Falling Off a Bike
by Alasdair McPherson
Genre: Memoir
Swearwords: None.
Description: A brief history of physical ineptitude.
_____________________________________________________________________
You forget the exact moment when you learned to do the things that you found easy to master. My daughter at six years old had a certificate to show that she could swim fifty metres without help. She now believes that she could always swim: the months of struggling with arm-bands or swimming within touching distance of the side of the pool have no place in her memory. I, on the other hand, was late in learning everything physical so my memory is crystal clear.
It was the daughter of our upstairs neighbour who finally got me waterborne. Her husband was studying hard so she used to join my Mum and sister on picnics on the beach. I suppose Jeanette was about ten years younger than Mum but I was eight so they both seemed impossibly ancient.
Her swimming lesson was very simple. She made me wade out until the buoyancy was lifting me onto my toes.
“Face the shore and kneel down,” she commanded.
When I tried it my legs came up behind me and I thrashed about with my arms, scrambling to find the bottom with my feet and convinced that I was on the very point of drowning. Instead, I barked my knees on the rough sand and discovered that I had somehow propelled myself forward a matter of four metres. I did not drown on my second attempt either and by my third try I had plucked up the nerve to bring my feet into the action, still kicking and thrashing the water but more purposefully.
By the time Mum called me in for the spam sandwiches I was swimming up and down parallel to the shore perfecting the same ungainly style I have preserved for the rest of my life. It is not pretty but it is effective and need cause no alarm to anyone who stays more than two metres from me in any direction.
I just needed to be taken in hand, you see. Jeanette was the only person I knew who could swim so I had implicit faith in her ability to pass the skill to me. I spent much of my young life progressing using the same method. The cub master, for instance, was an enthusiast for Celtic history, a subject that fascinates me to this day.
Dad was the local Police Constable and during the war (second world in case you ask) he had a team of specials headed by Inspector Napier. He was the millionaire owner of Smith’s Wools; in those days if you wanted to knit a balaclava for a loved one sweltering in the Libyan Desert, you bought Smith’s Wools. The alternative was to unpick an old jumper, surplus to current requirements, and reuse the wool. I would hate to think how many hours I spent doing that for Mum, an addictive knitter.
Inspector Napier was one of eight millionaires amongst the fifteen hundred inhabitants of the Burgh of Cove and Kilcreggan. Strictly speaking, one of them lived in Coulport but there were only a handful of other people who shared this exile from the centre of communal activities along with the gasworks and the cemetery. Some millionaires were more useful to the community than others. We got cheap wool from Smith’s and expensive prizes donated to the school and Sunday school, of course, but otherwise we had small benefit from their wealth.
The exception was Mr Ross, one half of the double act of Hepburn and Ross, who made Red Hackle whisky on the banks of the River Kelvin. At a time when the water of life had left the shores of Britain to help lubricate Lend Lease, Willie Ross ensured that the Burgh was well supplied. There was a strict order about Christmas gifts: the Church of Scotland Minister qualified for a full case of whisky as did the head teacher of the primary school; the Free Church minister and my Dad got nine bottles each while each postman and the undertaker got six. The largesse went down as far as half-bottles for under-gardeners and such like riff-raff – there were no miniatures in those days!
Up to the middle of the Nineteenth Century, Kilcreggan was a lair for pirates who rowed out to ocean going ships waiting to dock in Greenock or the new piers at Port Glasgow, helping themselves to what they fancied. The only remotely worthy thing in our history is a mound in Cove reputed to have been the home of Spanish monks.
Local legend has it that they chose the location because you could sail from there in a straight line to Northern Spain without touching land. Is the story true? I have no idea, but I did check on a globe and it is certainly true that not so much as a rock obstructs the sea between Cove and Coruna.
The railways and the steamers brought an end to our community of thieves and papists. Piers were built all along the Clyde coast so that the wealthy could continue to work at polluting Glasgow while they savoured the fresh sea air at their country estates. The piers were made of greenheart, a flexible timber resistant to salt water, while the ships were launched using lignum vita, a hard, slippery wood also used for policemen’s truncheons. A sliver of greenheart is poisonous needing liberal application of bread and sugar poltices while lignum vita is so inert that it was used before stainless steel to strengthen splintered bones.
There was one full-time special in Dad’s squad. Special Constable Jimmy Grant had been Head Gamekeeper to Princess Louise, Duchess of Argyle. This daughter of Queen Victoria owned the whole of the Rosneath peninsula and she made another fortune feuing the land opened up by the piers to builders of luxury villas.
I used to have the job of stripping a mature tree of Victoria plums for an old lady whose father had built the property in 1875, the middle of the boom years. His feudal duty was to deliver two cart loads of seaweed to the Home farm in time for planting the tatties.
Colquhoun of Luss went one further and built a whole new town around the railway terminus. It was laid out on a grid pattern with provision for shops, schools and churches. There is only one square in the town, however, and that only exists because a quarry used to provide building material was left open until a town council was elected. Colquhoun evidently thought that the inhabitants would congregate in idleness in public squares.
I went to school in the town, named after the founder’s wife Helen. It had more millionaires in total than the Burgh but we beat them hands down on millionaires per thousand of population. The school was built in red sandstone with twin turrets over the separate entrances for boys and girls. Above the door was carved the legend ‘School Board of Row’; this is the old spelling of ‘Rhu’.
It was not only in Helensburgh that the Church of Scotland was slow to create new parishes. When Bearsden was built the parish was Old Kilpatrick and the inhabitants of the new town had to trudge about four miles each way across the moors through what is now Drumchapel to attend Sunday service in Old Kilpatrick. I dare say it was a safer walk then than it would be now.
There was nothing Jimmy Grant did not know about field sports and land-based wild life. He took great pains to teach me so that, before I was ten I was a fair shot with a point-two-two rifle. And I could manage a single ferret at a small warren. My townie cousin went to a rifle club and he could hit a paper clip at twenty-five metres but he could not hit a rabbit. I could kill two at a time, one sitting and the second when, after the bunnies scattered, it paused before going into its burrow.
