Tom Weir E-Book

Tom Weir

• Herausgeber: Sandstone Press
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Seitenzahl: 433

Beschreibung

From his early years Tom Weir MBE was set on making his way as an explorer, writer and photographer, a progress interrupted by World War Two but then leading to expeditions ranging from the Himalayas to Greenland. For over forty years his feature 'My Month' appeared in the Scots Magazine, reflecting his fascination with Scotland, its remote corners, people and wildlife - interests that made his award-winning TV programme Weir's Way so popular. From sources published and unpublished this collection of Tom Weir's writing has been selected by Hamish Brown from the whole body of his life's work. One of Hamish Brown's teenage inspirations was Tom Weir's Highland Days and, later, he was lucky to know and sometimes work with Tom. As a much-travelled author, lecturer and photographer himself, Hamish was delighted to put together this selection of Tom's work.

Leseprobe

Tom Weir MBE (1914–2006) was an inspirational Scotsman. Born in Glasgow, he was one of the first generation of working class outdoorsmen, his early years were spent exploring the Scottish Highlands on days off from his job as a grocer’s boy. Always intent on making his way as an explorer and climber, writer and photo­grapher, his progress was interrupted by service with the Royal Artillery in World War Two although his first book, Highland Days, was written while still in uniform.

Tom’s dedication took him from impoverished Glasgow to the ends of the earth. He climbed and explored in arctic East Greenland, northern Norway, the High Atlas of Morocco, and Kurdistan. In 1950 he was a member of the first post-war Himalayan Expedition (The Ultimate Mountains) and, in 1952, one of the first mountaineers to explore the hitherto closed ranges of Nepal (East of Katmandu).

For over forty years his feature ‘My Month’ appeared in the Scots Magazine, reflecting his fascination with Scotland, its remote corners, people and wildlife. Between 1976 and 1987 he hosted the popular television programme Weir’s Way. He won the Scottish Television Personality of the Year Award in 1978 and, in 2000, the inaugural John Muir Lifetime Achievement Award.

In the course of a long lifetime Tom Weir wrote many books and articles on the subjects and places which were close to his heart: Camps and Climbs in Arctic Norway, TheScottish Lochs, and a fine autobiography, Weir’s World.

Hamish Brown (1934– ) is a mountaineer, lecturer and photo­grapher who has written or edited many books. He was the first person to walk all the Munros in a single trip, the story of which, Hamish’s Mountain Walk, has inspired generations of walkers and climbers.

One of Hamish Brown’s teenage inspirations was Tom Weir’s Highland Days and, later, he was lucky to know and sometimes work with Tom and has travelled to many of the places Tom describes. Hamish was delighted to put together this selection of Tom’s work.

Other books by Hamish Brown

published by Sandstone Press

Hamish’s Mountain Walk

Hamish’s Groats End Walk

Climbing the Corbetts

TOM WEIR

An anthology

Edited by

Hamish Brown

First published in Great Britain in 2013 by

Sandstone Press Ltd,

PO Box 5725,

One High Street,

Dingwall,

Ross-shire,

IV15 9WJ,

Scotland.

www.sandstonepress.com

All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced,

stored, or transmitted in any form without the express

written permission of the publisher.

© Copyright all historical material the Estate of Tom Weir

© Copyright material from Highland Days, Weir’s Way and Weir’s World included by permission of Steve Savage Publishers, copyright © Tom Weir 1948, 1981, 1984, 1994, 2006

© Copyright 2013 all introductory material Hamish M. Brown

The moral right of Hamish Brown to be recognised as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988.

The publisher acknowledges subsidy from

Creative Scotland towards publication of this volume.

ISBN: 978-1-908737-28-1

ISBNe: 978-1-908737-29-8

Cover design and photographic layout by Gravemaker + Scott, Edinburgh.

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

Introduction

1 Life to Wartime Years

Nine Years to Happiness

Tough Joint

An Epic

Inspection

Zero Hour

2 Himalayas

First Reach Katmandu

The Tesi Lapcha

Uja Tirche

Endings

3 Highlands and Islands

Across Sutherland Hills

Eilean nan Ron: A Very Fertile Place

Eriskay

Contrasting Orkney Islands

4 Desert Mountains and Arctic Peaks

Morocco 1955

Peaks and Passes in Kurdistan

Greenland: In Scoresby Land

5 Climbing Days in Scotland

Thirsty Work in the Cuillin

The Big Ben

A Camp on Rum

Avalanche

Crossing the Cairngorms on Ski

6 From Norway to Corsica

Northland Mountaineering

To the Alps

The Alps on Ski

The Julian Alps

Corsica

7 A Variety of Interests

The Trossachs

150 Years of the Caledonian Canal

Largo Remembers Selkirk

The Railway Winding North

8 Tom’s People

Remembering Tom Patey

Two Lucky People

Tramp Royal

Seton Gordon – Man of Nature

Sailing with the Captain Scott

Return to 1912

9 Always the Naturalist

Ne’erday

The Gannet City of the North

Encounters: As Ward Clarke in Scotland’s Magazine

    Dawn Dancers

    Animals at Home

    A Glen Lyon Caper

    Snow Buntings

A Bibliography of Sorts

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

  1. Tom Weir, aged three, in Springburn Park, Glasgow

  2. Tom on Doune Hill in the Luss Hills looking down to Loch Lomond

  3. Tom, with Harold Raeburn’s ice axe, when president of the SMC, 1984–86

  4. Inspecting the tool chest made by A. E. Robertson (first Munroist) when AER was fifteen years old

  5. Two worthy hill gangrels: Tom Weir and Syd Scroggie (the latter lost his sight and a leg in the last days of World War Two)

