Growing up at Peth-heid

From the age of 9 until 21, my family home was 66 Main Street, Pathhead, Midlothian, Scotland, except for about two happy years in the same village at 5 Crichton Terrace on the council estate while major renovations were carried out on the property at 66 Main Street. The Main Street was the A68, one of the three major roads to England; a road that linked at Melrose to the ancient Roman road, Dere Street and before that through Lauderdale and over the Soutra to the medieval Royal Way (Via Regis). 

Ford House built 1680

There was a story that Bonnie Prince Charlie had ridden through Pathhead before lodging for the night at Ford House - at the foot of the 'path' that led to Ford. the tiny hamlet associated with the ford over the river Tyne. 

Since 1831 the ford could be bypassed using the Lothian Bridge 

built by Thomas Telford, the prolific designer of roads and bridges who was dubbed The Colossus of Roads.

The rather prosaically named Pathhead village is surrounded by farms, estates, and hamlets with names that resonate with names that evoke the language, history (social and political) of Lowland Scots: 
Whippielaw, Dodridge, Salters Burn, Muttonhole, Haugh Head, Longhaugh, Crichton, Burnside, Tynebank, Turniedykes, Newlandrig, Chesterhill, Byersloan, Cranstoun Riddell, Fordel Dean, Cousland, The Temple, and further to the south, Fala and Soutra Hill. 

The big estates were owned by the nobility and gentry: The Earl of Stair (and his mother, Lady Elphinstone) at Oxenfoord Castle; Major Henry Callander at Preston Hall, his son Major Charles Callander at Preston Mains - the Callanders also owned Crichton estate to which the owners of property in Pathhead paid their feu duties;  and the son of the 'Bully Beef Baron' Thomas Borthwick, Lord Whitburgh at Whitburgh House. 

Many of the farmers were tenant farmers, well respected men - and in many ways the pillars of the community. During my late teenage years, the lairds started to remove these tenant farmers and replace them with managers. I recall the shock of learning that some of the finest of these were no longer to farm 'their' properties - and the sadness when one committed suicide.

In 1882-4, Frances Groome's Ordnance Gazetteer of Scotland describes Pathhead like this:

Pathhead, a village in the northern extremity of Crichton parish, Edinburghshire, on the right side of the river Tyne, in the eastern vicinity of the old decayed village of Ford, 5 miles ESE of Dalkeith, 37/8 N of Tynehead station, and 11 SE of Edinburgh. Standing 500 feet above sea-level on the slpe and crown of an ascent from the Tyne, it takes its name from being at the head of this ascent or path; extends along both sides of the road from Edinburgh to Lauder; and has charmingly picturesque environs, including parts of the Oxenfoord and Vogrie estates, but chiefly consisting of feus from the Crichton property... 

Until sold in 1919, the Vogrie estate was owned by the Dewar family, their name retained in the nearby hamlet of Dewartown. 

While Pathhead was/is not a pretty village it is surrounded by some beautiful farmland and estates with grand houses and landscaped grounds. Nearby is the historic Crichton Castle, at the head of the River Tyne. The castle was built in the late 14th century as a tower house and expanded into a full castle in the 15th century. The building to the right of the castle in the photo was either a chapel, a slaughter house or stables.

Queen Mary of Scots stayed in the castle for a few nights after a cousin's wedding. The artist JMW Turner painted the castle, and the castle also features in Marmion by Sir Walter Scott.

Nearby is the pre-Reformation Crichton Collegiate Church. Originally built in the shape of a cross, the sanctuary (head of the cross) was destroyed by ardent Reformers - see a part remains to the left of the tower. Built in 1449, it has been in continuous use as a place of worship for over 550 years. We used to walk from Pathhead to this church at least once a month. It was a lovely walk, even in winter if the weather was dry. 