Dad had spent part of his youth on Skye so he was knowlegable on everything concerning boats and fishing. We always had a dinghy pulled up on the beach and I was allowed to use it provided I did not go too far from shore. By the time I went to secondary school I could bring home rock cod and coalfish on demand although I had to have adult company to go after whiting.
On Skye dad would knock a limpet off a rock, clean the muscular sole and chew it; I tried it and found it to be like salty chewing gum except that it began to break up after about fifteen minutes. I might have tried it again if it had not been for the Americans based in Rosneath Castle. They handed out real chewing gum in a bewildering variety of flavours to the local kids. They used to invite us to parties in the castle where we were given as much ice-cream as we could eat.
I remember one party where they lined the priceless mahogany staircase of the castle with mattresses and encouraged us to slide down on silver-plated trays!
My intellectual development was not neglected, I will have you know. The Police house was the bottom half of a villa tucked behind the red sandstone magnificence of the Burgh Hall. Willie Lamont, the Hall Keeper and father of Jeanette, lived upstairs from us but he had one more room – one of our rooms was fitted out with a desk and had a door leading into a single story extension housing two prison cells. Criminal activity in the area fell well short of rampant so the cells were available as a playroom.
Across the road was the Church of Scotland and manse, while up the hill behind us past the bowling green, tennis courts, Scout and Guide huts, was the Free Church and Manse. There was a huge open shed in the church grounds where waste paper was stored until it could join the war effort. I could nip up our back stairs, dreep over a wall and read anything and everything perched on a great pile of paper; there is a particular smell to old paper than I can still remember.
It was my secret place but, of course, everyone knew about it. In fact the very first book I owned came courtesy of the minister who called to pass the time of day.
“Take it home with you. Mr Churchill won’t mind and I promise you that the war will not last one minute longer without that book.”
So I became the proud owner of a very, very early edition of Scouting for Boys by Baden-Powell. It had a chapter on First Aid that included detailed instructions for fixing a dislocated shoulder. The patient lies on his back with the first-aider sitting facing him with a foot in his oxter; firmly grasping the forearm he pulls sharply, twisting the arm at the same time. The advice was removed from later editions.
Apart from the first aid, I think I tried everything in that book. I made shelters from branches roofed with bracken and sat in them dodging the drips when it rained. I triangulated every tree in the neighbourhood using my sturdy ash stick carefully marked off in inches except where a knot forced a little deviation. The only thing I really mastered was making whistles from hazel twigs although I could not play a note. I was no better on the piano or the chanter even with dedicated, if despairing, teachers.
I was a restless sort of boy and it helped that I was allowed to join the Cubs at six, two years before the minimum age. I never could creep up on people and I was useless at Kim’s game but I always got top marks for enthusiasm. I was well above average at climbing trees and I used to spend hours in the tops of pollarded sycamores watching people arrive for adult events in the Burgh Hall.
Later, in my adolescence, I became addicted to climbing lampposts clutching them firmly with my thighs. Then I discovered that I could achieve the same pleasurable result rather more discreetly using my hand. Even now I get a bit turned on when I see one of those old cast-iron lamps with the cross-piece.
So by the age of eleven, I could shoot, fish, undislocate a shoulder (well, in theory I could) and all sorts of other things. The one thing I could not do was to ride a bike. I used to prop my bike against a tree then carefully settle myself in the saddle, feet on the peddles and one hand on the handlebars. The other hand was on the tree and I used it to push off. By the time I had that hand on the handlebars I was wobbling and next instant I was on the ground. On a good day I could travel about a bike length.
My friends call me ‘determined’, the rest of the world describe it as ‘stubborn’, except my family who just think I am thrawn. Whichever it is kept me trying to master the two wheeled mystery. My pal Albert could ride a bike with no effort and it is to the kindness of his brother that I owe my eventual success.
There was very little flat land around so I made my essays beside the Burgh Hall. I chose the hours just after school because there were few people about to witness my shame. One Friday I had travelled several metres before coming off and this encouraged me to extend my attempts into the early evening when the older lads started to turn up for the dance. It was the custom for them to wait outside smoking and chatting while they judged the female talent that was heading for the restrooms to touch up their make-up.
Albert’s big brother knew that I was struggling and he came over to take charge when some of the other lads started to laugh at my feeble efforts. Alex was a big lad and no one, as the adverts used to say, kicked sand in his face. He came over to me, stilling the laughter with a glance.
He took hold of my saddle and ran alongside me until I had found my balance. When he let go he trotted along in case I had a wobble. I still remember the moment when it all suddenly clicked and I knew that I could cycle. Just before I reached the main road I swung round into the church grounds, peddled past the Sunday school and my reading room and returned to whistles and cheers from the village youth.
Flushed with success, I wheeled the bike onto the main road, remounted and cycled the half mile to the village shops. By the time I got there I was having qualms so I just slowed down and made a wide turn without stopping. I was afraid to dismount in case my new found skill had withered and died.
Not an auspicious start to two-wheeling, and things did not get better. It was a thirty-five mile round trip to secondary school and I was not by a long stretch the furthest distant pupil. A couple of years before I went village kids travelled by ferry to Helensburgh, if it was calm and the tide was in, but more often to Craigendorran. There was a walk of about a mile from the pier to the school and they set records that stand to this day for the slowest mean speed recorded by a human being.
There was a lot of bullying of the keen pupils to make them keep pace with the people who did not really want to get there at all. The theory was that if everyone took two hours the head teacher would think it reasonable. Teenagers have a touching faith in the gullibility of adults, particularly teachers and policemen! It is, after all, the principle underlying the Beano and Oor Wullie.
Our playing field was the best part of a mile away from the school so it took nearly half of a double PE lesson just in travel time if you walked. The local pupils could bring a bike to school to make the trip in less than ten minutes. Us commuters had to borrow, usually from a younger pupil who could be gently coerced – not actual bullying, you understand, but who can tell what lies behind a scowl? I conned a nice wee girl in the year below me into lending me her shiny new bike.
Sadly, the brakes were on the wrong handlebars so when I firmly applied what I thought was the back brake, the front wheel locked and I dismounted clearing the handlebars by almost a foot. I was gentleman enough to try to save the bike but it cost me about two thirds of the skin on my face to do so. I still have a bit of grit trapped under the skin of my right eyelid.