  6. Tom’s sister Molly and wife Rhona at a standing stone on the Island of Jura

  7. The world that lured four Scots lads, all self-supporting, on the first post war Himalayan expedition

  8. Porters in the Rishi Gorge, described in Tom’s book, The Ultimate Mountains

  9. Men and women porters on a Himalayan glacier as described in East of Katmandu

10. The coastal area described during Sir John Hunt’s 1960 expedition to Greenland

11. Rhona at a camp in the Jotenheim, Norway

12. On a ridge in the Toubkal massif of Morocco’s Atlas Mountains

13. Ringing gannets on the Bass Rock

14. The view to the mainland from Eilean nan Ron, Ben Loyal and Ben Hope visible

15. Stornoway, gateway to the Island of Lewis

16. A seal pup on Eilean nan Ron, off the Kyle of Tongue

17. Ready to tackle the Cairngorms in the ‘Good old days’

18. A lass on remote Foula (Shetland) with a pet short-eared owl, which had strayed to the island

19. George Waterstone, the ornithologist who bought Fair Isle and did so much for the successful reintroduction of ospreys to Scotland

20. A crofter woman met in the Outer Hebrides (1975) who was in her eighties and spoke only Gaelic

21. Rhona Weir in Glen Lyon, Tom’s favourite glen

22. Part of the one man’s epic pick-and-shovel creation on Raasay, the story told in Roger Hutchinson’s book Calum’s Road

23. The controversial, environmentally misplaced Coruisk Bridge in Skye, 1968 (storms soon removed it!)

24. The Edwardian period drawing room in Kinloch Castle on Rum (may be visited, but the castle is in need of renovation)

25. The one-time Renfrew Ferry not long after World War Two

26. Curling stones from Lanark being packed for export to Canada

27. Colonsay: trying to move cows onto a boat for Oban in the 1960s

28. Lewis: marking sheep in Ness in the 1950s

29. A waterfall in the Julian Alps (today’s Slovenia)

30. At the Shelter Stone in the Cairngorms: Tom Weir, George Roger, Matt Marshall, Percy McFarlane

31. Tom inspecting the ‘Viking’ watermill at Dounby, Orkney

32. The Guizer Jarl preparing for Shetland’s Up Helly Aa winter festival

33. Shepherd Alex MacKenzie and his dogs

34. An idyllic haymaking scene on the Island of Raasay

35. Hamish McInnes, mountaineer and inventor extraordinary

36. John Ridgway, who set up an adventure school in Sutherland after rowing the Atlantic with Chay Blyth

37. Adam Watson, long-time companion, from the Cairngorms to Arctic Norway

38. Cdr Victor Clark, DSC, inspirational captain of the topsail training schooner, Captain Scott

39. Heading for the Cobbler in the years when we had snow

40. On the Braeriach plateau

41. Following the one-time Oban railway line in Glen Ogle which closed in 1965

42. Two skiers facing the Lairig Ghru in the Cairngorms

43. Dick Balharrie with nosey ponies inspecting a hind and her calf at the Beinn Eighe Nature Reserve Centre

44. Before the bridge: the Kylesku ferry in the 1960s, looking to the Stack of Glencoul

45. Decorative fungus on a tree in Glen Lyon

46. Gulfoss, typical of the powerful waterfalls in Iceland

47. A scientist catching puffins in the Faroe Islands, where they formed part of the local diet

48. Douglas Scott and Tom Weir with guides Memhet and Bahri in Turkish Kurdistan

49. Tom Mackinnon (the team’s medic) with porters in the Garhwal Himalaya

50. Milking time: a Kurdish woman and children with their flock of sheep and goats

51. Young schoolboys in a remote Himalayan village

52. Stags and hinds in the Reay Forest, Sutherland

53. The Great Stack of Handa, first reached in 1876 by a raiding party from Lewis

54. Construction work on the Garry Hydro-Electric Scheme: somewhat pre Health and Safety days with the airborne worker

55. Enlarging the Corpach basin on the Caledonian Canal

56. Stac Lee, one of the spectacular gannetries of the St Kilda group

57. Tom Weir, Douglas Scott and Adam Watson and local lassies on a Norwegian farm where they camped

58. ‘The last train’ as Aberfeldy Station was closed, 1965

59. Clearing points and passing the tablet at Balquidder Station (closed 1951)

INTRODUCTION

This is a selection from the many books and some unpublished material written in the course of a long and active life (1914 – 2006). It is not a biography; Tom’s own Weir’s World, AnAutobiography of Sorts, written in his eighties, is his personal story, the telling of which is a tour de force: very readable, often exciting, sometimes moving and of growing historical interest. Much of what he wrote is about what he did, what he saw, what he thought: head, hands and heart writing.

Tom’s autobiography does not follow a strict chronological order and this selection does similarly, taking some of the dominant themes he followed, sometimes briefly, sometimes with a lifelong dedication. He wrote with considerable passion, an earnestness which perhaps hides the vivacious, often amusing side of his persona. He ‘made good’ by unstinting hard graft and bore the disciplines of his way of life with good grace.

When people turned on their TVs to watch Weir’s Way they invariably smiled in anticipation. Tom was enthusiasm personified on TV. The stocky figure with trademark woollies and toorie top was a friend to thousands. The erudition was there of course. Few had travelled more or had studied more about Scotland, its history, its people, its wildlife.

