Red currants and rabbit stew.
Red Currants and Rabbit Stew.
This is a short story that I wrote for my grandchildren.
Everybody, nowadays, has a mobile phone, an iPad or tablet and lots of other gadgets. You jump in the bath or shower every day and get loads of hot water. You go shopping to a huge supermarket that has more things than you can possibly buy. You go out to play with your friends, in the street or in the play-park. You go to swimming classes, or dancing classes, gym classes or skating. And of course, you have a TV to watch films, sport and music. You travel every day by car, or maybe by bus and you go on holiday every year in a plane.
Try to imagine living in a house that doesn’t have any electricity, just candles and oil lamps. You live two miles from the nearest shop and that is a little wooden hut smaller than a garage for your car. But, of course, you don’t have a car. Nobody has a car. Nobody has a TV. Nobody has a phone except the doctor, the policeman and a few very rich people. Aeroplanes have just started and very few people have ever seen one and even fewer have been inside one.
You have to walk to school every day, two miles there and two miles back home and for two boys age five and seven it seems like twenty miles. School is nice though, with just one teacher and just one class. There are only eighteen pupils in the school. In the village there are only a dozen houses and, with the farms and cottages round about, there are not many more than a hundred people.
It was a completely different life but my brother and I had good fun. I was five years old; he was seven and my sister was just two.
Oh, and I forgot to mention, dinner nearly every night was rabbit stew!
THE FLITTING
Most people call it moving house but as kids we called it flitting. Anyway, it means we left one house to go and live in another one. I’m really not sure why we did this. I was five and I had just started school in a little village in Argyllshire, in Scotland, called Barcaldine. It was near where my mother and father grew up and they knew everybody. We had lots of family and friends who lived near us. So I don’t know why they decided to move to a really weird place in the middle of nowhere and with nobody that they knew. But for my brother and me it was a big adventure.
Anyway, one day a furniture removals van turned up at our door and the men started loading all our stuff into the back. We had quite a lot of furniture because, in those days, there weren’t many fitted cupboards in the houses. Everything was heavy so the removal men carried it to the lorry. I remember two trunks with lids that lifted up. My father called them kists. And there was a metal one full of his tools. All the small stuff was packed into tea-chests.
I don’t remember how we got to the other house because, like I said, nobody had cars. I think we travelled in the cab of the lorry but maybe it was a taxi. It was about 50 miles so it didn’t take long.
We arrived at a little village called Ford and then we turned off the main road to a smaller road past some farms. After about a mile, it was just a narrow farm track with bridges and gates and it was difficult for the driver to keep his van on the road. I remember my mother thought it was funny what the driver said.
“You really need a helicopter to get here,” he suggested with a big laugh. Except that instead of helicopter he said, “helitrotroper,” and my mother thought that was hilarious.
The new house looked about double the size of the one we had left and it was completely made of wood, painted a sort of greyish-blue colour. Here is a photo of how it looks now. It’s painted green now and has a big bit added on the end. And there used to be a big shed at the front that’s not there now.
The most amazing thing was the rabbits. There was a hill behind the house and it was covered with hundreds of rabbits all different colours. That was going to be part of my father’s job. He worked in the forest and his job was looking after the small trees but the rabbits ate the juicy tops of the little trees. So he had to catch the rabbits with wire snares. I think they’re illegal now. It must have been summer because the garden had blackcurrant bushes and redcurrant bushes that were covered with fruit. I imagine my mother would have made jam from them. (I mean from the currants, not the rabbits).
Well, that was the day we arrived in our new house. We only stayed there for one year. Some parts were happy, some were sad. It was seventy years ago but I still remember some of the things that happened in that year. I don’t remember very well what order they happened so I’ll just tell you the little stories as I remember them.
TAXI! TAXI!
Once we got settled into the house, we had to start going to school. It was two miles to walk in the morning and two miles back home in the afternoon. My sister was just two so she stayed at home with our mother. Like I explained in the flitting, it wasn’t a road; just a farm track and we had to cross two small rivers. Each river had a big gate that we had to open and then close again every time we crossed. The bridges were just flat and open with very little protection to stop us from falling into the stream of deep dark water. It was dangerous and quite spooky.
The school was really nice with just one class and one teacher in all the school. Before we arrived there were just sixteen kids so they were happy to have two more. Everybody stayed in school at lunch time because they all stayed in houses outside the village. There was a big fireplace in the side of the classroom and we toasted our sandwiches on the end of a big metal fork. It was good fun but we didn’t look forward to the long walk home.
