Celia Craig : Interview : Background details
Scottish Book Trust/Scottish Family Legends Awards for story “Galluses” – BBC, Pacific Quay,
Glasgow, 2011
In order to make this a more complete record of my life I include here some
background details and information, particularly concerning my pursuits since
retirement in October 2005 to the present (2013). I also include a number of
family photos.
Graduation:
I graduated from Aberdeen University in July 1966 - M.A., with First Class
Honours in English Language and Literature and was awarded the Lucy
Fellowship to study at Newnham College, Cambridge, among other top of year
prizes.
I graduated M. Litt. (dissertation submitted, August 1971) from Cambridge in
January 1972, having delayed taking up the Lucy to spend a year lecturing at
Waterloo Lutheran University, Ontario, Canada, 1966-67. Before sailing to
Canada I had also worked during the summer of 1966 on the Scottish National
Dictionary under Editor, David Murison. After Cambridge I returned to
Canada and to the same University, by then renamed Wilfrid Laurier University
to continue lecturing for a further two years (1972- 74). On return to Scotland I
took a Teacher’s Diploma at Moray House College of Education, Edinburgh,
1974, thereafter teaching at my old Secondary School, Mackie Academy in
Stonehaven for three and a half years (January 1975 – June 1979). Promotion
followed and I became Principal Teaching of English at Westhill Academy for 26
years, retiring in October 2013. An interim interesting experience in 1972
involved six months teaching at Wellshot Road Junior Secondary School in
Glasgow’s East End. I felt I was using the free period before returning to
Canada in 1972 to make a contribution to society. While at Westhill Academy I
also served on the Scottish Select Committee for English.
I loved teaching but have kept very busy post-retirement with a number of
writing and research projects and extra courses at Aberdeen University.
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Oral History Interviews of fishermen and one woman of Gourdon for the
Elphinestone Institute, Aberdeen University
Dissertation : A Comparative Analysis of the Use of Scots Language in
Selected Primary and Secondary schools in the Aberdeenshire (2006 -
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2009). Dissertaion lodged with the Elphinestone Institute, Aberdeen
University and with the National Library of Scotland in Edinburgh.
Served on the Holyrood Sub-Committee on the Use of Scots in Schools.
Contributed to the Coastal Heritage Project, supported by Stonehaven’s
MRI.
A Poetry Anthology for the Maggie Law Maritime Museum in Gourdon,
sold in aid of Museum funds, covering poems by the people of Gourdon,
past and present from 1850 to the present. (August 2013, launched
January 2014.
An extended version of the Anthology with additional poems, background
information on contributors, photos and newspaper cuttings – available
on the Museum’s website as an Ebook.
Guid Gurden Words – a Glossary of the Scots language prevalent in
Gourdon (August 2013) – also on the Maggie Law website.
An Article on Gourdon Childhood Games, first printed in the Leopard
Magazine, now on the Museum’s website.
A researched article on my father’s boat, “Trustful” ME 132, entitled The
Life Story of a Fishing Boat, also for the Museum.
The Oral History Interviews are also available on the Museum’s website,
with illustrative photos. (Thanks to Deryk McNeill, website manager for
invaluable help in inserting the photos). CDs of the Interviews are also
held in the Museum. My original recordings were on cassette tapes which
I later converted to CD format.
Women of Gourdon Project – a Tribute – my most recent and current
undertaking for the Museum will (I hope!) record in photo, archive and
descriptive form the noble work done by the women of the village in
sheeling mussels and baiting the 1200 hook, sma’ lines, prevalent in
Gourdon from the late 19th /beginning of the 20th century. This method of
fishing involved a huge commitment of intensive, diligent and skilled
work by the women. It was unique in Gourdon in lasting into 1980s
whereas it had declined and disappeared much earlier in other harbours.
Gourdon was noted for the superior quality of fish caught by this method.
The Sea Was in their Blood – A Memorandum of Family Memories, first
penned for the BBC World War II programme where the public were
invited to submit pieces about wartime experiences. It may be possible to
place this piece on the Maggie Law Museum website later.
Writing poems, some in Scots, some in English, and short stories. My
story, “Galluses” was selected among others for the Scottish Family
Legends Book/Scottish Book Trust -Awards in 2011. Two of my poems
appeared in Anthologies for pupils (“Fit Like, Yer Majesty” and “Nae
Bad Ava”) and Leopard has kindly printed some of my poems as well as a
piece I researched on the use of the special Gurden term for
“grandfather” – “Deddie”.
Giving Talks to various groups such as Probus and Heritage Societies.
I love singing in the local community choir, the Mearns Singers.
