Nostalgia

I get "Back in the Day", a Stornoway Gazette publication, fairly regularly: West End Glasgow newsagents unsurprisingly tend to have a good stock of Hebridean papers. Got the latest one yesterday.

1. On page 4, there are two (very good) shots of "Titan", my Aunt Chrissie's brother. A man who evaded matrimony by his potential fiancée demonstrating her ice-skating skills to him in Aberdeen Ice Rink (circa 1941). On an evening that came to an abrupt end when she broke a leg on the ice. Titan never married.

2. page 11: the unidentified teacher with the group from Ness is Charlie Macleod ("Charlie Piper"). Wrote one very fascinating and under-rated book "Devil in the Wind”: which I still have.

3. pages 16/17 : about the great Greta Mackenzie book on going to Patagonia. [My bother Alasdair once met an Argentinean in Buenos Aires (Silvia Macleod) who, when Alasdair asked her why she had such an intriguing name, explained that her grandfather had come from a very obscure Scottish Island i.e Lewis. Almost certainly he came from Keose.]

4. page 29

About 40 teachers from the Nicolson Institute of 1932.

a) 30 years later, at least 10 were still teaching in the same place.

b) Top-left back : Bill Trail, immortalised in Iain Crichton Smith's novel "The Last Summer". A very cruel portraiture. I have often wondered whether Bill read it.

c) Albert Nicoll: the man who told our class : "European wars were simple stage-managed effects. You put on your red uniforms and polished your brass buttons. The English had won the Seven Years War doing stuff of that kind: set-piece battles (as they had, somewhat earlier, won Blenheim, Romillies, Ourdenarde and Malpaquet.)So they went out to the USA (as it is now called) to meet the colonist rebels. But the rebels had formed an alliance with some of the native Indians: who taught them about concealment. So, as the redcoats with their bright buttons gleaming in the sunshine went looking for the enemy, a native Indian up in a tree took a sighting on a gleaming sunlit brass button with his bow and arrow. Twing. And another redcoat bit the dust. And that was the introduction of the concept of camouflage into modern warfare" [Whether his history was accurate I do not know - and prefer not to know. But that story made a huge impact on a 13-yr-old]

- memorable narrative teaching

      d) Johnny Crae, Rector. He looked stern and he was. In 1918, a few survivors of the 1st World war went back to school in the Nicolson Institute to resume their studies (a similar thing happened I think in some of Scotland in 1945). There were few concessions. But my mother told me that, when the sixth year went on their annual outing in June to Coll Beach and had their lunchtime picnic on the sands, Johnny Crae said “This is very unusual: but I think some of you older boys may have smoked the occasional cigarette. I will turn a blind eye to those of you who now want to have a cigarette”.

One has survived Somme and Passchendaele (and left most of one’s pals dead in the trenches there). And the concession of the school is to allow one a cigarette. I have often wondered what they thought about that.

All-in-all a well-spent £1.30p.