‘Well, Mister Mickey,’ he said, ‘I’m just getting the fire kindled. And I’ll come, I’ll gie ye a hand wi your horses.’
‘So we took all the horses and tied them to the hedge. And he took me in to make me some tea. I was badly needin it tae. And this bloody donkey! He had this bloody donkey, was a curse to me! So he gied me a good breakfast, a good tea. But he wanted a swap wi a donkey. So I had a braw wee pony, a wee Sheltie, the wee-est one of the lot. He had nae money. But I kent the old soul well. So he wanted a swap to the donkey. Noo I could barely refuse him after him giein me such a good breakfast in the morning. But havin a donkey wi eight horses on the road wasnae for me! Well, I said, “Look,” I tellt him straight, “you keep yir donkey! And tak that wee horse for the tea.” ’
Aye, old Tam told me that. He gave him his horse for his tea. But fifty shillings, three pound, five pound was the price of them then. I remember myself, I went to this farm over at Lochgelly, and all the money I had was fifteen pound. And I bought a two-year-old Clydesdale colt. And I knew I needed a pound for my messages. I got in touch with this farmer. I turned my pockets outside in to him and gave him a story. I left with that Clydesdale colt, and I had it for five years. I reared it up and it came into a beautiful animal.
I said, ‘Look, there all the money I have.’ I had one pound hidden in my shoe, for I was needing it for my messages that night. I said to him, ‘Look, if you find another penny in my pocket . . . you can have everything I’ve got for that horse.’ Now it took me about an hour to deal with this farmer. I said, ‘You can have everything that I’ve got within my possession if you’ll give me that colt!’
And he says, ‘It’s a deal.’ And his foreman was with him. I turned my pockets outside in. I counted my money, I had fourteen pound. He says, ‘Laddie, I couldnae dae it for fourteen pound.’
His foreman said, ‘Look, you tellt the laddie you’d take every penny he had, and he’s giein ye everything he’s got!’ And honest to God, I got it. Five years I had that horse. I took it to the market after that and sold it for thirty-six pound when I was finished with it. I used it, kept it a long, long time. And it was the only horse in my life I never tied up, wherever I went. It belonged to Edith, she was a wee lassie at that time, my firstborn daughter. That’s why I hung on to him so long. Edith could do anything with him. I’d sellt my pony the day before that for sixteen pound. I’d spent a pound for some messages, and I had the fifteen to go looking for a horse the next day. I got this beautiful colt, but it was unbroken, never was harnessed. Edith was about three years old, that was 1952.
But that winter when I was fifteen was one of the best I’ve had in my entire life. In the Hoolet’s Neuk in 1943. We wanted for nothing and there was plenty work to do. You had plenty camps to visit and plenty ceilidhs, plenty cracking and storytelling going on. Rabbie Townsley was a masterpiece at telling stories. It was good times there. And then you could walk to Dundee if you felt like walking for the pictures at night-time. But we never bothered going very often. Then there were the horses, the most important thing. You could go and yoke a horse anytime you felt like it and go for sticks. So I’d say, ‘Lend me your horse till I go for some sticks.’ Or if somebody yoked up and they were going some place, driving up to a cowp for sticks or driving to the town, going out hawking, you just jumped in the first cart.
I remember the first day I got to go with a horse myself. It was my mother’s cousin Jeannie, her laddie. Charlie had a white horse and everybody was away out hawking. He and I were left and we didn’t have any fags. I thought ‘If I had a horse . . . it’s a good bit.’ The first wee shop was down in the Murroes, about three miles away.
He says, ‘Take my horse and go for fags.’ Now I could yoke a horse or drive a working horse, but I had never had the experience of driving a trotting horse on the road myself on a gig or a trap. And it was a trap with high wheels. We yoked this white horse and he lent it to me to go to the shop.
It was about three months from the time I’d left my father and mother at Furnace, from the time Sandy tellt me about traveller laddies having their own horses, driving their own horses on the road. And I was really interested because I wanted a horse. A horse to a traveller laddie then was just the way a car is for a boy nowadays. Having a horse of your own gave you the feeling that you were growing up, you were getting somewhere. But Charlie really used the horse to shift with his mother, for his mother’s stuff, because he stayed with her and his sister. I was to spend another year with him after that. And he and I became great pals, great friends. We still are to this day.