Celia Craig, July 2013
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Celia Craig : Elphinstone Institute, November, 2007
Interviewed by David Northcroft
I was born in Forfar, in November 1943. My father’s family actually lived in Gourdon
but my mother had lost an earlier child to a home confinement and my father was
away on Atlantic convoy Escort duties and he wanted to ensure that nothing would
go wrong during the birth so the Fyfe Jamieson Maternity Home in Forfar it was. I’ve
recently come across some of the letters he wrote to her at this time. He couldn’t give
the exact circumstances he was in owing to wartime censorship but I would imagine
he was somewhere like Portsmouth or Bootle waiting for embarkation: later clearly
he was in Canada. (Some family letters have a number of spaces in them where
sensitive information was clearly being censored out). But the exchange of letters
written under such difficult circumstances makes quite touching reading. He wrote
regularly to my mother from the other side of the Atlantic and she wrote and replied
frequently too.
He talks about their hopes for the coming birth. Then when I arrived he received a
telegram; Christmas was approaching and they
couldn’t be together. My mother would have been
living at this time with either his or her own parents:
they were both fairly nearby- his at Gourdon and hers
at Hillside, near Montrose, so Forfar was a logical
place to go for the confinement, indeed the only
maternity home nearby at the time
My father was a man of the sea, as his family had
been before him. The sea was in his blood. My
grandfather had a boat and my father was brought up
to it. Fishing in Gourdon was very much a family
affair. Granny would ‘sheel’ mussels and bait a line for my grandfather. This was an
intricate and time-consuming procedure. She had to bait a long line, although it used
to be called ‘the sma line’. Along it were attached 1200 hooks for the bait at regular
intervals. Originally horse hair was used for attaching the hooks to the snoods which
were lengths of thinner rope attached to the line at regular intervals but latterly nylon
was used. The horse hair had to be twisted using a ‘tipping stane’, then the hook
‘beaten on’. All of this was ‘set up’ by the men from scratch – stretching the line,
attaching snoods and horse hair and the 1200 hooks : two lines were required, to be
alternated on consecutive days at sea, thus allowing time for one line to be cleared and
prepared for next day while the other was in bait, waiting to be taken out to sea. There
were two or three mussels to go on to each hook and the women would have to shell
sufficient to supply all these. The coiled line was gathered in one/two large basket/s,
ready for baiting to commence. The baiter sat in a chair in the centre with the basket
on her left, a stool with a basin containing shelled mussels set out on a board across
the basin at her knees and the ‘skull’, a long oblong basket, narrower at the top than
bottom immediately on her right, placed at an angle, sloping over a stool. The skull
had a centre bar where the first row of baited hooks would be laid. The process
involved the baiter picking up the line from the basket, reaching the first hook, baiting
it with two/three mussels and then passing it over to the skull. The baited hook was
With my father, Alex Craig, home
on leave during WWII
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placed on the bar, the line coiled in the bottom part of the skull. This continued till all
1200 hooks were baited and laid in neat rows, one above the other up the top half of
the skull and whole line coiled in the skull. This took up to eight hours of hard graft.
Some baiters used cut strips of paper to divide each row of baited hooks and some
used grass to line the top part of the skull. All this was to ease the ‘shooting’ of the
line over the funnel-shaped device used at sea to ‘shoot’ the line into the sea so that it
could begin to fish. If the line did not run smoothly, if it bunched the process would
be interrupted and an undesirable funnel bunch created which might damage the line.
My mother was a bit of an incomer since she was a country lass and baiting took her
longer than a Gourdon born wifie, who had been brought up helping her mother to
bait, would have needed. She was also incredibly meticulous and never produced
funnel bumches. However it was done, the procedure took several hours. It was very
hard going and what made it even more so was that the mussels came to them
unwashed and full of mushy silt. Although my parents employed a sheeler to shell the
mussels, nevertheless my mother’s hands came into contact with the impure water and
also were continually wet. Any nick would have cruelly stung her; my mother got
very sore hands. Baiting the line was a lengthy process : shelling the mussels also
took hours.
All that was only part of what was involved.
After the line was baited the man had several
further tasks to complete. The baited line had to
be redd back, moved from the bottom of the skull
it had been placed in to the top, over the baited
hooks, ready to be shot into the sea, so that it
could run clear into the water. This was called
reddin the back . Once the line had been fished
and hauled in with all the fish on it, it would all be
in a terrible muddle so there had to be a redding
of that. Redding the line was a long and tedious
job. Any hooks that had become torn off would
have to be replaced. So line fishing was a very
time-consuming job, something the women of the
My father, Alex Craig, redding a line
at 7 Mowatts Lane, Gourdon c. 1962. house had to get involved in as part of their daily
domestic lives. This meant that the sea and the
tasks associated with it were all around me during my childhood. In fact I was
actually about 8 before my father re-started the sea. Immediately after the War he had
become Manager of Lindsay’s Fish shop in Montrose.
But that was only one of the three main influences that formed my childhood. Another
major influence was music, all sorts of music and both at home and at school. A lot of
it came from my father and my mother, my father especially. Ballads and folk music
were important and Burns was supreme. His poetry and the music were always thereat school, at Burns Suppers, at concerts; we would play him at home too. My father
was an excellent musician and could play a range of instruments- the guitar, the banjo,
the fiddle. A lot of this came naturally to him and was self-taught though he had had a
dozen violin lessons from the village musician. This was Willie Douglas who was a
very fine musician who trained the village silver band. It was too expensive to have
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more than one quarter’s music lessons but my father managed to pick up the rest that
he needed to complete his training.