I recall the church was always cold. I was fascinated by the beadle, Tommy Farmer, who 'disappeared' behind a curtain screen into a cupboard-like room where he hand-pumped a lever to provide air for the organ before returning to his place in a near-by pew where he slumped and appeared to sleep - but never missed rising in time to prep the organ for the next hymn or psalm. The organist for many years was Miss Inglis, a spiritualist who conducted seances in her cottage at the head of the village (Pathhead) and attempted to teach my sister the piano.

My boyhood homes

I've had many 'homes' - houses I've lived in and considered 'home' (or in the case of the first first 'homes' they were places that I lived although I have no recollection of them whatsoever). I was born in a top flat overlooking the river Teviot in Hawick in the Scottish Borders before moving for some months to a cottage at Cavers, just outside Hawick. 

Then, aged about 18 months, my family moved to central Africa where my father had been posted as a pharmacist in the British Colonial Service. There my home became first a colonial service bungalow at Livingstone not far from the Victoria Falls and then another in N'dola in what was then Northern Rhodesia. My father then joined the mining company Rio Tinto, working in hospitals set up by  his new employer on the Copper Belt . We relocated to a mining company bungalow in 'A' Avenue, Luanshya, home on the Roan Antelope Mine.

After three years my parents separated and I moved with mother, brother, and sister back to Scotland to my mother's 'home' city of Dundee where lived first with her mother, my formidable grandmother in city-centre Panmure Street

Overgate, Dundee 1950s

before moving close-by into a small flat in Dundee's Overgate. I started school in Dundee at Harris Academy, but by year's end my parents were reconciled and we moved back to Africa and into a house that I remember well, again a large mine company bungalow, 134, 'E' Avenue.

It was a large sprawling brick and tile house with red polished concrete floors - anything wood was subject to attack from termites. The front of the house had a long verandah, enclosed with a fine-mesh wire intended to keep mosquitoes out; it was out indoor play area - especially during the Wet Season. Each house door was 'guarded' by rough coir matting laid out across the doorway to prevent, or so it was claimed, snakes from slithering into the house. It was not entirely successful as I recall on at least one occasion a snake coiled in a corner of my bedroom, until dispatched by my father.

My best memories of 134E are associated with our 'house-boy,' Daason, a tall, strong, handsome 'native' servant, who was something of a second father to me. He played football with my brother and me on the large front lawn; he amused us with silly antics, clowning , 'dancing' with cloths tied to his feet while he polished the floors. He taught me and spoke to me in Swahili. he gave me rides on the back of his bicycle. Daason and my mother seemed to get along very well; she spent time trying to teach Daason to read and write and to tell the time by looking at the clock and there would be much laughter. Looking back now, I am sure that there was some flirting going on; but at the time, it was to me just fun.

My other memories of that home were having braaivleis (Africaans for 'grilled meat') - usually cooked on our small brick-built 'braai' (barbecue) or when larger groups gathered for a party - over long shallow trenches dug in the back yard filled with burning logs and covered by sections of wire. These were always enjoyable evenings - staying up well beyond the usual bedtime, playing in the shadows with friends, enjoying the chatter and laughter of the party atmosphere.

When my family moved back to the UK, my father was not keen to 'settle' and he stalled for time which meant we travelled widely while he took on what seemed a never ending number of two-week 'locums' - and we lived in a succession of guest-houses. Finally, he took a more permanent position as pharmacist manager of a Co-operative chemist shop in the East Lothian village of Ormiston - and our new 'home' was the house attached to the chemist shop. We were there for about six months before he bought a property on the main street of a nearby village, Pathhead in Midlothian about 12 miles south of Edinburgh on the A68, one of the main routes to England, and opened his own chemist shop with us living in the flat above the shop.

At last - after almost two years, we had a place to call 'home' - and it remained my home for the next twelve years.

First time back in Scotland

My first memory of Scotland was arriving at Tay Bridge Station on a steam train. 

