I can still recall the dismay of realising primary school was the end of it: the end of the carefree world of childhood and the beginning of a lifetime of toil and trouble. Our dairy farm stood 600 ft above sea level on a hill in East Ayrshire. The Gaelic translation of its name is supposedly ‘hill shoulder’ which seems to fit the location. It lay about a mile from the East Ayrshire town of Cumnock, below us in the Lugar valley. To the north, our land bordered the Marquis of Bute’s Dumfries House, and the Auchinleck estate that once belonged to James Boswell. My father and his two brothers ran three dairy farms: Changue, Bankend and Crofthead. To the south, we also had two hill farms, Muirdyke and Newfield, which had some in-bye land, but mostly consisted of large areas of upland moor where blackface sheep roamed. There was a surreal quality to the landscape up there, like an endless rolling sea of grass, moss and rashes. Now, most of that land has been completely destroyed by open-cast coal operations. Picturesque white-walled steadings with their sheltering ash trees swept away. These included farms my ancestors worked. The overburden was carelessly replaced, leaving a churned up wasteland.
In 1950 the workings at the Knockshinnoch colliery at New Cumnock came too close to the surface and there was an inrush of liquid peat and moss trapping 135 miners underground. 13 died. My father attended the rescue effort with food and drink for the men. On YouTube you can see a very superficial, almost jaunty, Pathé News piece about it, which gives an idea of the landscape and climate of my home county.
Our Ayrshires were a renowned herd. We bottled our own milk and that of several neighbouring farms, collecting it using our own tanker. Later I drove that tanker, which lacked any internal baffles. When you stopped at a junction, the milk slopped back and forth, and you could feel the movement transmitted to the driver’s cab. I used to wonder if I was producing butter back there.
Having spent five years at my mother’s side, surrounded by adults, most of whom were employed by my father, I was reluctant to leave this comfortable bubble and meet my contemporaries in the town. Aside from my younger brother, I had little experience of children my own age. The headmaster of the local primary school was James T Cree, a very large and impressive man, later to become president of the EIS (Educational Institute of Scotland). Corporal punishment using ‘the belt’ or ‘the strap’ was commonplace in senior and even junior state schools at the time. It was known elsewhere as the ‘tawse’ or Lochgelly – after its place of manufacture – but I never heard those terms used locally. At my primary and secondary schools it was always referred to as ‘the belt.’
As a public relations exercise my father would occasionally hold ‘at homes’ when the farm and dairy were opened to the general public. Hundreds would attend. Tables were laid out on the lawn, the hotel staff served teas, and the Scottish Milk Marketing Board ‘Dairy Princess’ would pose for the press handing out ice creams from a van.
At one of these events my parents were entertaining Mr Cree and other dignitaries in the drawing room. As a pre-school child, one of my favourite games was ‘lions and lion-tamers’ where I would get any persuadable adult to brandish a leather strap at me from one of my mother’s old handbags, while I pretended to be a fierce lion they could scarcely keep at bay. Excited by all the strangers in the house, I fetched the strap from the toy cupboard and strode into the drawing room. I handed the strap to James T Cree with the instruction that he should be the lion-tamer. I had no idea who he was, and certainly did not know how proficient he was in the use of that other kind of strap. I gambolled about on the carpet on all-fours while he flicked it at me, harmlessly. He looked at my father, laughed, and said, ‘Shades of things to come!’
The local primary school was called Greenmill, and if your parents could afford it, there was a school uniform. The blazer pocket and cap were marked with the school’s ‘GPS’ monogram. We wore grey cotton shirts and black and green striped ties, usually with a grey wool v-neck pullover.
As one changes jobs and status, life seems to be made up of a succession of ‘first days at school.’ The first of these is your first day at school. Aged five, I was petrified. Everything was strange and threatening. I have a vivid memory of refusing to leave my mother’s side. She pointed to our business manager’s daughter, a year older than me and in her second year, standing in the queue, and said, ‘Look, Jennifer isn’t scared to go in.’
My first teacher was Mrs Cree, wife of the aforementioned James T. She was pleasant enough. We sat at wooden and tubular metal desks with hinged lids and stained, defunct inkwells. Inside the desk we had little blackboards and square dusters to clean them with. The boards had white lines to aid your callow calligraphy. The desks were full of chalk dust. The teachers had a large blackboard at the front, either attached to the wall or on a stand with a rolling fabric surface, some of which was squared off for ‘sums.’ If we were good, we got to play in the percussion band on a Friday afternoon. The best behaved pupils were given the drums.
I eventually overcame my fear of the unknown and settled into Primary 1, but always lurking in the background was the threat of physical punishment. The ‘belting’ of primary school children for minor misdemeanours still amazes me. A bunch of us boys once got belted for sitting on the wall between the school and my uncle’s farm, Bankend. I protested that the wall belonged to a family member but that made no difference. In the intensely egalitarian west of Scotland it might even have made matters worse. Mr Davidson belted me along with the rest.
Mr Davidson (known as ‘Rumpy’ for some reason) was the ‘discipline master’. He kept two belts on his person, hung over his shoulders and concealed under his tweed jacket. The larger, thicker, paler, and more painful one he called Big Bad John. The other smaller and darker one he named Little Black Sambo. There was a tense moment as you worked out which one he was reaching for prior to the assault. Heaven help you if you moved your hands apart as he swung the belt down. You’d get twice the number of blows for evasion.
The large classes were of mixed ability but no effort was made to sort us into groups of similar potential. As a result the entire class would have to sit quietly while the slowest reader struggled through a story that most of us had already read. The teacher would say encouraging things like, ‘Sound it out, David.’ My attention would wander and I was caught gazing out of the window. ‘What word are we at Allan Stevenson?’ I had no idea. ‘Ah, you see? Allan Stevenson is too good to study with the rest of us. Well, he can come down to the front where I can see him and make sure he joins in.’