I played the piano; I took it up to and
including Grade 8 by the age of 16. We
would play together at home and at concerts.
Our repertoire ran from the lighter classical
stuff like Handel’s Largo, to Scottish airs
and popular music of my father and mother’s
time to that of my own time. My father
would collect what was called ‘Highland
Wreaths’: these were the very popular
arrangements of Scottish airs and were
pieces in various tempos- reels, marches,
strathspeys all blended together. He’d play
the first violin and I would play the piano.
Sometimes we’d have a second violinist and
My father, Alex Craig, playing the fiddle at sometimes a cousin, Henry Craig, would join
a family picnic on the braes above Bervie, c. in and he’d take the cornet part. For several
1970
years I was also the accompanist for the Old
Age Pensioners concerts
My father also had his own tape recorder and this at a time when this was quite
unusual. The first was a Philips reel-to-reel machine, followed by a Grundig, which
could accommodate four tracks. He would put on headphones and then put in the
second violin part to add to what we’d already done. He would play religious music
too, especially the old Redemption hymns: ‘I was drifting away on life’s pitiless sea/
When the angry waves threatened my ruin to be….’ ‘The Old ship of Zion’, lovely,
lovely stuff. These fine old pieces were great feeders of imagery to me. There was the
’Lily of the Valley’ and its ‘bright and morning star’; words which haunted me and
which, I discovered later, tied in with the ending of Sunset Song and the scene at the
Standing Stones. When I came to it in my reading the echo from my earlier hymn
singing and the whole drama of the novel combined to move me to tears. Of course
there were also hymns and choruses at Sunday School which I attended regularly as a
child.
Then there were ballads. These had such strong basic emotions, often quite
sentimental- Lady Nairne’s ‘Caller Herrin’, the works of Lady John Scott. The
imagery was so powerful. And of course there was Burns: I’d read ‘The Cotter’s
Saturday Night’ and think of my own evenings at home and of my own father and
mother. But there were also popular songs from War time like ‘Roll out the barrel’
and ‘Lily Marlene’. I’m blessed with the memory of lots and lots of those old songs.
You know, my father died of Alzheimer’s and I sometimes wonder whether the same
condition will afflict me and all those precious memories will become lost in the
depths of my mind. It was so sad. I remember playing a Highland Wreath with him
when he was beginning to deteriorate and we got to the bottom of the page and
suddenly he found he just didn’t know what to do. I had to prompt him, ‘Just turn the
page over’; he was just standing there with his fiddle in his hand, completely at a loss.
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But, oh that ‘Lily Marlene’- its words and its pictures still run through me half a
century later: ‘I knew you were waiting in the street/ I heard your feet but could not
meet’ and the, ‘Resting in a billet just behind the line/ Even though we’re parted, your
lips are close to mine’. That image always makes me think of my mother and my
father separated in the war. The music and the words that
were implanted in you then remain very powerful. My
mother had a beautiful coat, a fitted coat, and brown
shoes, all in suede, with curled over bows. I’d hear the
words and imagine her waiting, waiting for my father who
was away on the seas on Atlantic convoy escort duties.
So I had a great mixture of words and music in my
childhood. There was everything from Mozart and
Beethoven to brass bands, traditional fiddle music and
popular wartime numbers. My father would call the kind
that he loved to play ‘the lighter or lesser classics’ but
really nothing was barred just because it belonged to a
particular genre. We sang cowboy songs- ‘Oh give me a
My father, Alex Craig, and
my mother Ciss (Elizabeth) home where the buffalo roam’- and he played the ‘Red
River Valley’ on the guitar. I’m told that he and my
during the war.
granny harmonised ‘Ye banks and braes o bonnie Doon’
at my parents’ wedding. There were masses of sheet music about the house. We’d
listen to Scottish dance music on the radio. Music, music of all sorts, surrounded me,
all through my childhood.
Music and dancing were part of village life. When I was little I was taken to concerts
and performed in them, and dances in the village hall. I would climb up the stairs to
the gallery and look down on all the dancers. Then I would creep down again and
father would come over and take me up onto the floor. A
lovely, unforgettable moment.
When my father was at school he had a very strict
Headmaster, Mr Johnstone, a man who’d been in the Boer
War and had come back home with an injured leg: he
taught the lads Mercator’s Projection and navigation. In
those days only the minority went on to a separate
Secondary school and the majority just stayed at the
village school and completed all their education there till
they left at 14. My father ‘s youngest brother, Joseph, did
go onto Mackie Academy but the family couldn’t afford to
send any of the others- there were four altogether- and that
Wearing the favourite wee included my father, even though he passed the Control
Exam. But he got a thorough grounding at Gourdon and
gold sandals, 1951.
this included some music. They put on little operettas and
concerts and my father played a full part in it all.