Dundee Tay Bridge Station

It was 1950: I was five years old. I had travelled back to Britain on a Union Castle liner with my mother, brother and sister and we must have taken an overnight 'sleeper' from London, having arrived from South Africa at Tilbury Docks near the mouth of the Thames. Perhaps we changed at Waverley Station in Edinburgh - I can't remember.

We took the short journey in a taxi from the station to Panmure Street where my grandparents lived in the top floor apartment. 

Panmure Street near Albert Square, Dundee

I recall climbing the wide stone stairs up three or four flights to the top landing and being greeted at the door by my grandmother, Grannie Mem (short for Grandma Jemima). She struck me as very old, her face thin and drawn, her grey peppered hair pulled back tight in a bun; her lips tight, her eyes more critical than welcoming, her face pale but with strangely rouged cheeks. She was simply quite frightening - to my child's mind she was more like a witch than a grandmother.

I have no recollection of my grandfather being there. Perhaps he had been at the station to greet us and bring us back in the taxi. It's strange because he was very much a grandfatherly figure - not tall, but portly, always dressed in a brown tweed three-piece with a fob watch on a chain in his waistcoat pocket, white wispy hair around a bald crown, his face round and weather beaten, his smile quiet but jovial enough, and on him the sweet aromatic smell of pipe tobacco. 

We sat at a table in Grannie's large kitchen. The fact that everything was spoken of as 'Grannie's' - and the frequent absence of my grandfather (visiting his mother on her small holding in the country at Drumlithie in the Howe of the Mearns) - emphasised that she was very much the boss in this household. Grannie had prepared supper, and even before it was served I was apprehensive as there was a smell of something unfamiliar and unpleasant - a fishy smell. When plates were brought to the table and Grannie told us that she'd made some scrambled eggs, I couldn't believe my eyes. We had our own chickens in Africa and scrambled eggs had always had a rich yellow to almost orange colour and a crumbly appearance - but what Grannie served was a pale yellow and finely grained, like the smoothest blancmange- and it was the source of that horrid fishy smell!

I instantly earned my grandmother's hostility and my mother's fiercest rebuke, by saying, 'This isn't scrambled eggs!' My mother's response was to tell me not to be rude; to inform me that Grannie had made supper from powered egg as fresh eggs were scarce; and ordered me to eat it all up! My mother chastised me for my rudeness saying I was 'an ungrateful brat.' It wasn't the best of starts to our visit.

 Even before that disastrous and disgusting supper (I'm sure my younger sister was 'excused from table' without eating much, my mother explaining that the child - only three - was too tired to eat after the long journey), I knew that we were in a different world. When I went to the bathroom to wash hands before supper, I saw the strange toilet seat imbedded in a wooden box-like structure and on the door a plaque with a warning :

Not much of it made sense to a five-year-old, but I got the drift - there were rules in this house and it would pay to keep them! 

The King is dead!

Like the then Princess Elizabeth, I was in Africa on 6th February 1952 enjoying the great outdoors when King George VI died. The future Queen was in Kenya staying  at the famous Treetops safari lodge. I was in the grounds of the Luanshya Club (on the Copper Belt of Northern Rhodesia) in a 'tree top' of kinds -  playing with some other kids on some jacaranda trees. 

I don't recall us being particularly noisy, but no doubt we were, as children do, shouting out words of encouragement, challenge or claiming some bragging rights as to who had climbed highest as 'King of the Castle.' However, our game was abruptly interrupted when a woman - politeness being very much the order of the day, we would have said 'a lady' - in the then standard floral summer dress ran out to us and ordered us to be quiet.

King George VI

'Be quiet, children! No more shouting - and get out of the tree! The King is dead!'

There was instant quiet. We'd heard those awful words, 'The King is dead.' 

I recall a sense of shock. We knew who the king was and it was hard to believe that he could be dead. We all collected stamps in those days, and most stamps, particularly those steamed off envelopes and parcels from 'Home' seemed to bear the silhouette head of King George VI. 