After about three weeks the teacher told us that she had managed to arrange a taxi that would take us to school every day. No more walking! Fantastic! And the local council were going to pay for the taxi. But on the first day of the taxi we discovered that the driver was an old grumpy man. I remember his name. It was Craigie Aitchison. It was a black Austin car with leather seats and funny doors at the back. They opened back the way. My brother was the eldest so it was his job to open all the gates. The taxi took a different road so, as well as the two bridges, there were two more gates. He had to get out and open each one till the taxi went through then he had to close the gate and get back in the taxi.
On the third day, the taxi arrived late so Craigie Aitchison was “Crabby” Aitchison, even more grumpy than usual. At every gate he grumped at my brother to hurry up. At the last gate, he got out to open the gate and forgot to close the car door. The taxi drove through and “CRUNCH”. There was a horrible crunching noise. The gate-post had ripped the back door off the taxi. He was jumping mad and shouted at my brother to get into the taxi. He threw the door into the boot of the taxi and he took us to school. He stormed into the classroom and announced to the teacher that he was never going back to Glasvaar. Those two stupid boys would just have to walk. He was right because his was the only taxi in the area. For the rest of our stay in Glasvaar, we walked to school and back every day. We soon got to know the road and the people in the farms. We learned all the shortcuts and it became quite good fun.
DAILY BREAD
There was a grocery van that came to our house once a week so my mother didn’t need to go shopping. The nearest real shop was about ten miles away and she would need to have gone on her bicycle. In the village of Ford, near the school, there was a tiny little shop. It wasn’t really a shop, just a little wooden hut at the side of the road. It was also the post office.
The lady in the shop sold bread and a few other things. We needed bread for our sandwiches and for my father’s lunch, working in the forest. Scottish kids used to call them pieces.
Every day after school, we had to go to this little shop to buy a loaf of bread. It wasn’t like the loaves that you buy now. It wasn’t cut into slices and it wasn’t in a plastic bag. The lady in the shop just put a bit of paper round it and one of us carried it home under our arm. If we stopped to play or look at something, we had to put it down on the ground and watch that the birds didn’t steal it.
One day, when we were crossing one of the bridges, my brother put the loaf down on the side of the road so that he could open the gate. I came along a few steps behind and instead of closing the gate correctly I decided to swing on it. Swinging on gates is great fun. Anyway the gate crashed into the loaf and sent it rolling towards the stream. We tried to catch it but it splashed into the water. We both let out a yell as it floated under the bridge. Big brother managed to get it on the other side but he nearly fell into the water. Half of it was still dry but the other half was soggy wet. He carried it home carefully. We were sure our mother would be angry.
But she just laughed at her two silly sons. She put it on the table and, with the big bread-knife, she cut it in two, separating the wet bit and the dry bit. She put the wet part in the oven. An hour later she took it out. It was a little bit toasted but it was dry and ready for making sandwiches.
Our oven wasn’t like the oven in your house. Yours is probably electric and when you want to roast something or to heat up your pizza you only need to switch it on and set it to the right temperature. WE DIDN’T HAVE ELECTRICITY! So in the living room we had a big metal stove that burned wood. It was like a big cooker made of iron. On the left was a door where we put in the wood and the door on the other side was the oven. The top was flat and it got very hot so that was the cooker for boiling and frying things. That’s where my mother made jam and soup and rabbit stew. She had to clean out the bottom of the fire every morning and start a new fire with dry pieces of wood and then keep putting in more wood all day. At the back there was a round metal pipe for the smoke to go up the chimney. So it was our cooker but it was also our heater to keep the house warm.
TWO WEEKS OFF SCHOOL
It’s funny but, apart from the taxi incident, I don’t remember much about mornings. I remember the walks back home better. I remember going to buy the bread but we also had a few coppers to buy a chocolate biscuit each, a Tunnocks, a Blue Riband or a Penguin. We also had to stop every day on the way home at a farm called Stroneskar. We had to get the milk but it wasn’t in a bottle or a carton. We had a tin can with a handle and a lid. The farmer’s wife, Mrs MacNair, filled it up with fresh milk from the cows. One of us carried the loaf and the other one carried the bread.
We weren’t supposed to but we usually had a drink of milk from the can on the way home.