Music was part of Gourdon life; there would have been singing in the houses
especially at Hogmany when you went round first footing. But in ours it was
unusually intensive; I suspect only two or three other houses in the village had the
kind of instruments that we had and went in for playing and singing in quite such a
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comprehensive way. You would have to get up your own personal repertoire. Mine
included ‘Comin through the rye’, ‘Braw, braw lads’ and ‘A Highland Lad’- Burns
songs. My main party piece when I was wee was ‘The Bonnie Lass o Fyvie’. At one
time, when I was at Mackie, I was doing so much performing and practising that my
father became quite concerned. He thought I might be overdoing it. I was playing in a
dance band on a Friday and a Saturday night, then the kirk organ at Johnshaven and
Benholm on the Sunday. I was also taking in a few piano pupils from the village. I
recently discovered a diary of my mother’s from this time and in it are entries like,
‘Up early for Celia’s music pupils’. I was also playing hockey and doing well
academically at the school. I was studying hard and I was
into sport- at school I was the Junior Champion, then Senior,
three times in a row.
It was a very full life. I remember my father going to see a
friend, James Soutar, who had excelled himself and had a
sister who had also done well and asking him whether he
thought I was doing too much. Maybe I was but I must say I
have no regrets. All this effort and organised activity gave
me skills which have stayed with me. It also instilled in me a
sense of self-discipline and perfectionism. As my mother
always maintained, if a job is worth doing, it is worth doing
well. My father was strict in his approach to developing my
Celia with the Alardyce
Sports cup for girls:
Sports Championship,
Mackie Academy, 1960,
1961, 1962.
music: he would practise the piano with me and insist that I
not only master the ordinary scales but be able to do them in
contrary motion, in thirds and sixths and so on. Yet nobody
forced me into this; it was something I responded to and got
satisfaction from. I seemed to take to it quite naturally.
So my childhood in Gourdon was a very happy, satisfying period. But I don’t want to
be too idyllic about it; the village was an ordinary enough one and had its usual run of
ups and downs. I might have been considered to be a high achieving child but maybe
not an especially pretty one though I was never conscious of
being any different from anyone else in that respect except for
once when I was in Primary 2 and was lining up in the
playground with all the others to be marched in in our lines.
One day, one of the big girls from Primary 7 who had the task
of helping to get us into proper lines, well, when she came to
me this is what she said, ‘You’ll have to go to the end of the
line because you’re the ugliest!’ This cut me to the quick. I
managed to leave the playground, up the side path to the
bottom of the road that ran up to our house, termed ‘up the
Primary 1-2, Gourdon brae’ at 21 Selbie Place, but I couldn’t go in and tell my mother
School.
what had happened- that would have been clyping. So I just sat
on the dyke, looking up the brae. My mother saw me from the
window, came down and asked me what had happened and because she had asked me
and I hadn’t actually gone to her with the tale, I felt I could tell her. She took me back
to the school and spoke to the teacher. I don’t know what she said but it never
happened again. An early example of verbal bullying, I suppose. That apart, school
was a happy place for me.
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After the war my father became the manager of a fish shop in Montrose and then he
joined the family boat, “Trustful” ME 132, and later became its skipper
Ours was a self-sufficient world, with everything a young child could want for at that
time. We ran around Selbie Place and invented games to play.. We would have a
magic carpet out on the grass at the front of the house. My father planted a hedge,
which I disapproved of since it created a barrier, so I pulled it up. At one stage he
grew tobacco for himself and cured it. Then when I was 8 he heard himself wheezing
and stopped smoking immediately and for good – no sweat! .He had cold frames for
other plants in the garden; I remember the urgent need to go in to confess what I had
done when I broke a pane during my play. I had my father’s Navy hammock set up in
the back garden in summer, a tent and the swing made by my father which was a
permanent fixture. My friends and I spent many happy hours in the garden. We had
everything a child of those days could want.
We were given freedom though there were boundaries which, if we crossed, would
incur a telling off. Once my cousin and I were down at the breakwater, climbing down
the narrow ladders behind it and my grandfather was standing on the pier. Suddenly
you could hear him blow his whistle and his voice roaring out: ‘ Fit are ye dohin doon
at the braakwater! Get back up!’ We swam in the harbour but my father taught me to
swim at a special spot which lay along the Low Road just to the north towards
Inverbervie, called the Sandy Holie. After a swim in the harbour you ran along in
your dookers to Granny’s house in Arbuthnott Street, up to the garret and changed
there. After a swim you got a ‘shivery bite’, usually a fine piece of some sort, maybe
just a slice of bread and jam!
Life was fun for the children in Gourdon but my father’s life at sea was hard enough.
He would have to get up very early in the morning. Gourdon’s a tidal harbour so he
would sometimes “take/tide the boat doonby”, i.e. moor the boat as far down the
harbour and piers as possible in order to catch enough water to float the boat and
leave the harbour at a slightly later hour than possible from his normal mooring place
fairly far up the harbour but he still had to rise early so as to make sure he would
catch the tide at whatever point was most useful- at half tide or at high tide or
whatever. You’d sometimes hear him getting up at 3 in the morning; you’d hear his
feet about the kitchen and the clatter of his spoon as he stirred the brose. He was
always needing gloves. He suffered from cold hands and to haul in the lines could be
a perishing job, especially on cold, frosty mornings. When he came back his gloves
would be carefully sorted into pairs, smoothed out, washed and put by the fire to dry.