And we knew the pomp and circumstance of kingship too from the Pathe newsreels at the Bioscope (as the Luanshya cinema was called). And at the end of each picture show we would stand and sing'God Save The King.'

The king was dead and it took some time in my young mind to realise that his daughter, Princess Elizabeth, was in fact no longer 'princess' but the new monarch, Queen Elizabeth. About two weeks later (the film reels would be sent out on Union Castle mail ships and then sent by rail from Capetown) we saw Queen Elizabeth for the first time as she descended from the BOAC airliner to be greeted by Prime Minister Sir Winston Churchill on the tarmac runway. The aged PM's appearance accentuating the youthful image of the new Queen.

However, despite the age-old tradition of 'The King is dead, long live the King (or in this case the queen)' it was difficult for me to think of anyone else as the King (or Queen) other than George VI - something was accentuated by the newsreel of his funeral at Windsor. It wasn't until the preparations for the coronation the following year that the Queen became The Queen. By that time, the insistence on her being called Queen Elizabeth the Second was offending our sense of Scottish identity and history (she was after all the first Queen Elizabeth of Scotland) - and as a family we followed with excitement the story of the 'stolen' Stone of Destiny from Westminster Abbey. For the first time,  I felt stirrings of Scottish nationalism.

Early Memories: First Friend Daniel Rosen

Daniel Rosen was my friend at Mrs Tucker's Kindergarten in Luanshya, Northern Rhodesia (Zambia) in 1949. I remember him as a kind and quiet lad, a bit shy - a small boy, a bit shorter than me, and wearing khaki shorts and shirt an a khaki pith helmet. He looked kind of cute.

We didn't know why but Mrs Tucker insisted on all children washing their hands after going to the toilet. My mother was also fastidious about cleanliness, so I'd been well drilled in hand-washing at home, so it was nothing new to me. Same for Daniel. I didn't know it then but coming from a Jewish household, the Rosen family probably stressed cleanliness even more than mine.

It may have been Daniel's undoing. Studies showed (later) that polio infection was transferred to taps and, despite children washing their hands, they touched the taps again to turn off the water - and picked up the infection.

Anyway, poor little Daniel was a victim of that pandemic that swept the world in 1948-49. I stood with my mother under some jacaranda trees outside what I suppose was the Luanshya synagogue during the funeral service for Daniel.

I had visited Daniel's grandfather's shop and ice-cream parlour with Daniel. His grandfather was

known as Pop Rosen and he always remembered me as 'Danny's friend.' Pop Rosen's shop was in or near the Boma (market) and whenever I visited his shop (it could be the one in the picture as it was a corner shop), usually to buy a comic, Pop Rosen would give me an ice-cream or some other treat.

There was still - despite the revelations about the Nazi concentration camps - a considerable amount of anti-Semitic 'talk' in the those post-war years. Sadly, 'dirty Jew' was a phrase I heard from time to time along with the derogatory use of 'Jew boy' to describe grown men. I couldn't understand it. I had no idea what being a Jew meant, but I knew that Daniel and Pop Rosen were Jews - and that personal experience made me react against the residual but ingrained anti-Semitism that still marked society during my childhood.

I was to learn much more about other prejudices throughout my boyhood and then later, as an adult, see governments pass legislation against such prejudices - and often injustices. I have also learned what are possible causes of such prejudice - and I have experienced the reverse-side of this phenomenon in what we call political correctness (and more of that in later blogs). I was brought up in a Christian home, and for much of my life followed Christian beliefs. Inevitably I think, and thankfully, through study of religion and history, I have moved one - and so have some parts of the wider Christian church, but I still feel ashamed in a way that the religion I followed for so many years was at least partly responsible for racism, bigotry against women and gays, and above all for anti-Semitism.

