The epidemic of diphtheria hit the school in 1941. Diphtheria then was deadly. Now you had to pay a doctor’s bill in these days. And by this time there were nine of us going to the single little school, all my brothers and sisters going together. But because there were so many children actually sick with diphtheria, they closed the primary school. Now we ran through the village with our bare feet. ‘Little raggiemuffins’ they called us in the village. Our little friends, five of them went off to hospital with diphtheria. Two of my little pals never came back.
My mother had good friends in the village, but some people wouldn’t even talk to us. One particular woman, a Mrs Campbell, had two little boys. She was one who wouldn’t even look at you if you passed her on the street. She wouldn’t give you a crust. After the school had been closed, I walked down to the village this one day in my bare feet. She stepped out of the little cottage.
And she said, ‘Hello, good morning.’ I was amazed that this woman should even speak to me. She said, ‘How are you?’
I said, ‘I’m fine, Mrs Campbell. I’m fine, really fine.’
She said, ‘Are you pleased? Are you enjoying the school closure?’
I said, ‘Well, the school’s closed. We’re doing wir best to enjoy wirsels.’
She said, ‘Are you hungry?’
I said, ‘Of course, I’m hungry. We’re always hungry. My mother cannae help us very much.’
She said, ‘Would you like something to eat?’ Now I didn’t know, I swear this is a true story, that her two little boys were took off with diphtheria and sent to Glasgow to hospital. She said, ‘Oh, I have some nice apples. Would you like some?’ Now an apple to me was a delight. She said, ‘Come in, don’t be afraid!’ And she brought me into that house for the first time in my life, into the little boy’s bedroom. And there was a plate sitting by his little bed full of apples. He was gone. And she took the apples from that plate and gave them to me, three of them. She said, ‘Eat you this, it’ll be good for you.’ I didn’t know what she was trying to do. Because I was too young, only thirteen. And she was trying to contaminate me with the diphtheria because her two little boys were taken away. Because none of Betsy Williamson’s children ever took diphtheria. And that school was closed for five weeks. And everyone was saying, ‘Oh, have you got a sore throat?’
Then they began to realise, why were the travelling children so healthy? And they used to say, when my mother walked round the doors of the village, ‘What was Betsy Williamson – oh, Betsy Williamson must have superior powers. She must be collecting herbs or something in the woods and looking after children.’ You see what I mean? And some would say, ‘Oh, she must be some kind of a witch.’ And things were never the same after that, never the same.
We were nine children going to school. But if you were a mother with only three, and you lost two with diphtheria; and your neighbour next to you, all her children survived, you would feel very, very envious. You’re going to feel very broken-hearted that some children should survive and some children should not. And that woman who gave me that apple, she never, never spoke to anyone again as long as she lived. Not even me, not my mother, nobody. She never spoke to anybody at all, she went kind of crazy out of her mind. She lost her two little boys and went completely crazy. Her man about four years later fell over the quarry and was killed. Some said he threw himself over.
When my brothers and sisters and I were in the school we had to stand torment from the children and static, the teacher saying we were little tinker children. She didn’t pay as much attention to us as she paid to the rest of the kids in school. We weren’t even second class. We were just there – she had to teach us because we were there. She couldn’t have cared a damn whether we were or not. But we did not stay off school. Some of the local kids stayed off, when they took flu and sneezes, colds. But even though we were not feeling very well and we were hungry, we still went to school. The only reason we went was to get 250 attendance marks, each of us, so that we could get away with our daddy and mammy for the summertime. We got two attendance marks per day, and we did about five months in school, from October through till February. The more we attended school, the sooner we could get away. Once our Daddy knew we had got our attendance quota, he knew we could take off. He burned the big barricade and packed up the few things which we children could carry. Each one of us carried something. And this is what we looked forward to all year. We weren’t interested in getting our education in school. Education began when we left school: hunting, guddling for trout, camping by the seaside, cooking shellfish and having a long summer to go with our parents, go hawking with our mother round the doors and going round the fields with our father cutting a little hay. It was an exciting time.
We travelled all Loch Fyneside, down to Lochgilphead, down to Tarbert, up Kilmichael Glassary, round by Oban. We had the time of our life. Father would get a little job in a farm and we put our tent in the field. In these days the fields were full of rabbits and the burns were full of trout. But one thing Father was against was the standing stones, the Pictish stones. We were allowed to look at them, admire them. But we could not even put a hand on them. He wouldn’t even let us touch them. We were not allowed. It was a belief that had passed down from his generation, from his parents as a kid; he was taught to leave these things alone.
But I didn’t believe my father, so I climbed one of the stones. Right up to the top of the standing stone. I sat there in the sun. The camp was beside the stone. He wouldn’t put the tent too close to it, just within looking distance, about thirty yards from the stone. He admired the stones himself. I’ve seen him standing there with his hands at his back for hours looking at that stone. What he had in his mind I wouldn’t know. Looking at it for hours on end, staring and imagining. But then I sat up on top. Oh, I was the king of the castle, you know!
He said to me, ‘Boy, would you come down off of there!’