My mother was constantly knitting them for him; they were in the form of mittens,
called “doddies”. Not all of the fishermen had the cold hands he had and some of
them did without gloves altogether; they would pull his leg about this, referring to
him as “the glove factory”.
He had a number of by-names, which he revelled in- the ‘Professor’, 'John West',
'Lairdie' and so on, referring to his studious side or to his smart, dapper appearance,
especially when dressed to go out. Like most Gourdon fishermen when he had landed
his catch and moored the boat after being at sea, he would come home and go to his
bed for an hour. ‘Ah’ll jist awa tae mi bed fir an oor’s kip!’, he would say - before the
next task like redding the line had to be done. My mother would also get up really
early too. She would keep going right through the day, baiting the line which took her
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at least 6 hours plus doing all the baking, the cooking, the mending and the cleaning
as well as waiting for the next delivery of mussels for baiting by the Gourdon
Fishermen’s Association lorry.
It was inshore fishing he did. The boat was
a small one – 30 – 40 feet, with maybe only
two or three of a crew. They caught
haddock, cod, whiting, flukes- gorgeous to
eat and straight from the sea to our table. It
could be a dangerous life too. I’ve written a
little poem about the relief of seeing him
back safe and sound in his bed after a
sudden storm drove his boat, Trustful ME
Trustful ME 132 on chains, Gourdon
132 past Gourdon harbour, with the crew
Harbour.
having to bail out all the way down the
coast to the next harbour at Johnshaven which fortunately they managed to enter.
Johnshaven folk, relatives actually, took them in and gave them dry clothes and hot
drinks. I’ve called it ‘Gurden Herber’. We didn’t normally worry too much but it was
always a good warm feeling to have him back in the house after a trip. On this
particular occasion my mother took me through to the bedroom where he was sound
asleep and the incident became part of the family mythology.
I did go out with him one summer. This
was some years after my graduation at
Aberdeen, in fact during my second stay in
Canada where I had a lectureship, after
graduation from Cambridge as well and I
decided I needed a bit of grounding in the
midst of all those books and study. I
worked the creels with him. I always liked
physical work such as the tattie howking so
My father, Alex Craig, myself ,Celia Craig
that summer suited me well. We worked 80
and summer visitor friend, Eric Nutter on
creels which for that time was a lot and we
board the Trustful ME 132 at sea c. 1970.
used them in fleets of 20. There are two
ways of doing it: you can haul on board all 20 of them (“boarding”), take out the old
bait and put in the fresh and then cast them off again; or you can “run them”, by
boarding only one creel at a time, whip out the old bait, put in the new, close the trap
and then push it off again, moving rapidly on to the next creel as it is hauled on board
- a faster, more skilled process. I spent the summer doing that. Either way, it’s hard
work. You’d go out on an early July morning and into the sun’s path as it rose over
the North Sea. It was a memorable golden time, like sailing into the very sun itself, all
bathed in the glow of it. A pure joy. And there was plenty of shellfish to be had then;
the depletion hadn’t yet set in.
My father knew how to get his enjoyment out of life. There was the music and he
liked his nip down at the pub too. All of the men went there; the women didn’t often
go at that time. My father, only half jokingly would offer my mother her night off. :
‘You can have any night of the week – except Friday and Saturday! How about
Thursday?’, knowing that that was the night my mother reserved for the Women’s
Guild. The atmosphere in the house was nice and warm. We weren’t really a
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demonstrative family though hugs were fairly common. When my father put me to
bed he might allow himself to kiss my hair and then tuck me in- but it was very
loving. He wasn’t a tall man- just 5 foot 8 or so but strongly built, fit for his tasks. He
had nimble hands, dextrous enough for the fiddle or a spot of macramé work. My
mother was a good-looking woman with a decent singing voice although she wasn’t
the dancer he was. She liked painting.
She was a country quine, originally from over Barras way. There seemed to be respect
between the country and the fisher folk. But then Gourdon was dominated by fishing:
the only other real employer was the mill. But you could get a bit of snootiness at the
school- not Gourdon, of course, where nearly every family was involved in fishng but
at Mackie. I can remember that when some of the girls asked me what my father did
for a living and I replied, ‘Fisherman’, there would be a somewhat negative reaction
which I simply did not countenance at all, viewing fishermen as the salt of the earth
and retorting to implied criticism that Christ’s disciples had been fishermen!
For me the fishing folk of Gourdon were the salt of the earth. Growing up among
them and being of one blood with them gave me a strong sense of what was basic and
true in life, the elemental if you like. That’s why I developed such a marked sense of
land and of sea and the people as belonging to the land and the sea. The poem
‘Scotland’ by Alexander Gray sums up my feelings here; the most important verse for
me is: ‘This is my country / The land that begat me/ These windy spaces/Are surely
my own. /And those who here toil/ In the sweat of their faces/ Are flesh of my flesh/
And bone of my bone’. For me that will always evoke an instinctual response, an
affinity that I can feel deep in my own bones.