Burnie Chuckies... memories like pebbles in a stream

I have returned to Britain after many years overseas, in Australia. As a Scot by birth and heritage, I would have moved back to Scotland, but family considerations - the reason for returning from Australia - mean that I live in England, in the Cotswolds, within easy travel of London where my family live and work. to be honest, having lived for almost four decades in the warmer parts of Australia, the cold and wet of Scotland would be hard to take. The area I live in is beautiful, with wonderful walks, and full of history - and so fulfils two of my passions. I'll possibly use this site to comment of life as I find it now and to reflect on my life through memories of time gone-by.

Hence, the name I use: 'burniechuckies' - chuckies or chuckie-stanes being Scots for pebbles or small stones and burnie, a burn or of a burn, a stream. The stream is life and the pebbles, memories. Just as a stream polishes the pebbles and stones within it, so the stream of life polishes our memories. Pebbles in a stream or burniechuckies appear stable, but are often rolled by the water currents, especially in times of spate, but can also be disturbed by other events, including animal, human, or mechanical traffic. River stones can also be coated or covered by water weeds and algae.

Thus memories are not always, if ever, perfect recollections - they are affected by the passage of time, by life events, by circumstance: they can be - and often are - embellished or edited, more often than not subconsciously. Perhaps, because a story has been retold so many times, with some fanciful management to make it 'more interesting, funny, appealing...' the tale becomes 'true' to the teller. The memories that I relate will hopefully be true, if not always the whole truth and nothing but the truth. I may 'have to' change names and other details to protect the innocent, but more likely to protect the guilty, including me. In other instances, names will not necessarily be the correct ones because, frankly my dears, it's not just that I don't give a damn, it is just that I can't recall the names although I remember other aspects very well (or at least I think I do!).

So, that's it - pebbles from the stream or, in the lingo of my youth, burnie chuckies

Racist attitudes in central Africa during 1940's and 1950's

In my last post I mentioned the anti-Semitism I heard during my boyhood in central Africa (and indeed later when I returned to Britain). Much more prevalent in Rhodesia in the late 1940's and 1950's was racism.

I don't know how racist or anti-racism my parents were, but I know that they respected our African servants by calling them by their African names - and treated them (almost) as equals. I remember very well how my mother would sit with us at the table with our house servant (known in those days by all as a 'house-boy' despite the fact that he was a married man in his late thirties), Daasan, and talk about the Kenyan Mau-Mau (the terrorist/freedom fighters led by Jomo Kenyatta, who would later become first President of an independent Kenya).

Daasan claimed to be a great supporter of the Mau-Mau, saying that one day the whites would be driven out of Rhodesia or slaughtered if they stayed. When my mother asked if he could kill her children, Daasan answered with a big grin, and a grim sense of humour, 'Oh no, donna (lady), I could not kill any of you! No, I will go next door and kill them, and the house-boy next door will come in and kill you!' We all laughed.

Also, I recall my parents deploring the way some of their friends and acquaintances called their servants with demeaning names like 'Ticky' (threepence) or 'Sou-Sou' (sixpence); and in one case 'Sixpence' for their 'house-boy' and 'Poison' for their cook!

Despite their more liberal approach, I don't think my parents questioned the very real segregation that existed in Luanshya. The Europeans lived in rather grand style in detached brick bungalows with large yards (maintained by black 'garden boys') in tree-lined streets. The 'blacks' lived in segregated African townships, apart from house servants who lived in a picinin kai-ah (little house - usually a single room dwelling) at the far end of a 'European' back-yard. There was a hospital for 'Europeans' and an 'African' hospital. (My father, a pharmacist, worked at both - and preferred the African hospital.)

I think my parents were well aware that 'colonial' Africa was coming to an end and accepted that the day was not far away when black Africans would gain their independence. Their views were also possibly moderated by the fact that we, as a family, attended a church sponsored by the Church of Scotland (Presbyterian) and the leading voice calling for an open franchise was Kenneth Kaunda, a 'mission boy,' i.e., he'd been educated at a Church of Scotland sponsored mission (hence his Scottish pre-name, Kenneth).