Mackay Country Community Trust Moving Times & Museum Tales - The Project
Hostel Memories 1940s
Melness memories with Nellie and Nana …. Oral History
“We were twelve. It’s 72 years ago that we left – 72 years ago this summer, we were sitting, full of excitement, preparing to go away to school, and the first school we went to was Lairg – aye, Lairg High School. We stayed with Willie MacDonald in Gruids. You see, there was no hostels and we went into this lovely family … they were so good to us. And then in Golspie there were boarding-houses which were more formal. There weren’t many pupils went to Lairg School, so they just welcomed us in. The daughter was four years older than us, and we were going into first year, she looked after us. I remember how she had a timetable written out for us before we went into the school and, of course, we’d never seen a timetable before that! And we weren’t hungry at all – it was wartime, but still, we weren’t hungry, and we were warm, and Willie was always teasing us and having fun with us; he was very jolly.
“Well, Lairg was very different in those days because all the mail buses came in from Durness, the North, Lochinver, Scourie, Tongue, and full of passengers. And the Sutherland Transport garage was alive then; apprentices there, and everything was just – Lairg was very busy. And there was soldiers in Lairg, stationed in Lairg, and airmen in Crask …”
“Lairg School must have been fairly modern besides other schools at that time; it had a big gymnasium, but we weren’t allowed to use that because the soldiers were in the gymnasium. And the school, Lairg School, was primary and secondary all in one building, and the primary classes down to the right, and the centre of the secondary had only three main teachers: the headmaster, Mr Henderson, who taught Latin; the science teacher …That Dr Mackay started me off on my French, and I’ve loved it ever since. And Mr Henderson, who was so strict – if you didn’t have 100% in your exams, you weren’t on. So, both those teachers, although Lairg was just a little, small school, they were the two that started me off on my career in teaching. I never even thought about it until I had to come and see you, but that was how I started with my French and Latin and went to study at university.”
And what about the disaster when we used to get home just at Christmas, Easter and summer – there was no cars to take us, no buses or anything. One Easter, we were all excited …Our first Easter, we were all excited about the holidays. We looked out the window one morning, and the snow was level with the dykes. Every day, soon as we wakened up, we were out, looking out the window, and it was still there … and in those days, they only cleared the main roads, for the buses and but the side roads, like ours to Gruids weren’t cleared. Because the men were just doing it with shovels – there was no snowploughs in those days.
The roads were impassable. And we never got home at all, never got home at all. Just in summertime. The snow came the very day we were to drive home, and the day before the snow came we were telling Jimmy Henderson … we’ll be with you tomorrow. It wasn’t snowing. Next day – right up the dykes, it was … and we were heartbroken. I was terrible homesick. It’s an illness, homesickness, if you don’t know about it. We didn’t have half-term holidays like they have now, so when we went away in September we didn’t get back until Christmas, and the school holidays were longer, the summertime. So, we would go back – we’d take off back to school about the 1st of September, and you didn’t get back home until the just before Christmas – about the 22nd. So that was a long time.”
Memories of Achriesgill and Durness… Oral History
When I got married I came here to Durness in 1959. And I’ve been here ever since. The kids went to school here and then to the High School, but they didn’t have the Hostel when I went – it’s lodgings we were in when I went to school. Golspie. During the holidays I went to work in the Altnaharra Hotel.
And my mother kept on saying, “You’re going back to school,” and I said, “I am not!” So I stayed there. So I stayed there, and, well, I was down south for a while, and then came back. Well, of course, in them days there was only hotels and places like that to work in. That was all – there was nothing else – you had to go away to work. And I went away down south to work for this … they were cousins of … och, he’s got a big house in Tongue … the Dukes, Dunrobin. They were relations of theirs. And I went down there and I was with them for two years before I came back home, and I thoroughly enjoyed it, because they were nice people to work for. And they just treated you like one of themselves. There was no nonsense with them at all. Well, it was in a big house, a manor house, it was called. And I did everything, more or less, everything, but, och, they were really, really good. And then I came back here and got married and came up here.
But the job in Altnaharra – well, we had to go by bus to Lairg, and then by bus from Lairg to Altnaharra. And there was very, very few houses there then. There’s quite a lot in it now. And very, very few houses, but you never felt the time long, because there was – you were always working. I was more or less looking after the kids – there was two kids there – I was more or less looking after them and doing other things as well. But there was ghillies and all that there then, so, I mean, there was quite a crowd, so you were never lonely. Never lonely. And then further up the road there was a lodge and it was Kimballs or something, the ones that was in that lodge, and all the menfolk from round about used to be working at either Altnaharra, at the hotel, or this lodge, and they had a big bothy of their own up there, you know. And we used to go up there at night and … they were all from Melness, Tongue and, you know, round that places, and we never felt the time long. And then there was a dance here and a dance somewhere else – we’d hire a car and off we would all go to the dance.
Oh, I thoroughly enjoyed my time in Altnaharra, although it was quiet. It was grand. But, oh, I wouldn’t like to see that days coming back again, where … you know, when you went off to school and you went into lodgings and that – no. No, I always remember going – of course, you’d have come off at the station and then you had to walk from the station to your lodgings. And I thought I was never going to reach there. And afterwards I thought, well, it’s not very far! And I was sitting, sitting having my supper at night and I was thinking, oh, I wonder what they’re having at home for their supper. This kind of thing, you know, was going through your head, but then, after a while, once you got to know, you know, started the school and you got to know people.
It was all bursaries then. At the end of each term, we didn’t get home from the summer till Christmas-time, and at the end, of course, the headmaster paid out all the bursaries and we had to pay it in too, to give it to the landlady and whatnot.
Then at home, of course, it was the usual. You had to work, when you’re at home, cutting peats and planting potatoes and all the rest of it – looking after the horses, cows and sheep and whatnot. And then in the springtime, we used to do our washing, and the water was all coming from the well, and we had to go – and then one part of the year we … just the springtime – we used to go down to this burn. And we were all like, all, the whole village was there. We’d a fire going and everything, and doing the blankets and the sheets and everything, and we were all tramping the sheets and all that kind of things. You know, down beside the burn and we took our food and everything with us.
It was the same when we were cutting the peats. We had – like, say, the whole lot of us went and we did so many peats, you know, one day, and then went on until everybody had their peats cut, and we’d be up there all day. And we used to have a big zinc bath and we used to take this up full of food and whatnot. Everybody took food up and we ate our food and everything up at the peats. We had to walk about a couple of miles or more before we would get to the peats, mind you, because there was nothing then but horses and carts and all the rest of it, but oh, it was great fun. Great fun. We thought it was, but I don’t know what they would think of it today, mind you!
And then of course every year the big boat used to come in with the stuff that you ordered – if you ordered a … one of the big square things of sugar and flour and oatmeal and all this kind of things, you see, and all this used to come in on the boat, and we used to go down for that and have a day out down there.