That poem was introduced to me at school when I was taking my Sixth Year Bursary
Competition studies and I think at this point I should pay tribute to my education. It
was here that I really encountered the third great influence on my formative years:
literature. When I came out of my Secondary school I could feel that I had been given
a very thorough grounding in the richness of literature. It’s all become so much
patchier in schools now but we were given something we could get hold of, a time
map of the major periods and the great writers. We were also close enough to the
Bible and to classical literature to appreciate the chain of allusions that runs through
all literature, a dimension which now seems to pass today’s pupils by completely.
Right from the start at Gourdon Primary school, my education answered my best
hopes and gave me something to feed upon. At that stage I was quite an ordinary
performer – I usually came third in class (the book I chose for third prize in primary 7
was The Mill on the Floss and I remember its influence on my own writing – e.g. a
story about a river flooding!) but gradually, almost suddenly at Mackie Academy I
pulled ahead and did well academically. One of my problems by Primary 3 / 4 was
that I just couldn’t see the board but I spoke up about it and Miss Clark sat me down
at the front- I had needed glasses!
Stories were important. Always. I can remember the pleasure of sitting there and
listening to the teacher read out ‘Wind in the Willows’ to us or the sheer satisfaction
of being called to her desk and being asked to read to the class. We also had to
prepare talks. The other girl in the class who did well was Margaret and we were both
of us expected to do well. One time, she went out and delivered her talk; it was so
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good that the teacher told us all, ‘Well, that was so good that I will just have to give it
50 marks out of 50’. Then it was my turn. After I had finished she said, ‘Well, that
was very good as well so I’ll give it 50 too’. I can remember the gasps that ran round
the room: the class had heard this as ‘52’!
Music was also important. For example it was in Primary 1 /2 that I first heard and
loved Dvorak’s Humoresque played by the teacher on the piano : we sang words to it
and did not realise at the time what the piece was. Many songs learnt in Primary
school have stayed with me till this day as indeed have many poems such as “Where
the pools are wide and deep/ Where the grey trout lies asleep/ Up the river and over
the lea/ That’s the way for Billy and me” ( “A Boy’s Song” by James Hogg) which
struck a lasting chord with me, allowing me to identify with the sentiments in it in an
idyllic way, relating to our play as children around the village and surrounding
countryside. Another favourite poem was Allingham’s “Up the airy mountain/ Down
the rushy glen/ We daren’t go a hunting/For fear of little men”, a poem about fairies,
often quoted by my mother. Another of her favourites was The Gladiator while my
father was fond of reciting The Wreck of the Hesperus and the comic Bishop Hatto
among others. There were so many more that I could recite to you, time permitting.
Songs for playground games, skipping and balls were also seminal, often following
the seasons. I have written a wee poem about that and all our pursuits and games as
children too, season by season, also in Elphinstone Kist. I remember too learning up
Burns poems for recitation, in particular To a Mountain Daisy, and winning Burns
certificates. About this time too my mother was reading Treasure Island with me : it
was being printed and illustrated in one of the newspapers, I think The People’s
Journal! It is pleasing to think that Primary school children are still learning up Scots
poems for similar competitions today, keeping Scots alive in that way.
I learned that you have to be brave enough to speak up for yourself so that if anything
wasn’t clear then you put up your hand and asked the teacher to go over it again. At
the Secondary I would do this in the Maths class but that kind of coming forward
wasn’t part of the North-East culture so after the first few times the rest began to
groan at my repeated questioning. The usual thing when the teacher enquired, ‘Has
everyone got that?’, was just to quickly nod and let him or her carry on. But I just
couldn’t do that: I wanted to get to the bottom of everything so up my hand had to go.
I think many classmates secretly benefited from that!
For me, the classroom was always a welcoming place, one that I felt quite at home in.
Going into Primary 7, however, the old teacher retired and we got a Mr Christie who
was quite hard and insisted on putting us through our paces. The rigour was good for
me. Each morning we’d start off with some quick fire mental arithmetic sums, the
kind that elicited strings of combinations and figures that had been well drilled into
us, then move onto written arithmetic, then the dreaded ‘problems’ where you had to
work thing out- ‘If a man digs a hole …’ that kind of thing. In English we got analysis
according to the two types of ‘particular’ and ‘general’. In the former you learnt how
analyse each word in the sentence according to its part of speech status. In the second
you learned how to break a sentence down and set out its components in columns with
the relationships between the clauses explained. I know that this kind of grammatical
work later came to fall out of favour as over-academic but I found the challenge
interesting; I also think it improved my own writing by giving me a method of
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checking its clarity and control.1 Mr Christie also believed that he could actually
improve our IQs by regularly giving us tests and exercises. Whether all that really
made us more intelligent or not, there’s no doubt that our ability to score in the tests
rose. I strongly believe that it helped us pass the Scottish Qualifying Exam which
sorted pupils out into senior secondary school status – where you followed an
academic course, took your Highers and went on to university or junior secondary
school where you left at 15 and followed a much less academic course. Mr Christie
was also strong on Scottish songs and poems, Burns, of course, some of the Charles
Murray, David Rorie variety, e.g The Puddock, The Pawkie Duke, Tam and the
Leeches as well as playlets in Scots which we prepared for school concerts and other
performances at other concerts. I well recall acting out a playlet with him where he
was an auld wifie in bed whom I was visiting! Good stuff! I can still recite most of
the verses of the poems today.