Here is a photo of Stroneskar farm in the winter. You can see the track that goes across the valley to our house on the other side. This photo was taken from just in front of our house.
Between the school and Stroneskar we had to pass through another bigger farm. They had lots of sheep and big hairy Highland cows. They also had a ram. That’s a male sheep with big horns and he was aggressive. He didn’t like anybody passing through his field but his field was a shortcut for us. If we risked this route, we could get home quicker. Brother was terrified of the ram but I always said, “Don’t worry. I’ll look after you”. One day the ram saw us and chased after us. I wasn’t so brave and we both ran like blazes.
We can both remember that story but the day we remember most was one day that it rained a lot. The teacher let us go home early. We passed the farm with the ram but he was inside sheltering from the rain. We arrived at Stroneskar farm and we looked across the valley towards our house. The fields and the bridges and our road home had all disappeared. The whole place was flooded and it was an enormous big lake. How were we going to get home?
The horse from the farm was tied up and was standing in the water which came up to his belly. We couldn’t ride a horse so that was no good.
We looked across and saw a man standing waving to us on the other side of the lake. Daddy! It was our father coming to rescue us. He was wading through the water to meet us. Then he picked us up, one in each arm and carried us back across. I don’t know how he could see the road or the bridges. We were really lucky that we didn’t fall into the water.
This was all a big lake! We were huddled under the tree on the right. It was quite frightening.
It rained more that night and the lake got bigger. It was two weeks before the water subsided and for these two weeks we couldn’t go to school. It meant we couldn’t buy the bread or the milk and the grocery van couldn’t get to our house. So, guess what? We had rabbit stew for lunch and dinner every day for two weeks! My mother had a terrible time making the cooker go because the wood was all wet. But rabbit stew is quite good. It tastes like chicken but with more bones.
The funniest thing was that, with so much water around our house, water suddenly stopped coming out of the tap. My father said, “I know what the problem is. Come and I’ll show you.”
We went up the hill behind our house to the little stream (called a burn in Scotland). There was loads of water tumbling down the hill after the rain. There was a little pipe running alongside the burn and’ at one point, it went into the burn. My father pulled out the pipe and it had a metal filter on the end. It was all covered with leaves so he cleaned them off. We went back to the house and turned on the tap. The water came through all brown at first and then it came clearer.
It was still a little brown for a few days but usually it was good clean water that we could drink. Nobody bought water in a plastic bottle. It was seventy years ago and there weren’t many things made of plastic, maybe just some toys. Nearly everything was made of wood or metal. It was just the beginning of the age of plastic.
So we didn’t have plastic rubbish bags. There were no wheelie bins or rubbish containers and nobody came to take away the rubbish. My mother had a metal bucket to take the ashes from the fire in the cooker every morning. So she put tins and bits of food and things into this bucket and then took it to the end of the garden and threw it into a rubbish tip in the trees. It was called a midden. We had hens and they loved the midden because they could scrape around looking for bits of food. This is good for hens because they also eat little bits of sand and dirt which makes the shells for their eggs. I’ll tell you about the hens in the next little story.
CHOOKIE HENS
Part of the garden was closed off with a high fence. This was the hen-run where we had about twenty hens. Most of them were small hens called Bantams and they laid lovely little eggs. They laid some eggs every day and we had to go into the hen-house to collect them. It was really smelly. There were also some bigger hens and there was a male hen called a cockerel. He was aggressive. Like the ram in the farmer’s field he didn’t like anybody in his territory. He made a lot of noise, if we went in, like a sort of cluck, cluck, clucking. My mother gave them corn to eat every day and she called, “chook, chook, chook,” to make them come for food. All the hens came running making a terrible noise.
My little sister, was terrified of the “chookie hens”. One day we couldn’t find her and went searching around the house. We found her hiding behind the hen-house with the cockerel standing guard going, “cluck, cluck, cluck.” She was crouched down crying, “Chookie hen no get me. Chookie hen no get me.” The chookie hen didn’t get her. Her two brave brothers rescued her but, as we took her into the house, she was still whimpering, “Chookie hen no get me.”
There was one time in the spring when the hens had eggs that weren’t for eating. These were the eggs that were for hatching into baby chicks. They had to be kept warm and the mother hen sat on them nearly all day. But sometimes at night it got really cold so my father took the eggs inside the house. Remember the oven where we dried the bread; well when we went to bed and the fire was not too hot, the oven was still quite warm. So he put the eggs in the oven. In the morning, some of them were broken open and they had little fluffy yellow chicks.