Less painful but much more embarrassing was the accident that happened when I graduated to a motorbike. I was heading for school a few months after I started my first teaching job. The main roads were tricky despite salt having been applied and I knew that the side road leading to the school would be treacherously icy. I slowed right down and had my legs out to the side as I turned into the street but it did not stop me from falling.
I went down very gently, still holding the bike, in front of a concerned queue at a bus stop. There were also two big fourth year girls in my science class who galloped across the road to lift me and the bike upright with no apparent effort. The sympathetic murmurs from the bus queue turned to uncontrollable laughter.
“Are you awrigh’, Sur?”
“Yes, thank you girls. Nothing broken, everything under control,” said I, wishing the ground would open up.
But the very worst thing that happened to me on a bike was that it got me a criminal record.
My Uncle Farquhar retired from the police force while he was the sole constable in Luss. He gave up because an incomer complained that his son had been assaulted. The boy and his friends had been scrumping apples and the new lad was inclined to argue when Farquhar arrived on the scene. The locals ran off although they did not escape identification. The new boy was propelled on his way by a size ten boot constructed for the exclusive use of the polis by Whites of Rushden.
The boy’s father made a complaint to the Chief Constable, Farquhar was reprimanded and the boy was charged with theft with a police caution recorded against his name.
“A criminal record for life instead of a sore bum for a day or two,” Farquhar complained to my Dad. “The world has gone mad!” He resigned two days later after talking things over with Colquhoun of Rossdhu.
The Colquhouns owned Luss and much of the west bank of Loch Lomond. They had a hand in appointing the local bobby so they looked after retiring officers. Bob Kerr, the constable before Farquhar was the landlord of the Inverbeg Hotel. Farquhar was a whisky expert who could distinguish the malts that had been blended with grain so he considered that licensed premises would be too much of a temptation.
Instead he was given the lease of a farm on the lochside where he nurtured pigs while his son Duncan looked after the sheep and the three cows. His wife filled the house with bed and breakfast guests and they rented overnight parking to caravaners. In my mid-teens, I spent a lot of my time on the farm helping out with the animals and caravaners. My special job was to invent and construct ways of connecting an assortment of third-hand farm machinery to be pulled by an old jeep. Baulks of timber and baling wire were available and I was able to rig up something even if it did break down fairly frequently.
The hay cutter was the worst because it was off centre putting a big lateral load on the baling wire. It turned out to be quicker to unhitch it at the end of each cut and turn it manually – turning under power just broke the baling wire!
Sheep are a lot of work twice a year but otherwise they give little trouble: except once, when an old ewe breathed her last right behind the toilets in Luss camping ground during Glasgow Fair. They had plumbers and sanitary engineers not to mention officers from three different council departments, scratching their heads until a swarm of blow flies alerted them to the corpse.
Cows need attention twice a day – hail, rain or shine, they must be milked. I was free to come and go as I pleased about the farm except that, morning and evening, I had to get a stool and a pail to sit with my head against the warm, aromatic, flank of a beast while I relieved the tension in her udder.
Most of the sheep grazed on Forestry Commission land although there were always a few that preferred the roadside or someone’s vegetable garden. Bracken beneath the trees was creeping into the fields reducing the already small arable area. At that time ‘The Scottish Farmer’ was full of articles about how good pigs were at rooting out bracken. The experts even asserted that pigs preferred the succulent roots of the intrusive plant. Sadly, Farquhar’s pigs turned their noses up at anything that was not presented to them in a trough!
The highlight of the Luss year is the Highland Games. Duncan and I would be there from nine in the morning setting things up, running stalls, marshalling races until the witching hour of three when we had to leave in our finery and cycle back to the farm to milk the cows.
Farquhar was willing to take his turn but the beasts did not like him. They would stand as good as gold for me and they even let Duncan twist their teats to direct a stream of milk straight into the mouths of waiting cats, but as soon as Farquhar laid a hand on them they started shifting and stomping until they couped the pail while he shouted at them in Gaelic.
Our social life was good and varied. We would wait at the road end until a MacBrayne lorry stopped to pick us up. It might be going to Tyndrum or Arrochar but there was always a dance on a Saturday so we went where the lorry driver listed. After the dance we would be picked up by a returning lorry and be dropped off in time for the milking.
One gloaming, a strange lorry pulled up and offered us a lift to Glen Douglas where NATO were building a storage depot. At first we planned to get off at Inverbeg at the foot of the Glen, but Duncan remembered that he owed a visit to a shepherd who lived at the top of the road. I had been at school with the younger daughter so that was considered a sufficient reason to justify a journey of more than ten miles into the wilderness.
When we arrived without warning we were greeted as honoured guests. The older daughter was engaged to the son of a linesman on the West Highland Railway on the Loch Long side of the watershed so he came up the Glen bringing his sister who had also been in my class at school. From home to Luss is a long way by road but less than ten miles in a straight line across difficult terrain. Kids from the top of Glen Douglas joined pupils from Arrochar and beyond at school in Helensburgh while youngsters from the Loch Lomond end of the Glen went to the Vale of Leven for their secondary schooling.
The shepherds husbanded sheep on all the hills both sides of the educational watershed meeting up regularly for clipping and dipping with an occasional fox hunt using shot guns and terrier dogs rather than pink coats and hounds. That evening in the Glen, I was slow to appreciate that the real reason for our visit was that Duncan fancied the sister whose fiancé turned up to protect his position. Everyone was very civilised about the rivalry – no shepherds’ crooks at dawn!
Luss was a long way from home spiritually as well as geographically. I had fairly easy-going parents but I did not enjoy the licence I was given on the farm. This night, the chat was good and the drink sufficient so before we knew it, the clock was striking four.
An all-night party with alcohol and girls – even well-chaperoned girls – would not have been possible in Cove. When my parents arrived early to take me home from Luss one time they caught me with a small glass of whisky.
“Is that boy drinking?” my Mother enquired of Dad.
“Don’t you worry, Aunt Cissie,” Duncan chimed in. “He got awful drunk last week so we’re just giving him practice.”