This was a diet I thrived on. I’d come to the school prepared for it, of course, since
books were part of my home life. My father was proud of the bookcase he kept in the
house and he would set himself programmes of self-improvement. He had a notebook
in which he would put down the titles he had read and the new vocabulary he had
come across. He was a great one for self-improvement. So as well as what I got at
school I would read hungrily at home. I loved the Enid Blyton stories especially ‘The
Family at Red Roofs’. Later I went through a phase of war books and stories of
exploration and danger: ‘The Cruel Sea’, Douglas Bader, Vivien Fuchs. Discussing
books with my father was something that continued throughout adult life as we often
read the same novels and compared notes. My mother too loved reading.
At Secondary we were taken through a pretty full programme that included several
Shakespeare plays, some Milton, Wordsworth, Browning, Keats, Pope’s ‘The Rape of
the Lock’, the essays of Addison and Steele and so on. We were introduced to the
sonnet forms- Petrarch and the Spenserian and Shakespearean forms came in here.
We drew on Palgrave’s ‘The Golden Treasury’ and also on the ‘Parnassus’ for the
longer poems. We even had a bit of Donne. In sixth year the Rector took us for
English and was a wonderful teacher – I remember in particular his lessons on Hamlet
and Walter Scott. I remember reading D H Lawrence then as well. I also discovered
Lewis Grassic Gibbon in S5. I remember sitting at home reading ‘Sunset Song’ and
getting very sad at it all, especially at the parts relating to her father’s funeral, to her
sudden conviction that “only the land endures” and to the emotional intensity of
Chris’ vision of Ewan at the end and my mother saying, ‘Awa oot- that book’s just
maakin you sad!’ But I had no feeling that any of this was separate from the life
around me. The stories spoke to me of life and of people. Besides, my father and
mother were always interested in what I was doing: they would listen to me reciting
ballads or learning them by heart for homework ( The Gay Goshawk, The Wife of
Usher’s Well, Sir Patrick Spens). My mother and father would be going about the
normal household tasks and at the same time be listening to me reciting and telling
them what I had been reading at the school. My English teachers to Higher, both
Moira Copland (later Jolly) and Archie Watt (Killer!) were super in different ways. I
particularly enjoyed analysing Burns’ poetry and Keats’ sonnet, On First Looking into
Chapman’s Homer but loved almost everything we did!
1
I have recently (2015) discovered a number of my mother’s school exercise books/jotters from her
primary school days at Barras School where she was adept at this very type of grammatical analysis as
well as at different kinds of “arithmetic”.
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So there you are, the three great formative influences for me: the sea, music,
literature. The church also played a part. My mother was a regular attender at the
Mission Hall and my father occasionally went, enough to keep up a connection. At
secondary school there would be a hymn each morning and that came to mean a lot to
me. I loved the old rousing ones- ‘Guide me, O Thou Great Jehovah’, ‘To be a
Pilgrim’, ‘Be thou my vision’. I came to see the choice of the morning hymn as
something of an omen for the day ahead; it was particularly important that an exam
day began with something positive and heartening! It may be interesting to know that
I went on to become Arts Dux at Mackie, winning the Rector’s Prize for English as
well the Agnew Music Prize and Senior Sports Championship three times, among
other firsts! At University, like yourself, I excelled at English, coming top of my year,
gaining a First Class Honours M.A. Degree, winning various Medals and prizes there,
including the Lucy Fellowship to Newnham College, Cambridge.
Graduation Aberdeen
University, 1966.
Retracking, I suppose these hymns were another aspect of
my early diet of literature and of music. I don’t think that
the young get the chance for such a full and grown up diet
as we enjoyed. Today the English teacher has so many
bureaucratic hoops to get through: it’s becoming well nigh
impossible to get through all the requirements of the
Higher course and take the time to cover a representative
range of work, not while you have so many assessment
tasks to get through, so many boxes to tick. We got
Milton, Pope’s Rape of the Lock, Scott, Keats,
Wordsworth’s ‘Tintern Abbey’, and many more, and
several Shakespeare plays. Nowadays it’s dwindled down
to maybe one play, one novel, a handful of short poems,
and a couple of short stories. Some teachers claim they
don’t even have time to do a full novel, like ‘Sunset Song’.