What many won’t realise is how much research went into his work. He was not only immersed in the geography of Scotland but in its history. “He kens aboot awthing” was a viewer’s comment I once passed on. But the fluency of his TV work and the factual detail in articles came from the hard graft of researching. All writers are readers. He absorbed Scotland whole – and gave it back in words and on the TV screen in a unique way that endeared him to everyone.

I encountered his perfectionist demands during the making of one of his Weir’s Way series. I had just completed the one-off walk over all the Munros and he wanted to cover this in one of his programmes. We drove up to the Loch Sloy dam and, dressed as I was for the walk, pitched the tent and scattered the correct gear as if relaxing at the end of day, mug of tea in hand. Tom then trundled down to me with a “Hello, Hamish” to which I had to look up and reply “Oh, hello Tom”. There were ten takes of that scene before he was satisfied.

Among the questions asked about Tom are those wanting to know how he started out as a writer so I’ll use this introduction to recount something of his early life with its inexplicable initial inspiration and steely ongoing determination. The spark came early and the flame never dimmed. At a lecture question time when he was in his eighties someone began, “Now you’re retired . . .” only to have Tom snap, “I’m not retired!”

Tom was born in Springburn in 1914 and never knew his father who had been killed in Mesopotamia (as had the father of W H Murray). He was brought up by his Gran while his mother worked painting wagons in the railway yards earning just enough to support Tom, his sister Molly and brother Willie. His mother had a love of hills and early Campsie days would spur on his first dreams of the outdoors while Glasgow itself had plenty of green places and rivers where children roamed and learned in a way regrettably missing today. Interestingly, Tom won through his early hill explorations without any mishap yet, as a boy, broke his collarbone when hit by a motor bike and was seriously concussed when falling down the close stairs.

He drank deep of the books of Shipton, Tilman and Longstaff, devoured volume after volume of Seton Gordon, took every chance to head for the hills by bus and bike and thumb, exploring further and further afield, meeting other inspiring stravaigers like Ritchie Wallace and Matt Forrester and befriending people who lived in the remoter Highlands. This passion for the hills by hard or easy routes turned Tom into a lifelong gangrel, exploring Scotland as few others had done, in a way unknown today, and setting his characteristics, moulded by people and places encountered. That so many men, older and more experienced, accepted, befriended and led Tom in his adventures, points to a strong outgoing character already there. Tom just didn’t dream; he put legs to his dreams.

Tom left school at fourteen and had ten years of unhappy security in a Co-op grocery, necessary until his older brother qualified as an engineer and could support the family. Determined that he would become a writer he learned to type by taking lessons from sister Molly (at 2/6d a session – she was an equally ‘with it’ Weir) and buying the correspondence course booklets of the self-improving Pelmanism scheme. He also attended some nightclasses on writing skills. He persevered. “I could have papered a house with rejection slips” he once said (At the same stage I had a shoebox below my desk inscribed with a double misquote: “All that glitters is not sold”) but how greater the satisfaction when work begins to be accepted. He would see a million and a half words appear in the Scots Magazine in the 48 years he wrote “My Month” (1956 – 2004).

Molly Weir’s ‘Shoes Were For Sundays’ gives a vivid picture of their early life and is worth reading. Theirs must have been a lively home with three youngsters bursting out of their chrysalises to spread wings for such disparate flights.

Tom was struggling to survive once he left his grocery ‘job for life’, finding time to write, and explore, while earning something at whatever he could. If you are writing you are not away doing the things you want to write about, if you are away you are not hammering at the typewriter. Oddly, it was the war that gave him time to write what would become his first book, typing it after being demobbed in 1946. With his background as a gunnery surveyor he soon found work with the Ordnance Survey which happily had him roaming the hills of home again.

As a youngster keen on the hills I read Tom’s first book Highland Days not long after it came out following World War Two – and have read it on many occasions since. Like Borthwick’s classic Always aLittle Further it painted a picture of a world utterly remote and different to today’s: traditional and settled in character, kindlier in social manners, a world uncrowded and, for visitors like Tom, as unexplored as the Arctic or Himalaya. The book is a gem. For years, every time we met, I would urge Tom to try and have it reprinted (it eventually was in 1984). When I said it was the best thing he’d ever written he grinned back, “So you’re saying everything I’ve written since then is rubbish?”

Tom always called himself a photojournalist rather than a writer and studied hard to make himself one of the best. The commissioning editor of Scotland’s Magazine when discussing an eleven part series by Tom, under the name Ward Clarke wrote, “We know that we will get a good sound job from you – that it will be true to the facts, informative, readable and all we wish our material to be” – a good summation of Weir’s writing. But I always recall many gems of description brightening climbing or wildlife features: “. . . clinging to avoid becoming part of the wind . . . thick lips of snow cornice . . . the wind was a scream . . . blackcock with Glengarry bonnet tails . . . divers, low as battleships in the water . . . guillemots, like rows of bottles in a press.”

He progressed from using a cheap boyhood camera to become a busy professional, illustrating all his own features and books, with his own darkroom and writing sanctum from which all distractions were barred. Rhona became headmistress of their local primary school and the pair took classes on memorable hill outings.

Tom and Rhona settled in Gartochan after marriage in 1959, a hamlet with its own wee hill, the Dumpling (Duncryne 463 ft/142 m), and, at the mouth of the River Endrick, flowing into Loch Lomond, an area of outstanding bird interest and recently bought by the RSPB.