So there we were at four in the morning fifteen miles from home with no transport and cows to milk in just over an hour. We were not drunk but in that happy state of inebriation where every mountain looks like a molehill.
The girls willingly lent us their bikes, mentioning that they had no lights but forgetting to alert us to the almost total lack of brakes. We were a little closer to the ground than usual because I am six inches taller than the girls and Duncan is three inches taller than me. We comforted each other that the first ten miles were downhill.
The road from the top of Glen Douglas follows the contours of the land. It goes more or less straight until it comes to a place where a burn, tumbling downhill, has carved a gulley for itself. At these points, the road takes a sudden turn to the left goes round a tight bend over a little bridge and comes back to resume its straight path.
It was still dark that morning when we took the road and the moon was just setting. The light was good enough on the straights to pick out the road surface of grey grit shining faintly silver in the moonlight but the shadow of the hillside made the visits to the gulleys hazardous. With the brakes fully applied we were able to keep our speed just about safe. All went well for the first six or seven miles but from that point on road repairs caused us an extra problem. The patches were of black tar: the moon glimmering on the grey stones gave us our direction but how could we distinguish between a sharp turn into a gulley and a straight section mended with tar invisible to us?
Add to that, the brakes were fading so we hurtled down the Glen guessing our route in the benevolent hands of whatever deity protects drunken cowboys! Sometimes you just have to throw caution to the winds of chance. Without mishap we shot across the main road in front of the Inverbeg Hotel and resigned ourselves to peddling the micro-bikes for the remaining five miles. Unknown to us, danger lurked in the car park.
We were congratulating each other on our good luck when headlights appeared behind us and we were passed by a wee police panda car that came to an impressive halt skewed across the road blocking our path. Farquhar had patrolled the district in his own car getting a mileage allowance from police funds, but his successor had been supplied with a proper police vehicle so he felt justified in doing handbrake turns. It might have lost ground in pursuit of a Jaguar speeding along the A84 but it had proved effective in stopping two young men on pedal cycles.
The tradition of policing the area was that the Chief Constable offered a short list of names to Colquhoun of Rossdhu who spoke to the candidates before making his selection. The present Chief Constable, piqued that Colquhoun had bought a prize gundog from under his nose, gained his revenge by appointing a constable without consulting the laird. The new man had no tact and very limited intelligence.
The Chief Constable admitted to his wife that he had acted unworthily but told her she would just have to do without her usual invitation to the annual garden party at the big house that was the highlight of the county’s social season. What she replied is, sadly, unrecorded.
The new constable, getting out of his wee car, strutted towards us metaphorically adjusting his six-shooters just like John Wayne. He was clearly running through a long list of crimes and misdemeanours but either his imagination failed him or his sergeant stepped in. The charge sheet, when it arrived two days later, made no reference to dangerous driving or endangering pedestrians although these had been mentioned in our pre-dawn chat in the middle of the deserted main road.
Riding a bicycle without lights, was all it amounted to. By the time we had expressed our disbelief and he had stopped threatening to handcuff us, day had dawned so he could not in the end prevent us from mounting up and finishing our journey. He followed us home just, he assured us, to see that we had not given a false address.
Farquhar was now a magistrate and both Duncan and I are sons of former policemen but the affair would have been quietly forgotten if it had not been for a very keen young reporter on the Lennox Herald. The chief magistrate told Farquhar that we would probably get a police caution, so the case would have fizzled out if it had not been that the reporter was winching a Luss boy.
He told her the story to give her a laugh but she saw it as the key to unlock the door to the news desk of a national daily paper. While he came to the farm to beg forgiveness for dropping us in the mire, she went to the Chief Constable and pointedly demanded that we be brought to trial
“I was only meaning to have a wee laugh at the pair of you but now she’s on her high horse. If I can do anything to put it right just let me know."
Farquhar discussed the matter with the other magistrates who showed their support by leaving it to him. They did not want to offend him by being harsh on us but they were not prepared to be pilloried by the press for being too lenient. In a judgement that Solomon might have envied they decided that Farquhar would hear the cases, sitting alone at half past seven in the morning, an hour before the court usually opened. They did agree to forget to notify the press about the change of time.
The three of us drove to the court in Alexandria in the wee van that was normally used for carrying pig food. That in itself was unlikely to deter the reporter but it would ensure that she stood upwind at a respectable distance. We got out at the main entrance while Farquhar drove round the back to the parking reserved for magistrates. The first person we saw when we stepped down was the reporter sitting on the steps clutching her notebook and several sharp pencils
Duncan and I nodded to her and then went into the wee room where miscreants wait for justice. When I was called into the court, Farquhar was sitting in solitary state. From the dock I had a quick look round: the court was packed. All the solicitors in the area had got wind of the unusual proceedings and had come to see the fun. The one person I could not see was the ace reporter.
The clerk established my identity before he read out the charge and asked for my plea.
“Guilty, Uncle…. Your Honour.”
Farquhar leaned forward over the bench to consult with the clerk.
“Fined ten shillings.”
So off I went, a convicted criminal, glad to have escaped a custodial sentence.
It was the next day before we discovered why the reporter failed to show up. Her boyfriend, still eaten up by remorse, had found a solution. As she moved to enter the court he appeared, dropped to one knee and proposed holy matrimony. She was so overcome that he had finally succumbed to her hints, that she dropped her pencils and let him lead her away. They walked off hand in hand to stroll along the banks of the river Leven.
Her promising careers in journalism came to an end half an hour later behind a bush on the towpath where she conceived the first of five children that blessed their marriage.
Meanwhile, Duncan had taken his place in the dock. I had met him on his way in and told him of my ten bob fine, so he was feeling fairly relaxed. After pleading guilty he waited the verdict. Once again Farquhar consulted the clerk before passing judgement.
“Fined one pound.”
Duncan stood for a minute looking stunned.
“But you only fined Alasdair ten shillings!”
“Indeed, but this crime is becoming too prevalent and I am making an example of you: this is the second case of cycling without lights that I have heard this morning!”
Swearwords: None.
Description: A brief history of physical ineptitude.
