A Rowan Tree In My Garden Day 61

I was absolutely stunned by the spectacle of it all and thought: why on earth should we want to move away from the country of our birth?

One half went to the Mediterranean where many ships were sunk and the other, which included the ship Ronnie was on, sailed to South Africa where the sailors were treated with great kindness by the South African people. Later he was transferred to the Greek navy. Ronnie was good at telling a story and often had me laughing at his exploits while there.

The Greek navy was a whole different concept from the British Navy where discipline was strict.

Here the Greek captain would shout down orders to the engineers and, more often than not, they would come up on deck to argue with him.

Sometimes a fight would break out aboard ship and dangerous looking knives and axes appear.

On these occasions Ronnie said that he would always lock himself in his tiny cabin with his rations of oranges and sardines and wait until everything calmed down.

All sorts of things happened while he was serving in the Greek navy. Once, his ship got tied up in its own boom.

Sometimes, when they were in waters where mines were a threat, if someone so much as dropped a fork, the sailors would all jump overboard thinking that they had hit a mine.

The vessels that he was on were none too sea worthy and always in danger of breaking down or sinking. “I’m really very lucky to be alive,” he would tell me. “So many ships were sunk, so many sailors drowned. My strategy was always to do what I was asked to do and never to volunteer for anything. I trusted to fate and it paid off. Here I am today.”

Unexpected

One cold January day after I had started my part-time work in outpatients, Ronnie made an unexpected visit to see me at home in Wormit where I was now living again.

With him he had a selection of diamond rings for me to choose from. I knew that any one of them was more than he could afford but he insisted, “I want you to have the best,” he said. I chose a cross over diamond ring set in platinum. We began to make plans for our wedding day.

The sleek Allard sports car, silver and with a long nose, raced along the April roads early one Saturday morning.

Ronnie had met me off the first train from Fife and was taking me to see a farm on the Sidlaw hills. His father had lent him the car for the day.

The usually busy, narrow Carse road, that was fast becoming totally inadequate for the amount of traffic now using it, was quiet at this time on a Saturday morning.

The excitement was all in the air as a splash of silver rain battered the windshield even while the sun shone with that clear, brilliance found on April mornings.

The sun deuked and dodged round rain clouds. If it did get lost for a short while, behind a cloud, it shone all the more brilliantly when it came out again, glittering on every short green spear of rain-rinsed wheat.

Sitting close to the man I loved and was soon to marry, I was enchanted by the early morning light and the landscape we whizzed past: the white farm houses; the emerald crops of wheat, sown in winter time, and contrasting with fields of brown earth waiting for the barley seed.

Racing along

Ronnie was racing along, just a little too fast, and the nose of the Allard started to wobble.

I did not care about that – this was living, this was excitement, this was fun; something I hadn’t experienced before.

Halfway to Perth we slowed down to turn off the main drag on to a minor road that led up into the hills.

At first it was fairly level but, after we passed the small village of Rait, almost lost in a tree-lined dip and dissected by a purling burn, we started to climb in earnest, snaking our way up a steep hill road at what I considered to be an alarming rate for a road with so many sharp corners.

Ronnie turned to me laughing. “Fun isn’t it?” he cried, “This bit of the road is called the Swirl and that steep hillside to the left is Shanry land.”

I looked at it with interest and liked what I saw; a hillside sparsely covered with old Scots pines whose red bark shone in the early morning sun. “There looks to be a lot of it,” I said. “I thought you told me it was a small place that would be difficult to wrest a living from.”

When he had told me about it I imagined the 12 acres of land we had farmed at Westburn.

“It is small,” he said, “small for a sheep farm. It is only 350 acres and at the very top of the Sidlaws; you can’t graze many sheep on that acreage, not with all the rabbits that are around.”

I looked more closely and noticed that part of the hillside resembled an enormous riddle with rabbits moving everywhere or sitting at the entrance to their holes enjoying the sunshine.

I was very shortly to forget all about rabbits when, driving over the brow of the Swirl Head, we were confronted with the most amazing panoramic view.

Away to the north, far across a vale of greening fields, stretched a wide sweep of mountains; the beginning of the vast Highlands of Scotland.

Ronnie stopped the Allard briefly to point out some of the distant peaks.

“See that one far to the north, a perfect peak drawn on the skyline,” he said, “that’s Schiehallion, the fairy mountain as the Gaels call it.

Stunned

“To the east of it are the mountains of Glenshee: to the far west,” his pointing finger travelled along the horizon, “that could be Ben Lawers.”

I was absolutely stunned by the spectacle of it all and a thought shot through my mind; why on earth should we want to move away from the country of our birth?

What could Canada or anywhere else, for that matter, have to show us more fair than this, as Wordsworth would have put it?

The spring sunshine showed up clearly and precisely the amazing contours and colours of a sparsely inhabited vale in all its greening glory leading to the strange grey-blue of distant mountains still streaked with snow.

Ronald, sensing what I was thinking, brought me back to earth. “It doesn’t always look so good,” he broke into my enthusiastic wonder.

“Sometimes, especially in dull weather, it is all plain grey as far as the eye can see and you can’t see the mountains for mist.” (More tomorrow.)