Tom was a bonny fighter when he saw thoughtless or perverse commercial wrong being done to the environment. Hydro schemes and forestry could – and should – benefit local people and look attractive but when tax benefiting blocks of trees were planted in the Flow Country of Caithness or a hideous track scarred a view or a dam was proposed across the Nevis Gorge, he would fight hard to prevent such unimaginative desecrations. I recall Tom’s scorn when a power line from Skye was built and was taken through to Kinloch Hourn by the only glen in the west free of man’s handiwork, a fact which should have been its safeguard but to the planners was the reason for going that way.

Reading dozens of obituaries after Tom’s death I was struck by the variation of perception and conception and, too often, simple errors of fact. What I’ve written I’ve tried to verify from prime sources and personal knowledge. Myths start so easily, Tom’s wife Rhona gave me an example.

She and Tom visited Foula in 1959 on their honeymoon, an eight hour uncomfortable boat journey (Tom was not a good sailor) then, when she returned recently – by air – the welcoming folk recalled the first visit and where they had pitched their tent and how Tom had presented Rhona with a bunch of red roses when landing. “As if Tom would.”

Recently I met a strange myth. During the war Tom reputedly wrote a book about climbing in the Alps (which he’d never visited) as an aid to escaping POWs, and sent to them in Red Cross parcels. Comments, such as ‘from the Dufferspitz the view to the NE reaches as far as Looniberg 80 kilometres away’, could be read ‘backwards’ to gain useful geographic information for escapers. All very hush hush; not even the family knew.

Tom had started off in the Cowlairs Co-op as a message boy and then working in the shop. More than a decade on he left to work in Willy Paton’s grocery where the incident with the scales occurred (see Nine Years to Happiness) and he walked out. He went to work on an Arran farm, struggling to write and explore in the limited time available. Then came the war.

The war, as mentioned, gave more opportunity to write: hours were often regular and pay certain (his discovered love of opera dates from this time) and danger and boredom were relieved by looking back to the good days in the past.

‘Sitting writing this in a guard-tent in the blazing heat of a Belgian July I find it hard to believe that my memories are thirteen years old. “Is it thirteen years,” I ask myself,” since I fearfully traced out of Abraham’s British Mountain Climbs dotted lines up the face of Buachaille Etive Mor, and produced diagrams of likely routes I could climb solo.”

Tom was no saint. He could be ‘thrawn’ and argumentative, determined to do what he wanted, when he wanted. He liked his day’s routine unchanging. He had strong views because he’d read and thought his way to them. But what strong characters are not prickly at times? His really close friends of many decades were all robust characters who could give and take. Sadly, he outlived most of them, his declining powers a frustrating burden. Duncryne was hardly the same when its climb was a struggle with two sticks but “better than the alternative”. Tom was also very much part of a couple to those who knew them and Tom without his wife Rhona unthinkable. She was his great support and aid throughout 47 years of marriage – and in her nineties she is still attending meets of the Ladies Scottish Climbing Club. She used to joke that Tom was the only married bachelor she knew.

Tom and many of his friends were members of the Scottish Mountaineering Club and, in his early days, often wrote for its Journal (listed in the bibliography) and two articles are included: p98 and p129. One of the pictures shows Tom as club President (1984 – 86) with one of the club’s treasures, the ice axe of Harold Raeburn. Traditionally the club president leads a walk on the day following the dinner and I recall Tom, then president, refusing the excuse of a ferociously wet day, leading a group of us from Strathyre up and over the shoulder of Beinn an t-Sidhein to Glen Buckie and back round by Balquhidder – and setting a cracking pace.

My first encounter with Tom would lead to several projects where he involved the Braehead School children. This was a junior secondary school in the mining coast of Fife where a team of inspirational teachers were giving new heart to a depressed area, my part being to take them into the wilds, to explore their world, to climb their dreams.

Descending to Loch Monar in the Sixties we came on a “bouncy wee man” (one lad’s description) whom I recognised as Tom Weir from the Scots Magazine and Highland Days. He later confessed to being astonished at the encounter with such lads in such a remote spot. Typically, he at once pointed out a kestrel keeking up on a crag and much bird talk followed. If the kids thought him “great”, he was impressed by their knowledge and enthusiasm. “I was seeing myself again as a laddie when all things were possible.”

When Braehead had closed and my Hamish’s Mountain Walk was published I asked Tom about the idea of trying to make a go of writing, as he had done. His reply was, “Don’t” – so I did, passing his test of my commitment perhaps, where becoming a casualty in the reality of such a life was all too likely. Tom, in the best notion of the term, was a self-made man, working unendurable hours for very little return in a chancy and very limited field. If he hadn’t the monthly assurance of the Scots Magazine – and a working wife – he might not have survived.

Writers in this field do not become rich! Strangely, not so long ago a youngster asked me the same question, and received the same reply. Tom endured, Tom stayed the course and, with the inspired engaging him on TV, became one of the best known and loved figures in the outdoor world.

Tom was one of the first members of the Scottish Wildlife Trust and of the John Muir Trust, the latter presenting him with a Lifetime Achievement Award in 2000; in 2001 the Outdoor Writers Guild gave him their Annual Golden Eagle Award. He was Vice-President of the Scottish Rights of Way Society. In 1976 he received an MBE and in 1978 won the Scottish Television Personality of the Year Award.