And then I had to get a shot of Charlie’s horse again to go for sticks. And every time I wanted to go somewhere, I got a loan of it.
I was gaining the experience, because someday I hoped to have one of my own. Everyone there at the Hoolet’s Neuk had a horse, as I’ve said. They were all running in the fields, and you could go and help feed them, groom and brush them. And there were always other strange folk coming in with horses at the weekends looking for swaps and dealing. Not that you’d interfere when anybody went to have a bit swap or a deal, but we always gathered round this big fire and you heard what went on.
So there was plenty work to do there. It was a great winter, you always had a few shillings. You shawed neeps to the farmer. And the women were making a good living with the wooden flowers. These were a great go then and I learned to make them. You cut the elderberry into short lengths and peeled it, then heated it in the fire. Then you got an awfully sharp knife and made petals on the pieces of wood. The heart of elderberry is very soft and the women used to sit in the evening and make two or three dozen. The men would give them a help sometimes if there were nothing else to do, but it was mostly a woman’s job to make these flowers. Some were really good at them. They were white, like carnations.
The women would get dye, put it in a pot with hot water, and then dip these flowers. Sometimes only the petals, the points of the flowers, and sometimes the whole flower. Then they’d put them in a basket to dry, and they carried them in the basket to the town. They went to some house or a woman in the town.
They said to her, ‘Can I have some o yir privet?’ The green privet. They picked the long stems and stuck the points into the soft hearts of the flowers. They just looked so real.
Well, there was such a good trade with these flowers. There’s some folk making them yet. The sale of these flowers is as good today as it was then. Even with the plastic flowers in the market, all shapes of them, a lot of folk prefer the wooden flowers.
Then they would yoke their horse and drive for elderberry. You had some places you had to steal it, because the forests were private where the elderberry grew. You had to be careful where you cut it! It wasn’t good for anything, only a bush! And the travellers would never destroy bushes. They would cut the wee straight bits in the middle of the bushes. They wouldn’t slaughter the plant to get this elderberry. And the people who had houses in Dundee would come out to the country, some cycled out with a wee bag on their back to get elderberry for making flowers. The traveller women were getting six pence each selling them. I’ve seen them going to the town with five dozen apiece. Well, sometimes they gave them away for things too. It depended. If they wanted to they would sell them fast for money. Six dozen at six pence each, you could imagine how much foodstuffs you could buy for that eighteen shillings then!
And the thing was, the women bought the same amount each time they went to town, see what I mean! The average woman today may say, ‘I bought enough of this thing yesterday so I don’t need it today.’ But the traveller women never did that. Seven days a week they bought the same thing. It doesn’t matter how much was left, how much they bought the day before. Whatever was left at home, the kids who were at home or the men could use it up. That was it. And they had to wait until the women came home the next day.
Well, sometimes they bartered. They went through these second-hand shops. In these times we had rationing for five years after the war fini
shed here in this country. And a lot of things were scarce. Clothes weren’t scarce, but you needed coupons for them, and you only got a certain amount. So the traveller women traded the flowers for clothes and for old shoes. They collected them for about two or three hours, carrying them. And then they went to a certain place and picked all the best of them, put them in pairs. They had a brush and they gave them a bit clean up. Then they would go to a cobbler and sell the shoes, all in one day! Well, you see, two or three women always went together. If they camped together, maybe five women left the camp in the morning. They never took any buses or anything. They walked to the village. Maybe a man would walk with them for company if it was a wearying road. He maybe brought back a couple of pints of milk or a pack of fags to them who were at home. Because when they left in the morning about eight or nine o’clock, it was four or five o’clock before they came home at night.