_____________________________________________________________________
You forget the exact moment when you learned to do the things that you found easy to master. My daughter at six years old had a certificate to show that she could swim fifty metres without help. She now believes that she could always swim: the months of struggling with arm-bands or swimming within touching distance of the side of the pool have no place in her memory. I, on the other hand, was late in learning everything physical so my memory is crystal clear.
It was the daughter of our upstairs neighbour who finally got me waterborne. Her husband was studying hard so she used to join my Mum and sister on picnics on the beach. I suppose Jeanette was about ten years younger than Mum but I was eight so they both seemed impossibly ancient.
Her swimming lesson was very simple. She made me wade out until the buoyancy was lifting me onto my toes.
“Face the shore and kneel down,” she commanded.
When I tried it my legs came up behind me and I thrashed about with my arms, scrambling to find the bottom with my feet and convinced that I was on the very point of drowning. Instead, I barked my knees on the rough sand and discovered that I had somehow propelled myself forward a matter of four metres. I did not drown on my second attempt either and by my third try I had plucked up the nerve to bring my feet into the action, still kicking and thrashing the water but more purposefully.
By the time Mum called me in for the spam sandwiches I was swimming up and down parallel to the shore perfecting the same ungainly style I have preserved for the rest of my life. It is not pretty but it is effective and need cause no alarm to anyone who stays more than two metres from me in any direction.
I just needed to be taken in hand, you see. Jeanette was the only person I knew who could swim so I had implicit faith in her ability to pass the skill to me. I spent much of my young life progressing using the same method. The cub master, for instance, was an enthusiast for Celtic history, a subject that fascinates me to this day.
Dad was the local Police Constable and during the war (second world in case you ask) he had a team of specials headed by Inspector Napier. He was the millionaire owner of Smith’s Wools; in those days if you wanted to knit a balaclava for a loved one sweltering in the Libyan Desert, you bought Smith’s Wools. The alternative was to unpick an old jumper, surplus to current requirements, and reuse the wool. I would hate to think how many hours I spent doing that for Mum, an addictive knitter.
Inspector Napier was one of eight millionaires amongst the fifteen hundred inhabitants of the Burgh of Cove and Kilcreggan. Strictly speaking, one of them lived in Coulport but there were only a handful of other people who shared this exile from the centre of communal activities along with the gasworks and the cemetery. Some millionaires were more useful to the community than others. We got cheap wool from Smith’s and expensive prizes donated to the school and Sunday school, of course, but otherwise we had small benefit from their wealth.
The exception was Mr Ross, one half of the double act of Hepburn and Ross, who made Red Hackle whisky on the banks of the River Kelvin. At a time when the water of life had left the shores of Britain to help lubricate Lend Lease, Willie Ross ensured that the Burgh was well supplied. There was a strict order about Christmas gifts: the Church of Scotland Minister qualified for a full case of whisky as did the head teacher of the primary school; the Free Church minister and my Dad got nine bottles each while each postman and the undertaker got six. The largesse went down as far as half-bottles for under-gardeners and such like riff-raff – there were no miniatures in those days!
Up to the middle of the Nineteenth Century, Kilcreggan was a lair for pirates who rowed out to ocean going ships waiting to dock in Greenock or the new piers at Port Glasgow, helping themselves to what they fancied. The only remotely worthy thing in our history is a mound in Cove reputed to have been the home of Spanish monks.
Local legend has it that they chose the location because you could sail from there in a straight line to Northern Spain without touching land. Is the story true? I have no idea, but I did check on a globe and it is certainly true that not so much as a rock obstructs the sea between Cove and Coruna.
The railways and the steamers brought an end to our community of thieves and papists. Piers were built all along the Clyde coast so that the wealthy could continue to work at polluting Glasgow while they savoured the fresh sea air at their country estates. The piers were made of greenheart, a flexible timber resistant to salt water, while the ships were launched using lignum vita, a hard, slippery wood also used for policemen’s truncheons. A sliver of greenheart is poisonous needing liberal application of bread and sugar poltices while lignum vita is so inert that it was used before stainless steel to strengthen splintered bones.
There was one full-time special in Dad’s squad. Special Constable Jimmy Grant had been Head Gamekeeper to Princess Louise, Duchess of Argyle. This daughter of Queen Victoria owned the whole of the Rosneath peninsula and she made another fortune feuing the land opened up by the piers to builders of luxury villas.
I used to have the job of stripping a mature tree of Victoria plums for an old lady whose father had built the property in 1875, the middle of the boom years. His feudal duty was to deliver two cart loads of seaweed to the Home farm in time for planting the tatties.
Colquhoun of Luss went one further and built a whole new town around the railway terminus. It was laid out on a grid pattern with provision for shops, schools and churches. There is only one square in the town, however, and that only exists because a quarry used to provide building material was left open until a town council was elected. Colquhoun evidently thought that the inhabitants would congregate in idleness in public squares.
I went to school in the town, named after the founder’s wife Helen. It had more millionaires in total than the Burgh but we beat them hands down on millionaires per thousand of population. The school was built in red sandstone with twin turrets over the separate entrances for boys and girls. Above the door was carved the legend ‘School Board of Row’; this is the old spelling of ‘Rhu’.
It was not only in Helensburgh that the Church of Scotland was slow to create new parishes. When Bearsden was built the parish was Old Kilpatrick and the inhabitants of the new town had to trudge about four miles each way across the moors through what is now Drumchapel to attend Sunday service in Old Kilpatrick. I dare say it was a safer walk then than it would be now.
There was nothing Jimmy Grant did not know about field sports and land-based wild life. He took great pains to teach me so that, before I was ten I was a fair shot with a point-two-two rifle. And I could manage a single ferret at a small warren. My townie cousin went to a rifle club and he could hit a paper clip at twenty-five metres but he could not hit a rabbit. I could kill two at a time, one sitting and the second when, after the bunnies scattered, it paused before going into its burrow.
Dad had spent part of his youth on Skye so he was knowlegable on everything concerning boats and fishing. We always had a dinghy pulled up on the beach and I was allowed to use it provided I did not go too far from shore. By the time I went to secondary school I could bring home rock cod and coalfish on demand although I had to have adult company to go after whiting.
