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By Sinclair Calder
Some Local Characters
On a trip to Strathdearn years after I had left the Glen, I was visiting my good friends the Watsons. Cecil Watson, gardener at Glenmazeran, an accomplished piper and ingenious craftsman, was talking with me and his wife Jean. Jean ran the tiny post office, located at a counter in her front porch, and it was soon after the new-fangled first and second class post system had been introduced.
The door opened and in came Jackie Nobel, postman from Tomatin. After the usual greetings, Mrs. Watson (for outside the family married women were nearly always referred to by this formal title in those days) said, “You’ll have time for a cup of tea Jackie?”
“O-h w-e-l-l, let me see now. Do you have any letters for me the day?”
“Yes, there’s a couple there, but have your tea first”
“O-h w-e-1-], let me see now, I’d better have a look at them. Oh y-e-s, they’re both second class – — yes, we’ll have that cup of tea.”
—And Jackie had several cups, a few buttered pancakes, and some interesting stories to tell before making his way slowly out to his waiting van.
When we lived at Kyllachy in the 1940s, it was Willie the Post who was king of the road. He drove furiously, his van bearing the evidence of many near misses, and every year he attended at the GPO in Inverness to be honoured with his safe driving award! He often carried a very varied cargo in addition to the legitimate paid up mail, and in an age when almost nobody had cars or phones he thus provided a service that saved many a long and burdened walk.
There were accumulators; acid filled batteries that had to be charged every couple of weeks, essential for powering the wireless, without which the vital war news was missed. There were pails of milk, perhaps some rabbits or a hen for somebody’s dinner, or a blood soaked parcel of venison or a freshly caught salmon, and little boxes of “messages” from the shop.
Willie was most obliging, but anxious in case “officials” might be snooping around. He detested the tedious business of opening and shutting the many gates on his long, rough and tortuous routes, and boys like me were eagerly offered lifts to ease his passage. When, as often happened, the Glen road filled up with snow, Willie usually won through on foot, pulling a small sledge, to carry the mail. Willie was truly a power in the land!
Another character, who lived near us, was Alan Tulloch, “Allan o’ the Glen”, who farmed Corrivoric. I used to help him with his hay and loved to go into his house, where he lived alone. The low raftered ceiling had several guns stowed away in it, and when a deer appeared in his turnips he reached up and blasted away through the open window. “If it’s in my field, it’s mine”, was all he said, as he dragged it into a shed. When his collie began to chew at a dead hen, feathers and all, he remarked that it was good for cleaning out its system for it made “a good pull through”. Our lunch there was invariably Welsh rarebit, toasted directly on top of the kitchen range, but always welcome, despite its dubious colour, after a hard morning at the hay.
Dick Ross, the gardener at Tomatin House, was an inveterate raconteur of improbable stories. Fishing in the Findhorn one fine day he hooked a trout which he swung up into a tree overhanging the river. He climbed up to disentangle his line and recover the fish, but dislodged his hat, which fell into the rapidly flowing water below. Just then a terrified rabbit fleeing from a weasel jumped from the river bank right into the hat, and another angler further downstream was amazed to land a hat with a very alive rabbit in it!
There were many other. characters about, including these gamekeepers like Duncky Davidson of Glenmazeran, Malcolm Douglas and later Willie Mackay of Kyllachy, Callum Beaton of Dalmigivie and Duncan Don of Clune, who shouted their heads off trying to keep up flag wavers in line at the grouse drives. Anderson, at Tomatin House, spoke in a broad Aberdeen -shire dialect, and we hadn’t a clue what he was talking about.
Bicycles
For all of us, young and old, the bicycle was the magic carpet that carried us to work and pleasure. Bikes were hard to come by during the war, and so were the spares so often required, especially since apart from the A9, all the local roads had gravel surfaces. Thus we developed skills of make-do and mend which have served me well in subsequent years. My bike enabled me to visit the widely scattered houses of friends, and especially the homes of people who gave us young people a special welcome, such as the Watsons, the parents of Saunders and Margaret Fraser at Corrybrough and headmaster Leslie and his wife at Raigbeg. It was essential for getting to the bus at Findhorn bridge, where we Glen “scholars” gratefully waited in the warmth and welcome of old Mrs. Mackinnons cosy cottage until Bob the bus arrived to carry us to school in Inverness. It also made possible the many trips to Stuart-Walker’s shop in Tomatin, where often there was little to buy when one got there.
On one freezing cold day, the only edible thing available off the ration, was a packet of oxo cubes, and when I chewed one on the way home it was delicious. It is amazing what cold and hunger does to the taste buds. Freezing hands were always painful companions when cycling in winter Tomatin, but I solved the problem by making mitts out of rabbit skins, of which we had a_ plentiful supply.
Incidentally, when Karl Storey and I were building butts at Glenmazeran one summer, we returned to our bothy each night for three whole weeks to a copious and aromatic pot of rabbit stew prepared by Mrs Davidson. Even after three weeks we continued to enjoy it, but I have never considered rabbit as a delicacy since that time!