They feel they haven’t got time to do anything that isn’t
directly accessible and quick to cover. However, as a
recently retired English PT, I know that pupils today cover
other things such as word processing and media.
What we got in English was of one character with our
syllabus as a whole. In French and German, for example,
we got real literature: ‘Lettres de Mon Moulin’- which I
found pretty tedious, and ‘Le silence de la mer’, which I
loved, as well as classic French and German poetry and
plays – e.g. by Goethe, Moliere, Theodore Storm’s
wonderful novel, Immensee. We had reams of vocabulary
With my motherto learn up and we were taught grammar. We were
Graduation MLitt,
University of Cambridge, introduced to forms such as ‘the partitive article’ from the
very start, for instance, complete with terminology and
1972.
rules. Now pupils seem to be just left to pick it up as they
go along though again the design is for it to be initiated by example and be cumulative
: the emphasis is much more on the spoken word, an excellent aspect. Of course, the
education wasn’t perfect. We did become pretty teacher dependent; we would take
down stacks of notes – though this is also true of todays’ pupils! and apparently
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became uncritically positive about all
the great works we were being given.
I remember Archie Watt, our Higher
English teacher once handed out an
unidentified copy of McGonagall’s ‘
Railway Bridge of the Silvery Tay’
and asked us to write an
‘appreciation’ of it. We did our best
to praise the imagery and choice of
descriptive touches- ‘silvery’ and all
that, because that’s what we thought
Last day with my Higher English class at Westhill we had to do- only for him to turn
round and tell us that what we had
Academy, October 2005.
been praising was ‘sheer doggerel,
sheer doggerel!’ He would also tell us that if any of us found ’Ode to a Nightingale’
to be anything less than a very very great poem, then we ‘had no soul’ No half
measures- that’s what you had to think. In a way we were being encouraged to think
critically for ourselve : we were given the basic materials. In fact the McGonagall
incident taught us a valuable lesson in practical criticism in itself. When it came to the
famous “gobbets” test where we had to identify the unnamed writers of a range of
different extracts we became adept at analysing and differentiating the pieces,
distinguishing a Donne sonnet from a Browning dramatic monologue.
Now I’m retired I have been pursuing a research project into the status and usage of
Scots among school children. I’ve been using secondary classes at Mearns Academy
along with a couple of Westhill feeder Primaries. When I was at school myself I
learned to be completely bi-lingual. In the playground, at home or among my pals, I
would naturally use Scots but as soon as you stepped into the classroom it had to be
English. That never created much of a problem, I often think in Scots. Even now
when I’m in a passive mode, shall we say, I’ll find myself thinking in Scots: at night
I’ll say to myself, ‘Ah’ll awa tae mi bed’, not ‘I’ll go up to bed’. I suppose you could
say I speak in English but think in Scots- at least where the more personal intimate
aspects of life are concerned, though when I move into more theoretical or abstract
concerns it’ll be English. I love to speak Scots with others whenever I get the chance,
for example with my cousin. Normally I write poetry in English but recently have
written a couple in Scots.
What I’m finding out is that Scots is much diminished but it’s still there: it’s aye deein
but niver quite deid. When I give pupils lists of words or phrases, I find that nouns
concerning the more familiar aspects of life are clinging on- ‘heid’, ‘lugs’, ‘hame’,
hoose’ and so on. But a lot of this is recognition rather than actual usage: if you ask
pupils to translate from Scots into English the results are a lot better than if you ask
them to translate from English into Scots. The really worrying thing is that while a
core of basic nouns is still known, many of the verbs have gone and because verbs are
the glue of the language, that means that the ability to speak in sentences is
disappearing. The existence of a few nouns that are preserved as a kind of museum
quaintness isn’t really sufficient.
There are a number of contributory factors here- many of the teachers no longer use
Scots themselves and find that they haven’t the confidence to employ it in the
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classroom. And then parents often discourage their own children from using it too.
It’s not uncommon for a parent to use Scots when they’re talking to a grandparent or
an old familiar neighbour but then switch to English with the younger members of
their family. It’s all rather sad. We’re speaking here about something that is more than
a mere dialect: it’s a language with its own literature and its own history. It’s part of
Scottish identity and if- and when- it goes then a vital part of ourselves will be lost
with it.
Finally looking back over my years in teaching, I want to put on record that I loved
teaching, interacting with young minds, introducing my pupils to literature, to creative
writing, helping them develop critical skills, alongside running my department: it was
exciting and highly fulfilling.
Gourdon School photo Primary 5-6, aged 9.
Back row, L to R - The teacher is Miss Margaret Nicholson : John Craig, Eric
Gove, Billy Carr, David Gove, Robert Stewart, John Donaldson. Charlie
Smith, Stephen Morrison.
Middle row - Frances Duncan, Margaret Watt, Ann Middleton, Audrey Coutts,
Helen Ross, Andria Calder, Sheila Clark, Margaret Ritchie
Front row (seated) - Steven Burness, Bertie Davidson, Celia Craig, Iris
Walker, Nan Stewart, Margaret Watson, Johnny Barbour, Ian Gowans
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