I said, ‘Why, I’m no doing any harm!’
He said, ‘Come down off that stone at this moment or something bad’s going to happen to you.’ This was the month of June. It was a warm summer. Father was cutting a little hay with a scythe. ‘Come down from there, boy,’ he said, ‘at once! And don’t you ever try that again.’
But anyway, I obeyed his order and I came down from the stone. ‘Now,’ he said, ‘when I get my hands on you, I’m going to put my belt across your backside.’ So I was a wee bit afraid. I wandered away. And the young corn was coming up. I sat down in the corn, next to the field where we stayed. And then I must have lain down, because I got sleepy. And the sun came up . . . and I was sun struck. They searched far for me. They thought I had fallen in the River Add that passed by. They thought I was lost. They shouted and cried. But I heard nothing. I was struck with the sun. And for two long months, June and July . . . it was the beginning of August, time to leave and go back home to Furnace again, get the tent built up and get us back to school. But my mother hurled me in a little pram. I can’t remember that; she only told me later. I was completely lost for exactly two-and-a-half months. Struck with the sun, and I was about seven years old.
Then, just before we came home to Furnace my brothers George and Willie were catching gulls. They never hurt them, but caught the white gulls that flew around. They had a piece of bread on a string. They tied it and scattered bread all around. The gull would come down and swallow the piece of bread tied to the string. There were no hooks or anything, so it wouldn’t hurt them. As the gull swallowed the piece of bread, within seconds he pulled in the fishing line and caught it. You petted the bird, looked at it and then set it free.
So I was lying out there in a little pram my mother had for me. I couldn’t walk, was completely lost, brain burned out with the sun. My legs were paralysed. My father and mother blamed it on the standing stones, the curse of the standing stones. The boys were catching gulls, and I saw this gull with a piece of line in its mouth. My two brothers were pulling the gull in, nothing to hurt it, pulling . . . And I opened my ey
es. I looked up and saw them catching this gull. Pulling it in, and that’s when I came back to my senses. After two long months. George was two years older than me, Willie was two years older than George. Nine and eleven they were.
Father had said, ‘These stones belong to your people, your people a long time ago. They put them there for a purpose, so that you would remember them. These stones are there for you to remember your people by, not to deface them, not to climb them, not to touch or do anything on them. Respect and love them, that’s what the standing stones are for.’ And Father would always make sure he would camp not far from some of the great standing stones. He would have no fear of burkers, no fear of ghosts or spirits that many people had in these days. He felt safe, as if that giant stone were looking over, guarding us children. The stone was looking over us. In the summer. And we always went back to the same place in the summertime.
Years later I was to spend time under the Pictish cairns by myself. But it was the lesson Father had said to us, ‘They’ll never hurt you, they’ll never touch you. Leave them alone, they will guard you, you will feel no fear. You won’t be afraid.’ Respect and love for these stones had been taught to him down through the ages. It was magical.
The end of October, that’s harvest time. Father would finish the corn cutting, and that’s when we went back to school. We came back a week before the end of the October holiday. You had to build the barricade tent, help Daddy get the sapling boughs for the frame, patch the covers, collect stones for the base to hold the covers tight. We had to build a winter home for ourselves in the wood. And Father needed all the help he could get. We had to go to another wood, cut saplings, build the barricade all over again. He couldn’t do it on his own. It took two weeks, and we came home in the middle of October. He knew once he had the tent up and everything fit for us, then we could go back to school.
He said, ‘Now, weans, it’s up to yourself. If you want a holiday next summer . . .’ I remember getting up in the mornings in winter. Mother and Father lying sleeping in their bed and we going to the burn, washing our faces, with our bare feet. No tea, no breakfast, nothing and we went to school. All because we needed that 250 attendance. But my daddy and mammy knew they were giving us an education we were never going to get in school, because they knew we were never going to go off to any high school or things like that. They knew what they were teaching us was going to stand us good in our lives to come. Now we could leave home: I ran away from home first when I was thirteen and by the things I learned travelling with my father and mother around Lochgilphead, I was able to cope with my life. I knew the farmers, I knew how to work on the farms, I knew how to cut peats. If I hadn’t done that 250 attendance in school, I would never have got the experience – freedom to learn from my parents.
But there was also the law that children were taken away from their parents if they did not attend school. If we had left school without the 250 attendance, we would have been arrested. It was law. The School Board would have come along, the Cruelty Inspector.
He said, ‘Have your children been in school?’
If Father had said, ‘No, they’ve never been in school.’
‘Okay, then, just a moment.’ The Inspector walked to the first old traditional phone box. He phoned up a taxi. And then you were gone! You never saw your parents again, never. There were hundreds of children taken off, some went to Australia, some to Canada, some went around the world, no one ever saw them again. And parents were never informed. They were taken to Industrial Day Schools – not only traveller children. But they were worse against the travelling children. If you were in a settled community you would be able to attend school some days in the weeks through all the school terms. But the travelling people travelled to find work, and never sent their children to school most months of the year. And anyone over the age of five without the attendance quota was taken off – you never saw them again. I had cousins who were taken away, whom I never saw again. My Aunt Nellie’s lassies.
