Gift from the Gallowgate (36 page)

She left around four in order to avoid the rush hour on the underground – she had to go to Waterloo for her train home – so we walked a little bit with her, past Scotland Yard. We
were afraid to go much farther than that, in case we got lost, and in any case, we were beginning to feel quite tired. We spent the next two hours in the lounge, then went back to our room. After
our tuck-in at lunchtime, we didn’t need anything much to eat, so we ordered sandwiches and watched television before having an early night.

We left for Victoria Station the next morning, on our way to Heathrow to get the plane to Edinburgh. Bertha and Bill met us at Turnhouse at 1 p.m. They’d been to an exhibition of some kind
in Harrogate, I think, so this was a midway stop (almost) for all of us.

We had a very enjoyable few days with them, as we have always done, visiting all the old favourites and also finding new places to explore. We left Edinburgh on the Monday, and had an easy
journey home in Bill’s Jaguar, following the coast to a large extent.

And so ended a week that will remain forever in my memory.

It has just occurred to me that, although I have touched on some of our holidays, I haven’t included the times we went abroad. I started teaching in 1967, and by the
spring of 1968, I decided that we could afford to splurge out a little . . . if we were careful.

I booked a trip to Linz on the Rhine, costing £32 for twelve days (half price for twelve-year-old Alan) but a few weeks before we were due to leave, we were notified that, because there
were not enough bookings for that particular place, we had been transferred to another. Our destination now was Boppard.

The coach left from Victoria Station, but when we turned up, the courier had no note of us. I, of course, panicked, but he assured me that it would be all right. He would book us in separately
at each hotel we were to use. In actual fact, we came off far better than any of our fellow passengers. The cheaper rooms given to package tours were completely full, so we were given far better
accommodation.

We were based for a week in a small hotel, awakened each morning by the ringing of the church bells at the crack of dawn. Apparently, a rich merchant had once been lost in the forest in a
snowstorm, and only found his way when the bells at Boppard had started to ring. He left money for this to be done every day, as that might help other poor travellers. They didn’t help us,
however. We tourists could have seen them far enough.

We spent a night in Amsterdam going there, and on the way home we stayed in Luxembourg for one night and Brussels for our last night. It was here that we had the best accommodation ever. Instead
of being on the top floor with the other Overland passengers, we were given a huge
en suite
room on the first floor, usually reserved for VIPs. It was 1968, remember, and very few rooms
with bathrooms were available.

All this for £32 each – coach fares, full board everywhere we went, and entry paid to each place of interest. The place that interested Jimmy most, of course, was the Asbach Uralt
Brandy distillery.

It was a few years before we could afford to go abroad again. We spent the intervening holidays with Sheila and her husband in Aldershot. This, although the home of the British
Army, lies in lovely countryside, and having travelled there by train, we had to use public transport to get around. However, we saw quite a lot of the area, going to Windsor, Reading, Portsmouth,
and so on. Eventually, with a decent car, we were able to get there under our own steam, and go farther afield while we were there.

Our second continental holiday was in Austria, flying this time, and at a much higher cost, which for the life of me I can’t recall. I can’t remember the year,
either, but it was the time of a go-slow strike by the pilots, and our flight was four hours late in taking off from Edinburgh. This meant that we landed in Munich after midnight, and we saw not
one single soul as we went through the airport to board the coach that was to take us to Innsbruck. The café we were meant to stop at for something to eat was closed by the time we reached
it, and when we arrived at our hotel, we were shown to our room . . . and that was that. It was two or three in the morning, of course, but it didn’t make our hunger any the less.

We had one week there, and than we were transported to just outside Salzburg. This time we were in a much more upmarket hotel, all rooms having
en suite
bathrooms. One whole week of
this made us decide that it was the only way to travel. We have kept to this rule ever since, wherever we go. Salzburg, of course, was the home of
The Sound of Music,
and we were taken
round the various spots where it was filmed. I was quite disappointed to learn that things weren’t exactly as they had appeared, but it was still a lovely holiday.

Another few years on, both Jimmy and I had been quite ill for some time, and it was into July before we began to feel better – to feel we deserved a real break. As his
holidays were fixed in the Trades fortnight, I didn’t have much time to look for somewhere. To be honest, most destinations were fully booked up. The only place I was offered was the Costa
del Sol, and Jimmy had always said he didn’t fancy Spain. The lady in the travel agency advised me that waiting would mean losing it, so I booked it there and then. As you will imagine, I
wasn’t flavour of the month when I told my husband what I had done, but it turned out to be a wonderful holiday.

Spain was followed, at various intervals, by Majorca and then Ibiza. In both cases, we chose venues that were not yet popular with the public – they are now – and Santa Ponsa was
delightful, as was Ibiza town itself, although we were staying in a large hotel at the other side of the water. We had to take a ferry across every day (it cost the equivalent of eight pence) but
that was all part of the attraction of the place. We used to sit by the quay in the town itself to watch the cruise ships leaving. There were all sorts of people, and all sorts of yachts in the
marina, with celebrities and suntanned beauties (male and female) sallying around with very little clothes on.

Ho, hum! If only we could have enjoyed ourselves like that when we were young.

We booked for a Greek island (Aegina) at the beginning of 1981. I can remember this because my mother suffered a stroke about two months before we were due to go. I wanted to cancel, but Bertha
said it would be a shame to lose so much money; there were no refunds paid at that stage. I promised to phone every day, but I could never get through to Britain. It was a lovely holiday, lazy and
relaxing, but I could never rid my mind of the worry of what was going on in Aberdeen. As it happened, Mum lived for another three years, paralysed down her right side and confined to a wheelchair,
but her mind was still as clear as ever it was.