If they had a big family, one of the older grown-up weans watched the younger children and the men went out and hawked with the women. The father went with his cart and hawked. But he would prob’ly save his stuff up for the end of the week. Well, the women never went anywhere on a Saturday. The man would prob’ly drive to the scrap store on a Saturday morning and sell his quota, whatever he got. And he would give her enough money to see her over the weekend. He kept the rest in his pocket. And she started on the Monday again. The women always supplied the foodstuffs, unless times were hard. If they were on the road moving, shifting, and the women had to stay on the cart and look after the weans, well, when it came late at night the man would give her a couple of pound for messages. Only in an emergency would he give her money. If she was able to look for it that day, she had to go and do it. She either had to sell baskets or sell laces, it was up to her to take care of the family – provide messages and things through the week, get food and get clothes. But not every woman! There were some of the men better at it than the women. Whoever was good at it did it.
In my time, when all the travellers camped together, I saw six or seven of us at home at the camp. We would sit at home and make baskets or make flowers, or else go out with the pony and gather old stuff (non-ferrous metals), gather rags and scrap and that, or go away looking for a swap or a deal with the horse to get a few pound. But the women still went to the houses. And if they got good clothes when they were collecting, if the clothes suited their family or suited their man, they brought them back. They would never sell anything that was good for their family. So these were the things I was learning, forbyes being there, at the Hoolet’s Neuk.
While we were staying at the Hoolet’s Neuk, it was not unusual for some of us to drive our carts for twenty miles in the morning and twenty miles home at night to shaw neeps on a farm. We brought back hay and tatties. Usually somebody would pick the fastest horse then and drive to the town and pick up the women, bring them home with the cart before it got dark. We were there all through Christmas and New Year.
Mostly all travellers in that time liked to sit down some place for the winter. I remember there were four or five weans going to school from the Hoolet’s Neuk. And I remember some of them took diphtheria and the officer came up and fumigated the tents. But it was only mild cases. They took them to hospital, but they didn’t stay in very long. There was no disaster like it was in those outbreaks earlier on. But the Hoolet’s Neuk was a regular camping place. When we moved off, people who had been somewhere else for their winter moved onto the camp for their spring coming in. And they would stay there for a few months. That was the change! Well, people who had been at the Hoolet’s Neuk for the winter moved up to Forfar and Angus, and had their spring in there, a new district. Even suppose the new travellers who moved in were doing the same thing, the same work.
One of the many jobs I learned to do there was the tattie baskets. At that time there were no tattie lifting machines, and all the tatties were gathered by hand. And there were no plastic tattie baskets. It was wire, chain-like netting baskets. And the carts went over them, people sat on them, tramped and flattened them. Well, the traveller men would go with their pony to the farm, collect them, ask the farmer, ‘Have you any wire baskets needin fixed?’
The farmer would say, ‘Oh, I’ve a great big heap o them.’ And they would pack them all on their cart, drive them home. Then they would sit and straighten all these baskets out, put aluminium paint on them, and pack them into dozens. Take them back to the farmer and get three, maybe four pound a dozen for sorting these baskets. Now this was a great run, went on for years and years.
And then, they made a lot of laces. Travellers were great at making leather laces. Because you couldn’t get leather ones during and shortly after the war. There were a lot of miners in places. And you know their pit boots, working boots, were hard leather. And the travellers used to go to the old dumps, old places where they collected all these old boots, maybe in the old shoemaker shops. And especially in farm places where the boots were hard; you needed hard leather. They cut these round circles off the side of the boot, spun them out and made leather laces with them. I’ve seen an old man sitting one night making fourteen dozen. Fourteen dozen pair of leather laces! And his wife sold them for a sixpence a pair. She never came back with one. But you see the thing about the leather laces – you could hawk anywhere with them – start off leaving home and walk to the town, hawk all the wee cottar houses along the roadsides. They were the best, because the cottar men needed the leather laces for their boots. And I learned how to make the laces, how to sort these wire baskets, and I gained a good education of traveller survival while I was at the Hoolet’s Neuk. I was able to mend these baskets because I sat and saw it getting done.