On Skye dad would knock a limpet off a rock, clean the muscular sole and chew it; I tried it and found it to be like salty chewing gum except that it began to break up after about fifteen minutes. I might have tried it again if it had not been for the Americans based in Rosneath Castle. They handed out real chewing gum in a bewildering variety of flavours to the local kids. They used to invite us to parties in the castle where we were given as much ice-cream as we could eat.
I remember one party where they lined the priceless mahogany staircase of the castle with mattresses and encouraged us to slide down on silver-plated trays!
My intellectual development was not neglected, I will have you know. The Police house was the bottom half of a villa tucked behind the red sandstone magnificence of the Burgh Hall. Willie Lamont, the Hall Keeper and father of Jeanette, lived upstairs from us but he had one more room – one of our rooms was fitted out with a desk and had a door leading into a single story extension housing two prison cells. Criminal activity in the area fell well short of rampant so the cells were available as a playroom.
Across the road was the Church of Scotland and manse, while up the hill behind us past the bowling green, tennis courts, Scout and Guide huts, was the Free Church and Manse. There was a huge open shed in the church grounds where waste paper was stored until it could join the war effort. I could nip up our back stairs, dreep over a wall and read anything and everything perched on a great pile of paper; there is a particular smell to old paper than I can still remember.
It was my secret place but, of course, everyone knew about it. In fact the very first book I owned came courtesy of the minister who called to pass the time of day.
“Take it home with you. Mr Churchill won’t mind and I promise you that the war will not last one minute longer without that book.”
So I became the proud owner of a very, very early edition of Scouting for Boys by Baden-Powell. It had a chapter on First Aid that included detailed instructions for fixing a dislocated shoulder. The patient lies on his back with the first-aider sitting facing him with a foot in his oxter; firmly grasping the forearm he pulls sharply, twisting the arm at the same time. The advice was removed from later editions.
Apart from the first aid, I think I tried everything in that book. I made shelters from branches roofed with bracken and sat in them dodging the drips when it rained. I triangulated every tree in the neighbourhood using my sturdy ash stick carefully marked off in inches except where a knot forced a little deviation. The only thing I really mastered was making whistles from hazel twigs although I could not play a note. I was no better on the piano or the chanter even with dedicated, if despairing, teachers.
I was a restless sort of boy and it helped that I was allowed to join the Cubs at six, two years before the minimum age. I never could creep up on people and I was useless at Kim’s game but I always got top marks for enthusiasm. I was well above average at climbing trees and I used to spend hours in the tops of pollarded sycamores watching people arrive for adult events in the Burgh Hall.
Later, in my adolescence, I became addicted to climbing lampposts clutching them firmly with my thighs. Then I discovered that I could achieve the same pleasurable result rather more discreetly using my hand. Even now I get a bit turned on when I see one of those old cast-iron lamps with the cross-piece.
So by the age of eleven, I could shoot, fish, undislocate a shoulder (well, in theory I could) and all sorts of other things. The one thing I could not do was to ride a bike. I used to prop my bike against a tree then carefully settle myself in the saddle, feet on the peddles and one hand on the handlebars. The other hand was on the tree and I used it to push off. By the time I had that hand on the handlebars I was wobbling and next instant I was on the ground. On a good day I could travel about a bike length.
My friends call me ‘determined’, the rest of the world describe it as ‘stubborn’, except my family who just think I am thrawn. Whichever it is kept me trying to master the two wheeled mystery. My pal Albert could ride a bike with no effort and it is to the kindness of his brother that I owe my eventual success.
There was very little flat land around so I made my essays beside the Burgh Hall. I chose the hours just after school because there were few people about to witness my shame. One Friday I had travelled several metres before coming off and this encouraged me to extend my attempts into the early evening when the older lads started to turn up for the dance. It was the custom for them to wait outside smoking and chatting while they judged the female talent that was heading for the restrooms to touch up their make-up.
Albert’s big brother knew that I was struggling and he came over to take charge when some of the other lads started to laugh at my feeble efforts. Alex was a big lad and no one, as the adverts used to say, kicked sand in his face. He came over to me, stilling the laughter with a glance.
He took hold of my saddle and ran alongside me until I had found my balance. When he let go he trotted along in case I had a wobble. I still remember the moment when it all suddenly clicked and I knew that I could cycle. Just before I reached the main road I swung round into the church grounds, peddled past the Sunday school and my reading room and returned to whistles and cheers from the village youth.
Flushed with success, I wheeled the bike onto the main road, remounted and cycled the half mile to the village shops. By the time I got there I was having qualms so I just slowed down and made a wide turn without stopping. I was afraid to dismount in case my new found skill had withered and died.
Not an auspicious start to two-wheeling, and things did not get better. It was a thirty-five mile round trip to secondary school and I was not by a long stretch the furthest distant pupil. A couple of years before I went village kids travelled by ferry to Helensburgh, if it was calm and the tide was in, but more often to Craigendorran. There was a walk of about a mile from the pier to the school and they set records that stand to this day for the slowest mean speed recorded by a human being.
There was a lot of bullying of the keen pupils to make them keep pace with the people who did not really want to get there at all. The theory was that if everyone took two hours the head teacher would think it reasonable. Teenagers have a touching faith in the gullibility of adults, particularly teachers and policemen! It is, after all, the principle underlying the Beano and Oor Wullie.
Our playing field was the best part of a mile away from the school so it took nearly half of a double PE lesson just in travel time if you walked. The local pupils could bring a bike to school to make the trip in less than ten minutes. Us commuters had to borrow, usually from a younger pupil who could be gently coerced – not actual bullying, you understand, but who can tell what lies behind a scowl? I conned a nice wee girl in the year below me into lending me her shiny new bike.
Sadly, the brakes were on the wrong handlebars so when I firmly applied what I thought was the back brake, the front wheel locked and I dismounted clearing the handlebars by almost a foot. I was gentleman enough to try to save the bike but it cost me about two thirds of the skin on my face to do so. I still have a bit of grit trapped under the skin of my right eyelid.
Less painful but much more embarrassing was the accident that happened when I graduated to a motorbike. I was heading for school a few months after I started my first teaching job. The main roads were tricky despite salt having been applied and I knew that the side road leading to the school would be treacherously icy. I slowed right down and had my legs out to the side as I turned into the street but it did not stop me from falling.