GRANNY AND GRANDPA
While we were living at Glasvaar our Granny and Grandpa came to live with us. They were my mother’s mum and dad. They were quite old and my Granny was usually ill. That’s why they came to live with us. My mother had three brothers and two sisters but her parents preferred to live with her.
One Saturday, my mother got in a terrible state. She was really upset and she was crying. My Granny had died. My father was working in the forest and we had to go and look for him. We eventually found him, clearing weeds and bracken round the young trees.
The problem was that we didn’t have a phone and my mother needed to contact her brothers and sisters. So my dad took my mother’s bike and he cycled to the Post Office to send a telegram. We all have I-pads and email and text messages now but seventy years ago everybody used the telegram system. You had to tell the person in the Post Office what your message was and the address of the person who would receive it. They typed the message into the telegraph machine and sent it by phone-line to the other Post Office. Then a postman had to take the message to your friend’s house. So all my uncles and aunts got a telegram and the next day the family started to arrive at our house. It was a sad time because my Granny was dead but I remember it as a good time because all these people of the family came to visit us. I saw uncles and aunts that I didn’t remember seeing before.
After that, my Grandfather stayed with us for about ten years even after we changed our house again. The next story is about him.
GONE FISHING
My grandfather was a very tall man with white hair and a big white bushy moustache and he always wore a cap, sometimes even in bed. Every day he helped with the wood for the fire. My father brought home logs from the forest and my Grandpa cut them into short pieces on the sawhorse. He was a nice old man but always very stern and strict. (When he was a younger man he had been the postman in Benderloch).
One day that we didn’t have school, we were playing on the narrow road next to the gate outside our house. I can’t remember how or where we found it but we had a big fishing rod with a long line and an enormous fishing hook on the end. For some silly reason I caught the end that had the hook. My brother pulled the rod away and yes, you’ve guessed it. The hook jabbed into my hand. It went into the top of my thumb on my left hand. I couldn’t get it out because all fishing hooks have a barb, an extra jaggy bit that catches the fish so he can’t escape. Well I wasn’t a fish but I couldn’t escape either. My brother just laughed but I started to cry, “Mammy, Mammy.”
So Mammy came out along with Grandpa so see what was causing all the noise.
My mother said I’d need to go to the doctor but my Grandfather was much calmer. “No,” he said. “How are we going to do that without any transport? And we can’t call for the doctor to come without a phone. There’s only one thing to do. I’ll fix it. Get me a clean razor blade. I screamed because I realised that he was going to cut open my thumb.
“Stop screaming Bobby,” he said calmly. “Take a look at my fingers.” I looked at his hand and saw that he only had three fingers on his hand.
“What happened?” my brother and I asked in chorus.
“I blew two fingers off when I was a silly young lad, playing with gunpowder. I took the gunpowder out of some cartridges and set it alight. It went bang and blew off two fingers. I didn’t cry.” He added sternly. “I’ll just make a little cut and the hook will pop out and you’ll still have all your fingers. So stop crying and stay absolutely still.”
So I stayed as quiet as I could and held up my thumb. He made a small cut and out popped the hook, just like he said it would. We didn’t play with the fishing rod after that.
ANOTHER FLITTING
So then one day, about a year after we first arrived, another furniture van arrived at Glasvaar Cottage. We were moving on again. Why? I don’t know. It was something that my mother and father decided. My father was still going to work in the forestry but now it was at Tulliallan Forest near Kincardine on the River Forth. Tulliallan had a big nursery, not a nursery school but a nursery of trees for growing seeds into little saplings to be planted all over Scotland.
The journey was longer because we were moving from the Highlands to the Lowlands but I don’t remember very much about it. The house had ELECTRICITY and a gas cooker! It was in a street called Westfield and had a view of the River Forth. I remember running from one room to the other, switching the lights on and off. We had never seen anything so exciting.
The day we started in the new school was a terrific shock. It had seven different classes with about 25 or 30 in each class. And the other kids were not friendly and neither were the teachers. I didn’t like it. My brother hated it.
After we were settled my Grandfather came to live with us again. He looked down at the River Forth and called it “the big burn.”
So that’s the end of this little book, just one year in the lives of two little boys. It was written originally for my grandkids so you may have found some parts a little condescending.