Tom kept a low political profile (though admired by and giving advice to many, including Tam Dalyell and John Smith) but was all for taking Scotland back to her own destiny with independence. In an interview in the Scots Independent (2005) he was asked, “Do you believe in God?” He is sure of his answer: “No, Everyone has one life. That’s all it is. No spirit looks after you beyond death. I was lucky not to have been killed in the war. I was lucky not to have been killed on Ben A’an. I don’t believe the world will be in existence in another 100 years. Man is outliving himself.” Perhaps you need to be a pessimist to be an optimist, to whom everything is a surprise, a marvel, and life taken with a big heart, like Tom.

This is a collection for dipping into and I hope will encourage readers to seek out copies of his books still in print or those less easy to find. Details are in the bibliography. The only liberty I have taken with the text is to have abbreviated at times, space being at a premium. Any comments of mine in the text are in square brackets and introductory or other notes are in italics. Tom’s spellings have largely been followed as long as the meaning or name is clear.

Tom’s later work as a photographer and on TV is well remembered so pictures have been chosen to show the younger photographer, his friends, and the wide range of topics he covered, both at home and abroad, a representative selection from a vast archive and of increasing social and historical interest.

My thanks to those who encouraged along the way: to Rhona first of all; to Robin Campbell and other Scottish Mountaineering Club members who brought some order into Tom’s archive material; to the St Andrews Sustainability Institute for a grant to help with part of the research; to the Trustees of the National Library of Scotland and the staff of the Library where it is now housed (Acc. 13059), for their patience and helpfulness over many months, to Sheila Gallimore and David Ritchie for the typing, scanning, etc, of an unruly text; and to Robert Davidson of Sandstone Press who bullied the complex work along.

Hamish Brown

Burntisland 2013

I LIFE TO WARTIME YEARS

During the war years Tom tried his hand at writing fiction which, as with most early essays in fiction, leaned heavily on a limited personal experience. The two pieces following give vivid pictures of life in Springburn in pre-war days. ‘Nine Years to Happiness’ is scarcely fiction at all, he is Allan, the frustrated shop assistant and Jock is the very recognisable Matt Forrester, mentor and friend.

Tom wrote very little about the war so I include three very varied pieces which, in different ways, will be familiar to anyone who served in the ranks. Typically Tom gave his home address as Glen Brittle House, Isle of Skye, when much of the Highlands was a restricted area. ‘Across Sutherland Hills’ was one of his explorations when on leave.

That, and ‘An Epic’ are from Highland Days, his first book which was written during the war, as was W H Murray’s Mountain­eering in Scotland, though the latter was written in the worse boredom of a POW camp.

NINE YEARS TO HAPPINESS

Monday morning. Beyond the sugarloaf brilliance of the housing scheme and its forest of red roofs towered the craggy ridge of the hills. A thin spiral of silver veined it. Snow. The hooter of the engineering works sounded. With a start he bounded into a run. He had five minutes to get to the shop.

All the assistants were at their counters when he got in. Quickly he pulled on his coat stiff with white starch and seizing a broom, began sweeping the back shop. The gag was sometimes successful but not this morning. He knew it when the boss came into the back shop.

“I was wondering where you were hiding,” he said. “Did you think I didn’t see you?” Allan pulled out a box, swept under it but didn’t look up. “Well I’m waiting for an answer. Another thing; that’s already been swept.”

“I’m sorry, I thought it hadn’t.” He made to go out to the front shop.

“Come here Smith, I’m speaking to you!” His rubbery lips had a smirk of self-satisfaction and the sight of his double chin quivering as he spoke roused a wave of hatred in Allan. His name was Wheeler. He was a tall man going bald at the front and developing a paunch. No one ever succeeded in liking him.

“I don’t like telling you off Smith, but we can’t let you get away with it all the time. This is the fourth time in less than a week. What’s up? Do you go to bed too late?” It was no use explaining. “I’ll try to keep better time,” Allan muttered. “Well try then. This is a good job and you don’t want to lose it.”

“Give McKend a hand with these orders.” With his thumbnail he scratched a grove in the barrel shape of butter newly out of its cask and popped the wrinkled accumulation between his thick lips. He went to the cash desk where five girls were adding up figures and checking their cash. The assistants talked in low voices for Wheeler maintained that you couldn’t both work and talk.

With jobs so scarce he knew how to make them toe the line. Beside he had a reputation for managing successfully on a smaller staff than any of his predecessors. That was why the firm had given him their biggest shop.

At the age of sixteen Allan should have been sacked and replaced by a non-insured youngster of fourteen. As a message boy he had hated Wheeler. He knew too, how the counter hands hated the job. He could sense only too well the servility the customers expected and got from the grocers.

Then came the offer. There was a superannuation scheme. A guaranteed job. People always need groceries. (Look at the number of unemployed engineers.) What will you do if you don’t take it? The deciding factor was his mother. She was a widow. Other places he had tried for a job had ignored him, so he became a grocer’s assistant.

It wasn’t too bad at first. There was a lot to learn; prices, where the various things were kept, what all the drawers held, how to weigh goods accurately, how to fold paper bags so there was no possibility of the contents escaping, how to keep tobacco moist with the help of a cut up potato, how to ‘gas’ eggs, and then there was window dressing and the arranging of show cases inside the shop.