Going to and from social events in Tomatin on dark winter nights, with no lights on the bike, as was often the case, we steered by looking upwards at the line of brighter sky delineating the course of the road between the dark looming mass of
the trees. This was OK. Until unseen potholes were encountered, but even worse was to meet an equally blind cyclist using the same procedure in the opposite direction! Happily such encounters were rare.
A more worrying threat was that of meeting the local policeman, based at Daviot, who made periodic forays along our roads, in the hope of intercepting lawbreakers like me. Luckily he rode a noisy motor bike which could be heard long before it
arrived on the scene, and thus gave us time to take evading action, On one very dark night, between Morile and Tomatin, his headlight bore down out of the darkness in front of me and I had no time to react. Travelling very fast he went
roaring past, and then decelerated rapidly before turning round and giving chase. Jn some panic I steered off the road and found myself, still upright and mounted on the bike, embedded in a rhododendron bush, but completely concealed from the road. Five times the policeman ranged backwards and forwards past my hiding place, before he gave up and roared away thinking that he must have seen a ghost.
One day my sister Joan returned early and in some consternation from an errand on her bike to the shop. Near Morile she had met an Indian leading an elephant! Afraid to go past she had made a bee line for home! We never did solve the mystery of where the elephant had come from or where it was going.
On the long summer days the bikes took us into new, exciting environments, such as Carr Bridge, The Streens, Farr, Culloden, and to the wonders of Inverness itself. Eventually they took some of us much further. Alastair Hunter (of Scottish Dance Band fame) came for his holidays to the Watsons at Glenmazeran, and together he and I made it to Aberdeen and back.
Later Karl Storey of Corrybrough and I set out southwards on our rickety machines, and after braving the jungles of Perth, Glasgow and Edinburgh, eventually crossed into England at Coldstream. On the way home we stripped the thread on one pedal near Pitlochry. A spare one was unobtainable and in any case we had no money, so we completed the long road home taking turns of towing each other, using a bit of rope we “found” on a haystack. That would be pretty difficult on the A9 nowadays!
When the county Scout sports were held in Inverness, the town boys looked with disdain at the effrontery of the entry of the tiny Tomatin Troop, but when the day was over we came third out of some dozen Troops, having made a clean sweep of all the cycling events; thanks to muscles toned up daily on our hills.
The Bus
To us secondary School children attending the Academy or the High School in Inverness, “the bus” was an important element in our social lives. ‘The bus, run by Macrae and Dick from Strothers Lane. was under the benevolent command of Bob Calder of Inverness, who was king of the Tomatin route during the wartime and for quite a few years afterwards. One disapproving look from Bob in his rear view mirror was enough to settle any unruly behavior in the back, yet he had a great sense of humour and loved to play tricks on his more eccentric passengers.
Tomatin seemed much further from Inverness than it does nowadays, and the bus took about an hour to follow the winding road along by Loch Moy. past Meallmore and round the big hairpin bend across the River Nair at Daviot. It was a general passenger service with we “scholars” making up most of the regular payload, and we were given lots of jobs, putting off parcels at the appropriate places and giving out the weekly tickets on Monday mornings. The bus itself was a wartime utility model, with slatted wooden seats and the minimum of comfort, but to us it was a kind of club, where homework was copied, gossip was exchanged and friendships and even romances flourished.
There were sometimes adventures which brightened up our daily routine, such as the time when, travelling on an icy road, we rounded a blind corner at Loch Moy to find a huge “Queen Mary” RAF aircraft transporter carrying a crashed Spitfire, jack-knifed across the road in front of us. Bob expertly brought us to a controlled stop just inches away from this giant load. More than once we spent hours stuck in snowdrifts huddled in our icy vehicle, and on one memorable occasion we completed our journey to Tomatin on a railway steam engine!
Among my fellow travelers on the bus I remember. Barbara McPherson, Jean and Betty Don, Karl and Rosa Storey. Freddy Anderson, Billy Macdonald, Bobby Thain, Molly and Nelly Ross, Iris Curtis, Margaret Fraser, Jock Macdonald, Margaret, Philpott, Shirley and Joan Latham, Nancy and Mabeth Grant, Betty Macintosh, Doreen Stuart, John Brown, Nancy Cameron, Malvin Wood and the Macdonald girls and David Hutcheson, (“Chuckies” because his father raised poultry”) from Moy. I know that some are no longer with us but perhaps there are some survivors who will read this???
The Hall
The other focus of our social lives was the wooden, corrugated iron roofed Tomatin Hall, tucked precariously under the piers of the stone railway viaduct. Here were the dances, the Strip the Willows, the Eightsome Reels and the marathon everlasting Lancers. enjoyed by everyone from grannies to toddlers and all to the toe-tapping music of maestros such as Ian Watson. Jock Macdonald, Andrew Mackay and Alastair Mackenzie. There were concerts too, with Mr. Storey rendering “My Grandfather’s Clock”, and Alex, Ferguson and Dunc. Macrae astonishing us with their versatility with bones and spoons.