And then watching the traveller men shoeing their own horses. They went to the blacksmith shop and they collected old cast shoes that would come off somebody else’s horse. And they knew the size of their pony’s feet. They would take them back. But first go to the man and say, ‘Give me a sixpence-worth o nails, horseshoe nails.’ And there were some travellers very clever at it. Willie Cameron was the greatest ever you saw, as good as any blacksmith. They had their own foot knife for cutting a horse’s feet. See, they had to look after these horses, clean their feet, clean the frog at their foot and clean their hooves. That was an offence in these days. The police or the cruelty inspector of animals could stop you at any time, check your horse’s feet. It didn’t make any difference what kind of shoe was on, as long as the horse’s feet were covered. But woe be to you if you were gotten going too far! It was all right to take a horse, say, two mile with its bare foot on the road, till ye walked him to the smiddie. But if you walked that horse too far, then its hoof would get so short that it wouldn’t hold a shoe, because it wore down into the quick. Then you had to go and put it into a field. That was you left without a horse, till its hoof grew again.
Now, horses that had been running on the rough ground were very easily caught. A shoe could catch on a wire fence and get pulled off. I’ve had them pulled off with wires myself many times, pieces of wire lying on the ground and old fences the horse was stepping over. The least loose bit or loose nail would catch, and the horse’s foot got stuck. Well, it had to pull, and it pulled off the shoe.
I remember me, a long time ago on the top of the Rest-and-be-Thankful. This was many years later. I came late at night with a pony and the kids on the top of the float. I was making to Dunoon. I rose up in the morning and my pony had cast a shoe – barefoot. And you know the nearest blacksmith from there was in the Cardross – twenty-eight mile away. Now I knew that horse was never going to make it with its bare foot. So I cut an old rubber tube, a trick I had seen done before, the inside tube of a tyre. I made a real complete shoe for a horse’s foot. Not like a horse’s shoe, but just a kind of boot, drilled holes in it and put a string and tied a lace round it, round the horse’s fetlock. That horse went from there, that twenty-eight mile, and we landed at the blacksmith’s shop, its hoof not even marked. That’s the truth.
And the blacksmith says t
o me, ‘I’ve never seen that done.’
‘Well,’ I said. ‘I came fae the top of the Rest and Be Thankful wi that horse like that.’ I was told how to do this there at the Hoolet’s Neuk by some of the old travellers.
You learned all these things because you never knew in your life when they were going to stand you in good stead later on. I learned many’s a thing. Like yoking horses and how to put harness on a kicking horse. You can put harness on a kicking horse, but if you get too near behind it, you’re going to get kicked. Now you had to put on a crupper, a strap that goes under the horse’s tail to keep the breeching and saddle in place. Otherwise, when the horse went downhill, the shafts of the cart shoved the saddle up over the horse’s neck – there was nothing to hold it back from sliding forward. Now, horses didn’t like cruppers on their tails. They didn’t hurt, because they were padded. But if you didn’t know how to stand in the right position, you’d get your leg broken, kicked.
Then you had horses that kicked the cart whenever you yoked them. We had a kicking horse there and it was a pantomime to see it getting yoked every morning! They could kick clean, kick the floor boards right out of the cart and never hurt themselves, because they knew how to kick with their shoes. They were dangerous, you know, very dangerous. Travellers didn’t mind a good kicking horse. But they didn’t like a biter! You could watch a kicker, but you could never watch a biter! I’ve seen in my time, dealing among travellers among horses, a man who owned a biting horse. A man asked him for a swap.
He said, ‘No, no, I wouldnae give ye that horse even suppose you gie me ten times its worth. Because I couldnae sleep at night if I thought it would bite some o your weans.’ But if it was an old man and woman who didnae have any weans, he would tell the old man, ‘Mind, ye’ll have tae watch it because it’ll bite ye!’ It would turn around and snap you. You could never trust them. If you went to feed them, especially if they were hungry, they didn’t just nip you. I was bit often by horses. It’s like getting a red-hot brand, like a piece of hot steel touching your hand when it nips you. They didn’t break your skin. But a real biter can take a big lump out of your flesh with one bite because they’ve got powerful teeth, a horse. So you had to learn all these things.
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