We were both pensioners when we decided to have one last holiday overseas, but it would have to be reasonably priced. The travel agent checked fares for me, and came up with a
wonderful bargain – £129 each for two weeks in the Algarve . . . if we could be ready to leave in a few days’ time. We were ready to leave at any time, nothing to keep us back,
but I had never fancied self-catering. I’d always looked forward to being looked after, that was the best part of holidays, and I’d heard horrendous stories of the squalor of some of
the apartments offered.

We had to make up our minds there and then, though, and fortunately, it wasn’t like that at all. The chalets were in the grounds of a large impressive hotel, and we could use all the
facilities. Not only that, a girl came in every morning to clean for us. It was great. The only meal I cooked each day was breakfast, and we ate out the rest of the time. Cafés and
restaurants were really cheap, and the hotel itself only charged us £15 for the one evening meal we had there – which, sad to say, wasn’t particularly exciting.

In between these forays onto the continent, we spent our holidays with Sheila and John, in the bungalow in Ash Vale they had bought. This small village is on the edge of the
Army Training Grounds, with lovely paths through the Surrey woods, and we explored much of the surrounding area, too . . . when we went by car. In later years, when driving so far became too much
for Jimmy, we flew there, being collected at Heathrow by Sheila and John and driven around while we were there.

We found dozens of superb eating places, although one especially stands out in my memory because of its position. The village was called Friday Street and the original building, named the
Stephen Langton was extremely old (another part had been added far more recently).

Langton had been born in Friday Street, but after suspecting that he’d been let down by his childhood sweetheart, he left his birthplace and became a priest. Many years later, when he
returned to his roots with the burning desire to marry the girl whatever she had done, he learned that she had died . . . of a broken heart, by all accounts. He had devoted himself to the church
again, and eventually rose to Archbishop – an instance of local boy really making good. The tale was sad, but the cuisine and the service in the inn could not have been bettered.

On another holiday, we passed through another village with an intriguing name – Christmas Pie. I did wonder what its origin was, and was delighted to read in a local weekly some weeks
after we came home, that some time in the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries the land had belonged to a farmer called Christmas, and had originally been known as ‘Christmas’s
Piece’. It’s easy to understand how the contraction had been made. I think that whoever had written that article must have come across the village and been as fascinated by the name as
we were. He, however, had probably had the time and, being a journalist, the expertise to make enquiries about it.

Since Sheila and her husband moved to Aberdeenshire, John has been amused at many of the names here. Maggieknocketer is one of his favourites, and the villages where the pronunciation bears no
resemblance to the spelling – Finzean being Fingin, Strachan becoming Strawn. An old local ‘chestnut’ goes something like this.

After hearing of several places in this category, a Yorkshireman on holiday in Scotland’s northeast came across Aberchirder, and was stunned to be told it was pronounced Foggieloan.
It’s not, really. It’s actually pronounced Aberhirder, but it has the nickname Foggieloan – goodness knows why.

Enough! Enough!

I gave in to the many requests I’d received for a sequel to
The Brow of the Gallowgate,
and brought Albert Ogilvie’s children and grandchildren through the
Second World War. As always, as soon as it was finished, I gave it to Doreen to read. Not only does she spot misprints and errors (a real boon to me), she gives me her honest opinion of my stories,
and she thought that this was every bit as good as the original. Unfortunately, my editor (Ruth is as good a name as any) deemed otherwise. She gave me no explanation for the rejection, so I phoned
the agent she had recommended when my third book was accepted, to ask if he could tell me why. As he had instructed when I went to meet him in London months earlier, I sent him the manuscript of
Cousins At War
so that he could suggest any alterations he thought it needed, but he said it was perfect and passed it straight over to Ruth. If he thought it was good enough then, what
did he think had gone wrong when she got her hands on it?

She had already been in touch with him, however, and I got no satisfaction from him either, so I asked to have my manuscript returned. He advised me to change the names of the characters, in
other words to create an entirely new family, and try it again, but it was meant as a sequel and I found it impossible to change the names. I couldn’t banish the feel of the Ogilvies; they
kept coming into my mind and no other names seemed to fit them. I gave up. This box, too, has languished in some forgotten corner of my home ever since, but perhaps I will resurrect it some day
– enough time has surely passed since I wrote the first tale.

I come now to
Waters of the Heart
and Louise (another fictional name), a new editor, who suggested as many alterations for this book as Ruth had done for the second and
third. This book had just been published when I was asked to give a talk to the children in Catterline School, just south of Stonehaven. Aberdeen was celebrating 200 years since the making of Union
Street, our main thoroughfare, and I was supposed to talk about the history of the two centuries.

I didn’t feel competent enough to tackle this subject and pressure of work wouldn’t allow me to spend time in researching it, but I offered to give the pupils some tips on how to
make their own stories more interesting. It was a glorious summer afternoon when Jimmy drove me there and, because I feel nervous when he’s there, I don’t know why, he went down to the
shore to pass the time.

The children were really good and listened eagerly. I had begun by asking them if they knew what describing words were called, and got them thinking by giving them examples of wrongly-placed
descriptions. For example, two advertisements in a newspaper column.

I wish I had taken a note of the hilarious adverts the boys and girls produced. Then I asked them to write a story, remembering to put in some description, but not too much. The end results that
the headmistress posted on to me were extremely good, and I still regret not having time to comment on each one individually. At the time, I was deeply involved in wrestling with an ending for my
next novel, at a stage when even a small diversion made me lose the thread of what I had intended to do.

Jimmy collected me in an hour and a half, and took me to see where he had been sitting after having a walk along the shore. We were on the bench, looking down on the sea, when two men walked up
the stony path from the rocks. One, let’s call him Fred, asked Jimmy if he’d been taking photographs – this part of the coast is a favourite with photographers and artists –
and Jimmy said that I’d been giving a talk at the school.