The Badminton Club played here, invincible in its home matches against visiting teams, because they could not deal with our low ceiling and strategically placed suspended Tilly lamps! One of the badminton members was Willi Schlesinger, a German prisoner of war, captured in Europe, imprisoned in Arkansas, USA, and somehow ending up leading a relatively free life. working on Dell Farm. He was often my cycling companion returning from the badminton.
Here too met the Scouts, all ten of us on a good night, the glorious 30th Inverness-shire Tomatin Group, started up by John Johnstone, a boy evacuated from Edinburgh to stay with relations in the Glen. He later became a career army officer and served in Korea. Then there were the Youth Club and the Social Club, organisations composed of substantially the same membership, but organised by two well intentioned ladies who were deadly rivals. Thus we had two of everything! — Christmas parties, Halloween festivities and summer excursions to far exotic places like Kingussie and Nairn. A little boy who took part in those activities was Geordie Buchan, later to become one of Tomatin’s most celebrated sons, gaining international motor cycle racing fame as winner of the Manx Grand Prix.
Away from the hall there was the football. played near Freeburn, Tomatin was in the Strathspey and Badenoch League, competing against teams like Nethy Bridge and Boat of Garten, and we more than held our own. Among the most partisan of supporters was Tom Wallace, gardener at Tomatin House, who one evening had to climb a tree to retrieve his hat, thrown high in the air when Tomatin scored.
The War
Of course “the War”, and the long period of austerity which followed it, was a dominant feature in those days. The Home Guard (Lieutenant Jack, keeper at Balnespick, Sergeant Willie Macdonald, Woodend) practised guarding the railway viaduct, and we boys had great fun easily evading them, and running across the bridge triumphantly.
Young men and women got on the bus or the train and disappeared from our lives, some of them forever. Cecil Watson from Glenmazeran, shot down over enemy territory, was one of these. Some got occasional leaves, and George Grant of Wade’s Cottage brought home some bananas, a fruit which was a distant, magic-like vision of pre-war days. Nancy and Mabeth brought one or two to the bus and shared out little pieces to our great delight.
Walking up to school from the bus in Inverness, we rubbed shoulders with servicemen from many lands, lots of Poles, Norwegians, Czechs, French sailors with red pom poms on their hats, Canadians, Australians, New Zealanders, South Africans, and bearded Sikhs. There were also the lumber men who had come far to cut down our trees, soldiers of the Canadian Forestry Corps, civilian Newfoundlanders with their expensive looking wide trousered suits and little black men from British Honduras. At least two of the Newfoundlanders stayed in the district after the war, Kelly who started the haulage business which still runs out of Tomatin and Hawco who built up the Hawco motor company in Inverness.
One sunny day after a week of ever increasing snow drifts we started to plod our homeward journey from the bus up the Glen road and found a wonderland. Italian prisoners of war, brought in to dig out the drifts, had transformed the road into a Via Appia lined with beautiful, shining snow sculpted statues, columns and monuments. One of the monuments bore the simple words “Remembre Worse”. Next day the thaw came and all these magnificent edifices melted away, unrecorded except in our memories.
The day came when the bells rang out and the war was over, and most of the people who had gone away began to appear on the bus in their various uniforms. There was Jock MacDonald wearing the ribbons of the European War, his ATS sister Betty, George Grant, Wren Mary Stuart, Auchintoul, and her brother Ian, and sailor Ian Watson fresh from far Trincomalee in Ceylon. Alastair Mackenzie returned to reopen his cycle shop near Morile, and George Macleod brought back the skis which, as a Lovat Scout, he had learned to use in the Rocky Mountains in Canada. It was on these skis that J made my first faltering runs and the beginning of what continues to be one of the major pleasures of my life. Last of all came the gentle, artistic Murdo MacAskill, freed from the horrors of Japanese prison camps. Indeed his name was among those to be recorded as killed on the Inverness Royal Academy war memorial, and “DJ” the Rector was delighted when I told him that Murdo was very much alive!
Up on a hill behind Corrybrough there were many happy evenings of juniper cutting, and the bushes were piled high to make a bonfire worthy of the victory celebration. “Bob the bus” brought drums of waste oil from Macrae and Dicks and these were manhandled up the hill to add to the grand conflagration, which must have been seen from many miles around. Mr. Leslie, headmaster at Raigbeg, organised victory sports, and we began to realise that the war was really and truly over.
Although the decade or so that I spent in Strathdearn forms a very minor part in my life, it coincided with my formative teenage years, and had an influence out of all proportion to its duration. Here were nurtured my enduring interests and I still regard it as a HOMEland. Along with Donald MacAskill the Strathdearn Bard, father of Murdo, I can truly say:
"I've wandered over Scotland, and I've seen her choicest sights,
And in her lowland beauties I have found some keen delights,
But I ever turn with fondness back to beautiful Strathdearn,
Where the lovely Findhorn leads me to the hills of Coignafearn".