“Intelligent anticipation saves time,” was another of Wheeler’s sayings. That meant that shelves never had to go empty and cause a hold up at the counter while a new case was being opened in the back shop. It was a crime in his eyes to run out of goods. Allan was responsible for tea. No matter how busy he was these tea shelves with all the different blends had to be fully represented. He made it known how many men he had sacked for this neglect.

A favourite trick of his too was to withdraw from a customer under some pretext, packages of some expensive stuff like coffee or tongue, which had just ben weighed. It would be reweighed in the back shop and woe betide the unfortunate assistant if it was even a fraction overweight.

At home, he never mentioned the shop unless asked. “Your mind is always on these hills. If you’d take more interest in your work instead of reading about hills and going away every week-end climbing hills you’d get on better. Coming in here with a bag of wet stinking clothes every Sunday. And you can’t get up for your work on Monday.”

His was a grand respectable job his mother thought. If only if he’d take after his younger brother Willie a bit more. He was an apprentice engineer and wrapt up in his job to the exclusion of all else.

It was true though that Allan had a passion for the country. After the shop shut on s Saturday night he would catch the last bus out and from the terminus walk across the hills to pitch his tent in darkness by some little hill stream. To wake up in the morning to hear the gurgle of the burns and to look out to the green curving hills was the most joyful thing he knew. From the day he stood on Earl’s Seat and looked over Loch Lomond to the mighty summits stretching from west to east in a ragged blue line, he had been an addict. He read everything the public library had on the Scottish Highlands.

About this time he met Jack Brown, an enthusiast like himself. He was a butcher with the same sort of hours and ideals. They met on the train and spent the weekend together. Brown was an ornithologist and an advanced thinker. He fancied the simple life. To be a wage slave was all wrong. “If you don’t like the job you are doing change it.” Since he enjoyed the butchery trade it was easy enough advice for him to follow.

They had some great times together: they crossed the Cairngorms, climbed the Cuillin of Skye, wandered across Sutherland, explored the wilderness of Wester Ross, visited Harris of the big hills, and each of these journeys was done in their annual ten days holiday. He taught Allan to identify birds and in a thousand ways added to his education.

But at twenty three Allan was still a grocer. He was in charge of the provision counter by then and if anything, hated the job more than ever. Now that his brother was a tradesman, his mother was reasonably well off, so in short, he was free from responsibilities.

And how little things affect our destinies.

The shop was pretty busy and Allan was at his counter answering various calls for bacon, boiled ham or black puddings. Now it happened that the schoolchildren were fond of foregathering in Allan’s corner. The bacon cutting machine fascinated them and the man behind it was always friendly. Wheeler frowned on Allan’s popularity. On this day a youngster was holding down the other side of the scale on which Allan was trying to weigh something. He made a playful lunge to slap the hand of the offending youngster, slipped on the greasy floor and with a thud and a crash of breaking glass, scales and Allan hit the floor. There was commotion in the shop.

Wheeler took command, order was restored, and when the shop had cleared, Allan was ordered into the back shop. He owed an apology and intended delivering it. The broken scale was prominently exhibited, and when Allan came in, Wheeler pointed to it. “I thought you would do something like this,” he began. “Do you know how much this cost?”

“It was an accident sir,” said Allan diffidently enough, “and I’m sorry,” “Not much use in being sorry is there, after doing your best to smash something.” His voice was at its nastiest.

“I slipped on something and fell. That was all. It was just bad luck bringing the scale down as well.”

“I saw what happened. You were capering as usual with these damned youngsters. I’ll need to report this to the general manager. There are a few things I have to tell him about you while I am at it.”

“Well, if the general manager is dealing with it, that will be all.” Allan moved to go.

“I give the orders here. I’ve a few things to say to you. Your mother came to me and asked me to do my best for you when you were a message boy. I kept you on. I’ve closed my eyes to a lot of things, coming in late in the mornings, going away sharp at night, slip-shod work. And what thanks do I get?”

“You don’t want thanks for condemning me to a life of this, do you? Let me tell you that it was the worst thing that ever happened to me, getting kept on at this job. Now you are trying to make out that it was only your generosity that has kept me working here. You are incapable of generosity and if my mother did speak to you, then it must have accorded with your wishes to keep me on. You are not the man to sacrifice anything. But you haven’t spoiled my life yet though you’ve tried by fault-finding and watching my every action. Well, I’m finished here. And the sooner you let me leave the better!” Allan’s face was white when he left Wheeler. The following morning he sent in his resignation.

There were four days left till Saturday. Four days, and Allan worked as he had never worked before. He wanted to show them what a good man they were losing. He was in on time and out after time.

Saturday night came. He turned down his hams and bacons on to their marble slabs for the last time, draped cloths over everything, and went into the back shop. Wheeler stopped him going out the back door. “It isn’t too late to change your mind,” he said. “Stay on with us. You belong here.” He held out his hand. Allan shook his head. “Goodbye Mr Wheeler,” he said.

Brown did not applaud his action. He looked grave when Allan told him he had packed in. “It’s all very well to talk, “he said, after a bit, “but now you are out of a job and jobs are scarce. I hope I didn’t influence you.”

“I expect you did,” said Allan gaily. “I spoke to my mother about it. She was against it but told me I knew what I was doing.”

That weekend wasn’t so enjoyable as usual. For the first time the full seriousness of his step really came home to him. Twenty three years of age and he was trying to change his job. Brown has made it all sound so easy. Now he hadn’t a job.