I went down very gently, still holding the bike, in front of a concerned queue at a bus stop. There were also two big fourth year girls in my science class who galloped across the road to lift me and the bike upright with no apparent effort. The sympathetic murmurs from the bus queue turned to uncontrollable laughter.
“Are you awrigh’, Sur?”
“Yes, thank you girls. Nothing broken, everything under control,” said I, wishing the ground would open up.
But the very worst thing that happened to me on a bike was that it got me a criminal record.
My Uncle Farquhar retired from the police force while he was the sole constable in Luss. He gave up because an incomer complained that his son had been assaulted. The boy and his friends had been scrumping apples and the new lad was inclined to argue when Farquhar arrived on the scene. The locals ran off although they did not escape identification. The new boy was propelled on his way by a size ten boot constructed for the exclusive use of the polis by Whites of Rushden.
The boy’s father made a complaint to the Chief Constable, Farquhar was reprimanded and the boy was charged with theft with a police caution recorded against his name.
“A criminal record for life instead of a sore bum for a day or two,” Farquhar complained to my Dad. “The world has gone mad!” He resigned two days later after talking things over with Colquhoun of Rossdhu.
The Colquhouns owned Luss and much of the west bank of Loch Lomond. They had a hand in appointing the local bobby so they looked after retiring officers. Bob Kerr, the constable before Farquhar was the landlord of the Inverbeg Hotel. Farquhar was a whisky expert who could distinguish the malts that had been blended with grain so he considered that licensed premises would be too much of a temptation.
Instead he was given the lease of a farm on the lochside where he nurtured pigs while his son Duncan looked after the sheep and the three cows. His wife filled the house with bed and breakfast guests and they rented overnight parking to caravaners. In my mid-teens, I spent a lot of my time on the farm helping out with the animals and caravaners. My special job was to invent and construct ways of connecting an assortment of third-hand farm machinery to be pulled by an old jeep. Baulks of timber and baling wire were available and I was able to rig up something even if it did break down fairly frequently.
The hay cutter was the worst because it was off centre putting a big lateral load on the baling wire. It turned out to be quicker to unhitch it at the end of each cut and turn it manually – turning under power just broke the baling wire!
Sheep are a lot of work twice a year but otherwise they give little trouble: except once, when an old ewe breathed her last right behind the toilets in Luss camping ground during Glasgow Fair. They had plumbers and sanitary engineers not to mention officers from three different council departments, scratching their heads until a swarm of blow flies alerted them to the corpse.
Cows need attention twice a day – hail, rain or shine, they must be milked. I was free to come and go as I pleased about the farm except that, morning and evening, I had to get a stool and a pail to sit with my head against the warm, aromatic, flank of a beast while I relieved the tension in her udder.
Most of the sheep grazed on Forestry Commission land although there were always a few that preferred the roadside or someone’s vegetable garden. Bracken beneath the trees was creeping into the fields reducing the already small arable area. At that time ‘The Scottish Farmer’ was full of articles about how good pigs were at rooting out bracken. The experts even asserted that pigs preferred the succulent roots of the intrusive plant. Sadly, Farquhar’s pigs turned their noses up at anything that was not presented to them in a trough!
The highlight of the Luss year is the Highland Games. Duncan and I would be there from nine in the morning setting things up, running stalls, marshalling races until the witching hour of three when we had to leave in our finery and cycle back to the farm to milk the cows.
Farquhar was willing to take his turn but the beasts did not like him. They would stand as good as gold for me and they even let Duncan twist their teats to direct a stream of milk straight into the mouths of waiting cats, but as soon as Farquhar laid a hand on them they started shifting and stomping until they couped the pail while he shouted at them in Gaelic.
Our social life was good and varied. We would wait at the road end until a MacBrayne lorry stopped to pick us up. It might be going to Tyndrum or Arrochar but there was always a dance on a Saturday so we went where the lorry driver listed. After the dance we would be picked up by a returning lorry and be dropped off in time for the milking.
One gloaming, a strange lorry pulled up and offered us a lift to Glen Douglas where NATO were building a storage depot. At first we planned to get off at Inverbeg at the foot of the Glen, but Duncan remembered that he owed a visit to a shepherd who lived at the top of the road. I had been at school with the younger daughter so that was considered a sufficient reason to justify a journey of more than ten miles into the wilderness.
When we arrived without warning we were greeted as honoured guests. The older daughter was engaged to the son of a linesman on the West Highland Railway on the Loch Long side of the watershed so he came up the Glen bringing his sister who had also been in my class at school. From home to Luss is a long way by road but less than ten miles in a straight line across difficult terrain. Kids from the top of Glen Douglas joined pupils from Arrochar and beyond at school in Helensburgh while youngsters from the Loch Lomond end of the Glen went to the Vale of Leven for their secondary schooling.
The shepherds husbanded sheep on all the hills both sides of the educational watershed meeting up regularly for clipping and dipping with an occasional fox hunt using shot guns and terrier dogs rather than pink coats and hounds. That evening in the Glen, I was slow to appreciate that the real reason for our visit was that Duncan fancied the sister whose fiancé turned up to protect his position. Everyone was very civilised about the rivalry – no shepherds’ crooks at dawn!
Luss was a long way from home spiritually as well as geographically. I had fairly easy-going parents but I did not enjoy the licence I was given on the farm. This night, the chat was good and the drink sufficient so before we knew it, the clock was striking four.
An all-night party with alcohol and girls – even well-chaperoned girls – would not have been possible in Cove. When my parents arrived early to take me home from Luss one time they caught me with a small glass of whisky.
“Is that boy drinking?” my Mother enquired of Dad.
“Don’t you worry, Aunt Cissie,” Duncan chimed in. “He got awful drunk last week so we’re just giving him practice.”
So there we were at four in the morning fifteen miles from home with no transport and cows to milk in just over an hour. We were not drunk but in that happy state of inebriation where every mountain looks like a molehill.