After a few years my mother became dissatisfied with my academic performance. I came consistently half way between the top and bottom of a class of about 35. It appears she went to see the assistant Head, Miss Taylor, to ask why I was doing so badly. I seemed to get on pretty well with English composition and grammar (I just asked myself what my mother would say and filled that in). I was OK at art too – but arithmetic and spelling were not so great.
I soon found myself sitting an intelligence test in Miss Taylor’s office. The questions seemed very silly. I was shown a picture of a man and woman sitting on deck chairs in the rain and asked what was wrong with it. Then I had to look out of the window and name everything I could see. Later, my mother received the official analysis: It seems I was not in fact stupid – just lazy. However it wasn’t until much later when my teacher, a Mrs Bradford, took me aside and told me, ‘You shouldn’t let all those girls beat you,’ that I roused myself to greater efforts.
Once, when the district nurse came to give us all a medical she pushed a piece of paper across the desk and said ‘I hear you can draw a horse in three lines. Let me see you do it.’ I had no idea what the three line thing meant but I drew her a horse anyway.
Fighting was commonplace among both boys and girls at primary school. If a fight broke out, a mob of excited, noisy children would form around the combatants and a teacher would wade through the crowd to reach and separate the fighters. Like any hierarchy within a herd of animals, everyone knew exactly where they stood in pugilistic proficiency. It was only when two kids were of similar ability and the outcome uncertain that prolonged or serious fighting occurred. The biggest, toughest, boys in the school would inevitably have to fight from time to time to establish their status. These types even had henchmen that accompanied them, a bit like having seconds. Obviously these fights would be stopped by teachers if they occurred in the playground or ‘behind the bike sheds’. In order that they be fought to a clear conclusion serious fights therefore took place off-site. Behind the nearby bus station was a favoured location.
I only had minor skirmishes at primary school and did not have the skillset to take on anyone seriously good with their fists. I had been given a new football and took it to school for my year group to play with. This was appreciated by my contemporaries. One Friday, for some reason, the toughest boy in the year above, Montgomery ‘Monty’ Davidson, decided he would take the ball away from us. I snatched it back, stopping the game. I hadn’t appreciated that in doing this I had shown him public disrespect.
My parents would collect me from school at about four in the afternoon but I was often late leaving the grounds because I was playing with friends. As I walked across the empty playground Monty Davidson came towards me with his entourage of thugs. I had one rather meek pal with me, and the ball under my arm. As Monty reached us he said, ‘Right Stevenson, get your jacket off,’ and he hit me very hard in the upper abdomen.
The ball dropped to the ground and my pal Peter picked it up. My knees sagged. Trying not to cry I staggered on towards the school gates as the henchmen taunted me for cowardice, yelling in my ears, but they backed off once my parents’ car was in sight. It was obvious to my mother that something had happened. I gave her an accurate account of the day’s events. All weekend I worried about what would happen on Monday when I had to go back to school.
That morning I hung back after ‘the bell’ as lines formed at the various school entrances and the playground quickly cleared of pupils, leaving Monty standing in the middle of the playground, waiting. I couldn’t avoid him. As I came past I blurted out, ‘I won’t fight you Monty!’ ‘That’s OK,’ he said cheerfully and slipped an arm round my shoulders. ‘We’re fighting buddies now.’
Before morning break, Mr Cree came to my class and asked to see me outside in the corridor. ‘Did you challenge Montgomery Davidson to a fight?’ he asked. ‘Of course not! That would be mad.’ I said, wondering what was afoot. ‘That’s fine,’ said the headmaster. ‘That’s all I wanted to know.’ Later I heard Monty had been given ‘six of the best’ by Mr Cree. In spite of this he remained extremely friendly towards me. He had demonstrated his physical superiority and withstood his punishment with stoicism. I decided to invite him to come and play on the farm. We had hay sheds, gardens, woods, dogs and horses for entertainment.
Garrallan, the mansion house on the estate and the former home of the Douglas-Boswells, had a large overgrown orchard complete with chestnut and damson trees. There were beehives there that we allowed a local man to set up. He paid his rent in honey.
In the orchard I used my pony as a platform to climb into a large chestnut tree in order to shake down the nuts to make conkers. A group of us, including Monty, had gone there for that purpose. I would stand on the saddle and haul myself up onto the lower branches. Monty joined me aloft. High up in the tree I was bouncing on a branch when it suddenly broke and I was left hanging by my fingertips from the branch above. Far below my dangling legs I could see the white upturned faces of the others who were wondering what would happen. I wasn’t strong enough to hold on for very long or pull myself up. The main trunk of the tree was just out of reach and I wasn’t sure of supporting myself with just one arm, however briefly. Acrobatically, Monty ran along the branch he was on without using his hands, threw one arm around the trunk of the tree and reached out to grab me round the waist with the other. He lifted me back to safety.
The other benefit of being own good terms with Monty was that I had no further trouble from any other belligerents as I was clearly under his protection.
At the end of primary school in 1966 we sat what was then referred to as the Eleven-Plus. It was not the actual Eleven-Plus, but some Scottish equivalent, and was taken at age 12. On the basis of these results we were streamed into secondary school classes. The bands were A to F in descending status so you knew exactly where you stood in the intellectual hierarchy. The new entrants were all gathered in the gymnasium, seated on the floor, and from the front the headmaster read out the classes we were to enter at Cumnock Academy. I remember gripping my best friend’s hand as we waited to see if we were in the same class. We were.
The Bohemian Waxwing 