Monday he scanned the adverts and saw no jobs to his liking, Tuesday, he signed on at the Labour Exchange, Wednesday he wrote after various outdoor jobs he saw in a county magazine, Thursday he signed the Exchange, Friday he went away by himself for a long weekend. By Monday he proved that a life of leisure is not a life of pleasure.

The following weekend he got a lift north in a milk wagon. Rain was sweeping in grey veils across the sodden hills. After a few miles he decided to brew a can of tea under cover of a friendly barn, and with that object asked the farmer if he could have some boiling water. “Come inside,” said the farmer. They were a friendly couple and soon he was sitting at the table telling them his story.

“You are better out of it,” said the farmer. “What would you like to do if you could?”

“I don’t know, but I fancy the simple life, at any rate an outdoor job where I could see the seasons and the country and get away from the artificiality of the town. I don’t want to work under eyes all the time.”

“What about farming? Did you ever think of it?”

“You need to learn an awful lot.”

“A willing man can always learn and I’d rather have a willing learner than an unwilling expert.”

“Yes, maybe you would.”

“I’m offering you a job. I’ll pay you the standard agricultural rate and there is a bedroom in the house here, I need a man to help me. I’ve just broken up some new ground. The two of us can manage it. Can you start now?”

“What’s doing?”

“We’ll riddle some spuds, and when the rain clears uncover a wee stack I’m selling.”

So Allan started on his new life. The farmer found him a keen man and quick to pick up the art of harrowing, ploughing, cultivating, rolling and sowing. He was happy, and of a weekend the barn is a great place of outdoor men, hikers and climbers. But as well as giving advice on where to climb or hike, he’ll tell you the secret of successful living. “Be happy at your work and if you don’t like it, move heaven and earth to change it.”

Typescript in the National Library of Scotland collections

Tom was an extremely active youth. He joined the local boxing club in the hope of increasing his height – and for their excursions to Campsies and Ben Lomond. He joined the Boys brigade while underage in order to play the drums, an enthusiasm that only waned when the more serious business of learning to write began.

TOUGH JOINT

‘Wanted. Hot band for Saturday night dancing. Four or five members, terms moderate.’

A reply to this advert in a Glasgow newspaper secured us the job, and on a dirty Saturday night, five men with an assortment of cases might have been seen scouring one of Glasgow’s less choice districts for the hall. We were late, fearfully late.

“Here’s the bon,” was the prelude to finding the place and with sinking hearts we were hurried through a pend and up a wooden stair by five or six toughs who had been sent to look for us.

“Come on, boys. Hoff past eight. Whit kep’ ye?” greeted us in angry tones. The toughness of the crowd made our already quavering hearts quail and the women looked as unpleasant as the hard-bitten, hands-in-pockets, dandified toughs, resplendent in flashy mufflers. Resentful faces scowled at us as we crossed the dingy dance floor to gain the platform. We were an hour late and expected a razor attack at any moment for daring to keep them waiting.

Never did the band get going more quickly and we soon had the crowd swinging into a foxtrot. This was better we thought. The dancers seemed to like it, and with some feeling of confidence we waited for the MC to announce the next dance.

He did, shouting from the middle of the floor but we could not make sense of it. Expectantly the crowd awaited the band starting up, the women nipping their fags and lodging them behind their ears as their partners claimed them. Frantically our leader signalled the MC. “What was that you announced?” he asked. The MC bawled something unintelligible. “Say it slowly please,” the leader said, his face more ruddy than usual with the stares of the mob. “La Fanatique,” the MC retorted peevishly, “Ur ye coren beef?” “OK,” said the leader, then turning to us, “Have any of you boys ever heard of it?” No one had. “Right then. ‘Dark Town Strutters’ at this tempo.” He beat out a tempo about Palais Glide speed.

Before the first dozen bars were over we knew we had blundered. Scowling faces passed the platform. Suddenly a raucous female voice rang out, “Aw quicken up the bon there!” The pace quickened and we scrapped through. But that was only the beginning. For the first time we learned to play ‘modern select’ as it is called. Many of these dances are exclusive to the joints and owe their origin to ingenious, if misguided, MCs. Windsor tango, Happy landing foxtrot, sequence rumba, and a host of un-nameables were asked for and somehow we managed to dish them up. But the crowd did not like us.

The band platform however was a popular place, for behind my drums was the favourite spot for consuming bottles of beer. I had visions of being made a target for an empty.

It was during the last dance a scuffle broke out near the door and in a moment it was an all-in affair, the women standing on chairs for a better view.

As is the custom during a disturbance, we kept playing, but everyone abandoned the dance floor for the better fun of the fight. Like a rugby scrimmage the struggling mass gradually moved doorwards and down the stair. Raised voices and oaths and the clatter of bottles showed the fighting was still fierce. The hall was deserted so we packed up.

An ominous stillness marked our departure. The MC met us in the lobby and paid us our wages. He was in no way perturbed and seemed to regard the whole affair as normal. “It was only a ‘barney’ and it clears the hall.”

Typescript in the National Library of Scotland Collections

AN EPIC

It was fourteen years ago on a Loch Lomond bus that I first met Richie. I was sixteen at the time and my ambition was to be an explorer. I had read everything about the Arctic and the Antarctic that I could lay my hands on and here, for the first time, was a kindred spirit. I can see him now as I write, a quiet, rather grim looking man with yellow hair going a bit thin on top. His quietness was noticeable, for the busload were singing their heads off after a successful Easter weekend.

