, it’s for you.”

And come the surprise did, in a big white van. I could hardly believe my eyes when the driver pulled out an expensive-looking pedigree pram.

It was a beautiful shape – cream inside, black outside with a white flower pattern in the centre; a roomy pram with large wheels.

I had mentioned to Ronald I would need some kind of a pram but never expected this aristocrat. For the first three boys I had an old pram lent to me by my sister-in-law and for the Canada babies a small buggy type needed for travelling, but this was beautiful.

“It’s lovely Ronald,” I said when he came back home giving him a hug. “What a surprise, but can we afford it?”

“If I can borrow for a new tractor I can borrow for a pram,” he said. After Lindsay was born, whenever I could manage it, I was off wheeling the pram the two miles to Errol, showing off my gorgeous new baby. The roads were quiet in those days and at certain times of the year the countryside was beautiful with fields a brilliant emerald or rustling cloth of gold.

Errol was a typical Scottish village. It was built on one of the few bits of high ground, or Inches, as they are called, that rose out of what had once been marshland.

A hill ran up to the village passing the garage, the school, a mansion house in its policy of trees, and three other substantial houses in which lived the banker, the doctor and the headmaster.

To the right lay the church which I always thought was a handsome edifice, although some people told me the architecture was all wrong: “Too many different styles all welded together”.

Mellow tones

I liked it, especially its tall square tower that could be seen for miles, at the top of which was a clock that rang out the hours in mellow tones.

Sometimes, when the air was still at midnight, we could hear it down at the farm two miles away. Further to the right stretched the large tree-lined park with its view towards the hills.

It could be cold there when a wind was blowing. On the day of the annual school sports there was often a wind blowing.

The narrow road to the village rounded a bend at the small post office and continued on up past plain two-storey houses and shops built of stone, brick or clay, many of which were covered in harling in different shades of grey or beige.

The pavements were narrow and there were no gardens at the fronts. Near the top of the village was the cross marked by a unicorn.

More tomorrow.