‘You want to know about the Tech now, do you? Three years of purgatory. The thing that I remember most was the bullying. It was every night in your first year. There was twenty in each dormitory – ten on each side. You’d to bend over these old style army bunks – beds …Bend over and you got whacked across the backside with a gym shoe. Six times, every night. Seven days a week. That’s what was done to you in first year.

 

And the food was atrocious. Absolutely atrocious. It took me years to eat the jam. And they used to give you sandwiches – there was no butter on them – this was as a snack at night. Just bread and jam. We had burnt toast. To this day, I hate burnt toast. Och, aye. If it hadn’t been for the chippie in Golspie, we’d have bloody starved. On the Saturday there was films in the afternoon, in Golspie. So all the boys from the Tech and all the girls from the hostel, from the north coast or from the west coast, they would all be in there. And the chippie, he made a fortune out of these guys from the west coast. Absolutely. Starving hungry. In my first year, there was a lad from the backcoast, he was a big, big guy ….must have been nigh on six feet when he was fourteen, and he organised – well, petitioned – we were all going on a hunger strike. And if the food didn’t improve – well, I had my case all packed and I was walking down to Lairg and home. And then the food did improve a little bit after that …… but it was still terrible. I mean, you knew the days of the week by the menu. One in particular I remember was a slice of fat – it was meant to be cold ham, but it was more fat than ham, a dollop of spuds and some kale. That was it. It really was atrocious, you know. Your tea was was a pie or a sausage roll. That was your tea, on a Saturday. I think it was a pie, or a sausage roll, and a wee cream cake. That was your tea, at night. That was at six or five o’clock. It’s a wonder any of us was bloody lived to tell the tale.

 

As I say, it wasn’t luxury. The farm was on the go. That’s where the kale was coming from, and probably the potatoes …you had the milk from the farm. One of the jobs I had was going across to the farm to get these big churns of milk. There was one time I was coming back up, and it was icy, slippery roads, like, and it was a wee buggy with two wheels. And I slipped when I came down. I’ve still a scar in below there somewhere; I was lucky it didn’t knock me out, like …but being a west-coaster, made of sterner stuff, you see.

 

They improved the food because everybody signed the petition. This big fella – he threatened everybody and they were only twelve years old. He threatened them with violence if they didn’t sign it, you know. I signed it straight away. But, another thing they used to do – you had four different houses. There was Portland, Carnegie, Rosslyn and Sutherland – that was the four houses. And I was in Portland House. On Sunday night, you used to get the – you know, the six-inch, one of the big service spoons, across the backside …… on the Sunday night, after you’d finished your week. I was probably about fourteen at the time, and this guy says, right, bend over, and I says, no, – no way you’re hitting me with that. So he took a swipe at me with the spoon, and I grabbed the spoon out of his hand and I wrapped it right around his head. ’Course, then he threw a punch at me, and I dodged, and he went straight into a concrete wall! So, he didn’t know what to do, jumping about with a sore fist, and that. There was no more spoon for me, for the third year. I was there from 1959 to ‘62. I was big enough to stand up for myself, you know.

It was a big issue, really. And the thing is, the Headmaster knew it was going on. And, I mean, it had been done to them as well… the older ones. He would have had the same thing three years previously, you know… So it was just purgatory. I suppose they had this idea it was supposed to toughen you up. But it didn’t. All it did to me was made me anti-authority. And I’ve been like that ever since.

 

Another thing it buggered up for me and my family was, we were all shipped out. I had three sisters all older than me, but I went to the Tech and they were in Dornoch Academy. And we only seen each other during the holidays, so we missed out on an awful lot. We were basically – we were strangers. You just met up, you know, for a long weekend in October, you got ten days at Christmas, OK, maybe eight weeks in the summer, then ten days at Easter.

 

That’s all we seen of each other for a whole year. Everyone of us was like that, I suppose, really. I was seven when my sister went away to Dornoch Academy. You know, when you should be growing up and tumbling about with your sisters. You didn’t – you’d missed out.

 

But in some respects, some of the things you learned was, you know, I suppose it was, when I went away to sea myself I was the about the only guy that could sew a button on my shirt. That was because we had to do that. You know, the matron, she was a teacher herself so she made sure that you learned to do things for yourself. Well, I suppose you had a lot of fun, too, when you think about it, but the bullying was the main thing and the starvation.‘