Well, my father loved and respected his children, and he wanted to teach us to grow up to be natural human beings, learn the basic things of life he had learned as a child. He taught us about the standing stones, how to work in the fields, and gather stones. Oh, he couldn’t read or write himself, and he wanted us to be able to have these skills. But the teacher couldn’t care less whether we learned to write or read. And we didn’t wait till the school broke for a holiday. Once we got the attendance quota, we were off! Sometimes it was March, sometimes February. And this was the basic thing; Father knew the moment he took us off the school, we learned how to put up a tent, how to pick good dry grasses for our beds, how to gather firewood. When he got a little job, we went along and helped him with it. All the kids went and helped their parents every way; girls went with their mammies hawking round the doors.
We used to go up in the hills. Well, there’s a shortcut that takes you from Minard over the hill to Kilmichael Glassary, a twelve mile cross. And there in the middle of the hill is a sheep farm known as the Tunns. Old Duncan Stewart and his brother Hendry and sister Annie owned the farm. And we stayed there for a week, sometimes a fortnight. Mammy scrubbed the stairs and Daddy helped with the hay, cutting it with a scythe and building up little stacks. The Stewarts kept a couple of cows, and they had mostly sheep. And we would have the time of our life! There were fruit trees in the garden, and we cleaned old Annie’s garden. And she would bring us each big bowls of porridge. We slept in the byre, sometimes if the nights were cold. And she would sit there and milk the cow in the morning, ‘zing, zing, zing’ into the zinc pail, us lying in the stall among the straw, warm as pies, you know what I mean! And the big River Add ran beside us. We could guddle trout or poach an odd salmon. Daddy would dig the garden, cut the hay and trim the trees. He clipped the sheep with old Duncan and Hendry. Mammy scrubbed the kitchen floor. And they looked forward to this!
Old Annie would say, ‘Och, Betsy will soon be coming.’ And Annie Stewart kept a diary on every child that my mother had. And the sad thing was, even though Annie loved us all, Mother never called one of her children after her. And she always wanted one of Betsy’s kids to be called after her, old Annie Stewart. Mother called the children Susan, after another farmer’s wife, and Nellie, after someone else. But never ‘Annie’. Annie was her dearest friend. And Annie always looked forward to Betsy coming in the spring to clean the stairs and scrub the landing, help to clean up the kitchen and things like that. Because in these days things were really rough. It was a sheep farm away out in the countryside. And of course Hendry and Duncan waited until my father came before they started clipping the sheep. He helped them because he was a great clipper himself, rolling the wool, bagging it and doing all these things. But we never caused any problems around the farm, no way in this world.
It was a highlight for us visiting the farm, but it was always a highlight for them! Mother gave them the news. Because it was eight miles to Minard. Mother walked round the doors of the villages with her basket and she would talk to Mrs MacVicar or Mrs such-and-such and say, ‘Somebody’s ill’, and ‘somebody’s died’ and ‘the gamekeeper this’ and everything. She would bring the news to Annie. And she and Father would sit in the kitchen, have a wee drink together. They would have a wee talk and a wee ceilidh.
Mother would tell the news about Lochgilphead and Loch Fyneside.
And Annie would say, ‘What’s the next wean you have now, Betsy?’ She’d write it down, the date of birth, where it was born. But I was sorry my mother never called one of her nine lassies after old Annie. They practically reared us while we stayed there for two weeks. Because my father smoked a pipe, my mother smoked a pipe and Duncan and Hendry smoked tobacco. They used to buy the whole roll of tobacco so that the whole farm was self-sufficient. You had eggs, you had milk, you had porridge, you had tatties, vegetables, fruit from the trees, fish from the burn. You didn’t need anything else. And Father might work there for three weeks, and they gave him about five shillings a day. The
n we’d move down to Kilmichael Glassary and Father would buy himself a half bottle of whisky. He’d take out his pipes and play a tune. Granny would tell us stories. It was a wonderful way of life. Hard sometimes but wonderful.
If my father came at night and was too late to put the tent up on a farm where he worked, he never disturbed the farmer. He just walked into the shed, which was always full of straw, full of hay. Maybe he went into the byre. He had the freedom to go into the sheds and sleep. And Mammy could go the next morning with her big teacan and go to the farmer’s wife, get it full of tea made in the house and a big heap of scones. Then she would come and we’d be asleep in the shed. But what we hated was to hear the rain battering on the tin roofs – when we had to get up and go on our way! Oh, it was murder! Lying warm in a dry stall and the cow across from me, the cow chewing all night long. It lulled you, you know, chewing its cud, lulled you to sleep. We were so comfortable, just wanted to stay and lie on, you know. We’d have a couple of stalls in the byre full of hay and a couple of blankets, maybe a couple of shawls or something. Mother would have them thrown over us and we would lie there cuddled up. Father and Mother had another wee place by themselves. That’s when we were walking late on the road and we couldn’t see to put the tents up.
The Horsieman Page 3