He leaned across and asked me if I had been climbing, for although dressed as a schoolboy complete with a cap – in order to get half fare on the bus – I was carrying an army pack. I confessed my enthusiasm as is the way of youth, and he took me seriously. Indeed, he confessed to similar ambitions.

I did not expect to see him again, but by a coincidence met him later at Rowardennan one moonlight Saturday night as I searched the foreshore for a camping place. We shared the tent and got on famously. Richie seemed to know every part of the Scottish Highlands. He had been a cyclist and had just taken to walking and climbing.

He was unemployed and spent most of his time outdoors, going back to Glasgow from Tuesday to Thursday to sign his name at the Labour Exchange. Politics entered my life at this time too, for Richie was embittered against a government that had no work to offer, and rather than walk the streets he walked the hills. He was a plumber and in his kit he carried a few tools of his trade, so that he could pick up an odd penny by wee jobs such as repairing milk cans and so on.

He was a little chap, not more than five feet six in height, but very strong. [Tom was five feet one.] Weightlifting and wrestling were his hobbies, and I remember that weekend there was a health-and-strength club camping in the bay. We were sitting on the foreshore when a big chap, stripped to the waist and of magnificent physique, offered to ‘pull’ any one of the party. No one spoke and after a short silence Richie said he might have a try. It was a David-and-Goliath sort of tournament, but I have a vivid recollection of the big chap’s shoulders being forced down on the gravel so mercilessly that blood streamed down his back. Later, when weightlifting with boulders, Richie capped all their efforts by doing a ‘bent press’ with an enormous stone!

That, then, was the man. As well as revolutionary ideas on politics, he had revolutionary ideas on walking. He wanted to do it the hard way, the explorer’s way, across Scotland by the mountain tops, self-supporting in food and sheltering where one could. This was what I wanted, and Richie had an idea for a tour, provided I could get my holiday when he was allowed off by the Labour Exchange.

It was all worked out, and late one night a man and a boy might have been seen boarding the Oban train. Probably the watcher would even have permitted himself a laugh, for the boy, small for his age, was carrying a Bergen rucksack of huge bulk that reached far below the proper place in the small of his back. To counteract its weight he had to bend nearly double, the motion being as near turtle-like as makes no difference.

Taynuilt was our destination and in the grey of the morning we fortified ourselves with a meal. When I say ‘fortified’ I mean ‘fortified’ – at least as far as Richie was concerned. He prided himself on being a good trencherman. He was more than that. In amazement I watched as our store of food dwindled as Richie “packed it away”, to use his own expression. Our food was supposed to last a week, but I knew there and then that it would not.

Ben Cruachan, whose tops we were supposed to promenade over to Ben Starav, was in cloud. Also its slopes looked fearfully long and steep for our heavy bags, so we decided that, since there was nothing to be gained by going up into the mist, we would go up the seldom visited west side of Loch Etive. There as a track marked on the map, but the toil of that rucksack made each step a separate effort of will.

I can remember little of that walk except a pair of dogs that Richie antagonised by swinging a stick at them and hissing like a cat. He antagonised all dogs in fact, so that I was in terror each time we came to a house. What I can remember is that evening at the head of Loch Etive. All the toil was worthwhile just to be ringed around by the great hills, rocky and green, and seamed with innumerable cataracts that filled the air with sound. How delightful to be free of the sack and to be at last ‘exploring’!

Morning saw us take to the hills in rain by a wild pass, the Lairig Eilde, which at length led into Glen Coe. An impression of cloudy gloom and fierce, toppling crags remains distinct from the glen as I know it today. Under a rock we ate the last of our food and were joined by a tramp.

Richie was not flattered at being asked if I was his son, and answered rather sharply to the contrary. Prematurely thin on top myself at thirty I can understand how he felt at twenty-eight to be mistaken for the father of such a precocious youngster. I had many inward chuckles later as the same mistake was made time after time by people whom we met.

Richie’s interest in the tramp was more than passing, for he had a hankering to try the life himself, and he questioned the tattered-looking fellow on the technique of the craft. It was a mean sort of existence, of begging and labouring, and of model lodging-houses in big towns when winter came. The tramp’s last words were, “Keep off the game, it’s only for down-and-outs like me.” As he shambled down that bleak moor in his rags, purposeless and alone in an inhospitable world, I found my first romantic picture shattered.

It was afternoon as we climbed up a heathery hillside, the north-enclosing face of the glen. We were on route for Loch Leven. What went wrong I don’t know – our map was a motoring one, three miles to the inch, so I suspect that had something to do with it – but for hours we crossed an expanse of heather and bog, ‘God- forsaken and man-forsworn’. At length a long slash of water gleamed. We thought it was Loch Leven but tasted its water to make sure. It was fresh and sweet, therefore not Loch Leven water. We scanned the map and decided it was the Blackwater.

On its shores I was seized with a trembling of the lower limbs. I did not say anything but my weakness was apparent to Richie, for I was lagging behind. I had ‘the knock’ he informed me, a complaint common among hard-pushing cyclists. Food was the only cure but we had none, so he bravely shouldered my pack in addition to his own, and we pushed on. Later that night we camped at the foot of a huge, thundering waterfall, the biggest I had ever seen, and in my imagination now as big as Niagara. We came far that day.

But Kinlochleven was not far off, and after a breakfastless start, we got there around midday. Richie bought the groceries while I went to a house for water. ‘Is it tinkers?’ she asked as she handed me the brimming can. We got the stove going behind an outhouse and, regardless of the curious townsfolk, had a meal that is an event in my memory.