Mackay Country Community Trust Moving Times & Museum Tales - The Project
Hostel Memories 1970s
We used to get home every weekend. In the summertime, the bus would pick us up at 6 o’ clock at night on Sunday, and then, obviously, on a Friday, I don’t know, at about 4 o’ clock in the afternoon when we’d finished school. The wintertime bus would pick us up at one o’ clock in the afternoon, just for the bad weather …
In Earl’s Cross, there was only the light in the centre of the room. In Mackay House, you actually had the light with the wee pull-switch above your beds. So, it was the usual. The light would go out and then you’d wait for five or ten minutes and then start speaking, a light would go on and you’d hear the warden and everyone would switch their lights off. I remember one time, or more than one time, when we were in Mackay House, the warden used to come in. She’d put the main light on and then she’d go right to all our beds and she’d feel the bulb …to find out who’d had the light switched on, like. And then, obviously, the next morning you’d be called into the Headmaster’s office in school, and just … she didn’t belt you, she just passed it on.
The Headmaster said, well, you did something wrong, blah, blah, blah, you get the belt. And, in fact, it ended up – the room I was in there – the four of us that were in that room, we had the light-bulbs taken out. Whether they were trying to save energy, I don’t know, but …. There was another thing, too. We were in Room 1, which was on the first floor in Mackay House, but we figured out that the dining-hall was just in front of it. And it wasn’t that far out – you could actually go out that window and climb onto the flat roof of the dining-hall. And then go down the down-pipe and you’re outside. And I can’t remember why were out one night, but we actually got – this was after the hostel was locked, something like 1 o’ clock in the morning, trying to get back in. We got caught doing that. So, we went away for the weekend, came back and there had been bolts put on the window and they could only open that much … All the windows on the ground floor had been bolted, and that was to stop us from getting out of the windows.
Every time we did something wrong in the hostel, we were just sent to the Headmaster in the school. We used to get this standard lecture about how people from the west coast were unruly …We used to get a lecture for five to ten minutes and then get belted. Everyone. It didn’t really matter who … the ringleader or … you know, half the time in the hostel no-one would admit to anything.
Well, when I went to school there seemed to be this kind of fighting mentality. And it was the east coast against the west coast, apart from the fact that the people in Golspie and Brora didn’t like each other so the ones from Brora were on the west coast side …… which seemed a bit odd. But I tried to avoid an awful lot of that ’cause I actually got on well with a few people in Golspie.
In Dornoch, we were more kind of isolated, I would say, because of where we were. We weren’t really in Dornoch, in the town, as such, like. We didn’t really have to go into Dornoch itself. I mean, by the time we got back on a Sunday night, we were only really there four nights, I suppose. There was no school uniform at all. Just had to be tidy.
To me wasn’t a bad experience. Some people my age hated it; some loved it …I was kind of quite neutral. It was just something you had to do. You know, it’s like a means to an end, or …You know that you canna leave school until you’re sixteen, so you may as well just get on with it, sort of thing, you know. We were in the hostels for four years and then it was the same thing again as what happened to us in the first year. There was too many kids for the hostels so we actually had to go into lodgings …And that was great. That was just excellent; it was …Nae rules! Oh, it was great, like, you know. Excellent. You know, we never caused any hassle with his folks, ’cause …we were just … come and go, but just be sensible. That’s what they said to us, like. And I think half the time some of the things you used to do in the hostel – it was like, you were breaking that rule just because it was there. If that rule hadn’t been there, you wouldn’t have …; it was more devilment for the sake of it. And yet – or maybe the fact we were a bittie older by then. There was only three of us lodged in this house. There was probably about twenty, altogether in lodgings in the town. Like I say, it was just that there was too many kids …to fit into all the hostels. So the Education had to just find a few spaces.
But, then again, there wasn’t much in the way of rules, so … but at the hostels, you’ve got all these rules and it’s almost like you’re trying to rebel a wee bit against everything, just for the hell of it, at the time. But yeah, it was certainly good for us. It was almost like being home, in a way, the lodgings.
I suppose, looking back on it, it was just a big adventure more than anything else. Good days and bad days. Half the problems – half the trouble we got into was our own doing – it was more fun than malicious, the things we got up to. And sometimes it was just for a laugh, more than anything else …… because the thing was, once you’d been to the Headmaster and got belted once or twice, you knew what was coming, so …And even the young ones, even though – they knew fine who had been up to no good, they could have told on us, they never – they never did. And they’d been warned not to, so maybe that was enough. But they used to think it was a good laugh as well.
Dornoch was a very good hostel. Not so much from the food point of view and that but just the freedom of being on the golf course …I’d say, getting home every weekend, that was a real bonus. I mean, when we were doing our exams and that, if we had an exam on the Monday, we’d go back on the bus on Sunday night, do the exam on the Monday and if you didn’t thumb home or manage to get a lift they’d have had to stay in the school, you know.
Aye, different from when they weren’t getting home at all – that is a totally different experience from the older ones where they were really stuck there for the whole time. No, ours was definitely freedom relative to them. But, then, compared to the kids you see now, that are getting home at night – but that’s a difficult one to say, too, ’cause, I mean, the kids from Golspie and Brora and Lairg and places that did go home every night …They didn’t seem any different to the way that we were. So them getting home at night and us having to stay in the hostel … it didn’t do them any harm getting home at night. I think it’s just attitudes that have changed, full stop.
The parents of kids just seem to have more power in general. We got belted or we ended up with a thousand lines, and that was ‘I must not ….. And they’d have ten, twenty pages of this … and half-way down one page – I forget the name now, but he’d do Mr Whatever is a complete b******. And you’d actually write that in, and then carry on and finish your lines and say ‘Right, sir, I’ve done my lines’ and they’d just flick through the pages, rip them in half and throw them in the bin. And that was probably more annoying than anything …… because you’d just spent the last hour doing this. We soon cottoned on that he wasn’t actually reading them …… and just made sure you’d written on every page. Never got caught. I stopped doing that – ‘I must not’ – ‘cause we used to be, like, ‘I’ – one long stroke right down the way down the page, instead of doing it on every line, like … so that ‘I’ was never used in your lines. That was too easy.