The girls willingly lent us their bikes, mentioning that they had no lights but forgetting to alert us to the almost total lack of brakes. We were a little closer to the ground than usual because I am six inches taller than the girls and Duncan is three inches taller than me. We comforted each other that the first ten miles were downhill.
The road from the top of Glen Douglas follows the contours of the land. It goes more or less straight until it comes to a place where a burn, tumbling downhill, has carved a gulley for itself. At these points, the road takes a sudden turn to the left goes round a tight bend over a little bridge and comes back to resume its straight path.
It was still dark that morning when we took the road and the moon was just setting. The light was good enough on the straights to pick out the road surface of grey grit shining faintly silver in the moonlight but the shadow of the hillside made the visits to the gulleys hazardous. With the brakes fully applied we were able to keep our speed just about safe. All went well for the first six or seven miles but from that point on road repairs caused us an extra problem. The patches were of black tar: the moon glimmering on the grey stones gave us our direction but how could we distinguish between a sharp turn into a gulley and a straight section mended with tar invisible to us?
Add to that, the brakes were fading so we hurtled down the Glen guessing our route in the benevolent hands of whatever deity protects drunken cowboys! Sometimes you just have to throw caution to the winds of chance. Without mishap we shot across the main road in front of the Inverbeg Hotel and resigned ourselves to peddling the micro-bikes for the remaining five miles. Unknown to us, danger lurked in the car park.
We were congratulating each other on our good luck when headlights appeared behind us and we were passed by a wee police panda car that came to an impressive halt skewed across the road blocking our path. Farquhar had patrolled the district in his own car getting a mileage allowance from police funds, but his successor had been supplied with a proper police vehicle so he felt justified in doing handbrake turns. It might have lost ground in pursuit of a Jaguar speeding along the A84 but it had proved effective in stopping two young men on pedal cycles.
The tradition of policing the area was that the Chief Constable offered a short list of names to Colquhoun of Rossdhu who spoke to the candidates before making his selection. The present Chief Constable, piqued that Colquhoun had bought a prize gundog from under his nose, gained his revenge by appointing a constable without consulting the laird. The new man had no tact and very limited intelligence.
The Chief Constable admitted to his wife that he had acted unworthily but told her she would just have to do without her usual invitation to the annual garden party at the big house that was the highlight of the county’s social season. What she replied is, sadly, unrecorded.
The new constable, getting out of his wee car, strutted towards us metaphorically adjusting his six-shooters just like John Wayne. He was clearly running through a long list of crimes and misdemeanours but either his imagination failed him or his sergeant stepped in. The charge sheet, when it arrived two days later, made no reference to dangerous driving or endangering pedestrians although these had been mentioned in our pre-dawn chat in the middle of the deserted main road.
Riding a bicycle without lights, was all it amounted to. By the time we had expressed our disbelief and he had stopped threatening to handcuff us, day had dawned so he could not in the end prevent us from mounting up and finishing our journey. He followed us home just, he assured us, to see that we had not given a false address.
Farquhar was now a magistrate and both Duncan and I are sons of former policemen but the affair would have been quietly forgotten if it had not been for a very keen young reporter on the Lennox Herald. The chief magistrate told Farquhar that we would probably get a police caution, so the case would have fizzled out if it had not been that the reporter was winching a Luss boy.
He told her the story to give her a laugh but she saw it as the key to unlock the door to the news desk of a national daily paper. While he came to the farm to beg forgiveness for dropping us in the mire, she went to the Chief Constable and pointedly demanded that we be brought to trial
“I was only meaning to have a wee laugh at the pair of you but now she’s on her high horse. If I can do anything to put it right just let me know."
Farquhar discussed the matter with the other magistrates who showed their support by leaving it to him. They did not want to offend him by being harsh on us but they were not prepared to be pilloried by the press for being too lenient. In a judgement that Solomon might have envied they decided that Farquhar would hear the cases, sitting alone at half past seven in the morning, an hour before the court usually opened. They did agree to forget to notify the press about the change of time.
The three of us drove to the court in Alexandria in the wee van that was normally used for carrying pig food. That in itself was unlikely to deter the reporter but it would ensure that she stood upwind at a respectable distance. We got out at the main entrance while Farquhar drove round the back to the parking reserved for magistrates. The first person we saw when we stepped down was the reporter sitting on the steps clutching her notebook and several sharp pencils
Duncan and I nodded to her and then went into the wee room where miscreants wait for justice. When I was called into the court, Farquhar was sitting in solitary state. From the dock I had a quick look round: the court was packed. All the solicitors in the area had got wind of the unusual proceedings and had come to see the fun. The one person I could not see was the ace reporter.
The clerk established my identity before he read out the charge and asked for my plea.
“Guilty, Uncle…. Your Honour.”
Farquhar leaned forward over the bench to consult with the clerk.
“Fined ten shillings.”
So off I went, a convicted criminal, glad to have escaped a custodial sentence.
It was the next day before we discovered why the reporter failed to show up. Her boyfriend, still eaten up by remorse, had found a solution. As she moved to enter the court he appeared, dropped to one knee and proposed holy matrimony. She was so overcome that he had finally succumbed to her hints, that she dropped her pencils and let him lead her away. They walked off hand in hand to stroll along the banks of the river Leven.
Her promising careers in journalism came to an end half an hour later behind a bush on the towpath where she conceived the first of five children that blessed their marriage.
Meanwhile, Duncan had taken his place in the dock. I had met him on his way in and told him of my ten bob fine, so he was feeling fairly relaxed. After pleading guilty he waited the verdict. Once again Farquhar consulted the clerk before passing judgement.
“Fined one pound.”
Duncan stood for a minute looking stunned.
“But you only fined Alasdair ten shillings!”
“Indeed, but this crime is becoming too prevalent and I am making an example of you: this is the second case of cycling without lights that I have heard this morning!”
About the Author
Originally from Dalmuir, Alasdair McPherson is now retired and living in exile in Lincolnshire.
He says he has always wanted to write, but life got in the way until recently. He has already penned two novels and is now trying his hand at short stories.
You can read his full profile on McVoices.
He says he has always wanted to write, but life got in the way until recently. He has already penned two novels and is now trying his hand at short stories.
You can read his full profile on McVoices.