The past is a foreign country

Nostalgia is what it used to be

As my body hurtles inexorably into the future, with all that entails, my mind plunges uncontrollably back into the past. Specifically, to my upbringing in rural North East Scotland. I was brought up in and around Aberdeenshire. The part I recall best was in Kincardineshire (or the Mearns) but that no longer exists, having been subsumed into Aberdeenshire in 1983. I spent all but my final year of school in Banchory on Royal Deeside in the 1960s and early 1970s. In those days it was a village in terms of population (around 2000) and strictly remains a village having a current population of only 7400. However, it had a large, long footprint along the banks of the River Dee by virtue of the many rich landowners and industry barons who lived there in properties which were essentially stately homes with grounds to match. Thus, the Salvesens of the Christian Salvesen shipping company had property there as did Thomson of DC Thomson, the newspaper magnate family. There were many with double-barrelled names and minor titles who lived lives that those of us outside the high walls of their houses could only imagine. None of the children attended the local schools.

Unavoidably I am painting a ‘rich man in his castle’ with the ‘poor man at his gate’ scene here, but it is not with any sense of anger. The point of my reflection is that these seemed like much happier and simpler days than we live in now and they were days highlighted by indelible memories. Memories so unimaginable now that the past seems not only better but also a completely different place. Therefore, in no particular order, I look back on a patchwork of memories which pleasantly haunt me.

Onion Johnnies

I lived on the main road near the Aberdeen end of the village and was in prime position to see who was arriving from the big city. One of the regular visitors was Onion Johnny. This was a rather picaresque looking man wearing a beret and on a bicycle who pedalled very slowly into the village, weighed down as he was by large bunches of onions. These were carried around his shoulders, over his handlebars and over the mudguards of the bicycle. I saw the same man several times over the years and had no idea to whom he sold his onions or how far along Deeside he went. I guess he had cycled the 19 miles from Aberdeen having stopped off in some of the villages and hamlets along the way and then I suppose he simply carried on up to Braemar. I only ever saw him going in one direction, up Deeside, but at some point, he must have come back, perhaps without his onions. We had an inbred suspicion of outsiders and he never seemed like the most approachable chap. I now realise that Onion Johnnies were quite a common sight in those days. They were poor Breton farmers who came to the United Kingdom in summer and stayed until winter travelling around selling onions and garlic. Onion Johnnies were first recorded in Victorian times and continued across the country until the 1980s. A few still work but only in major conurbations. I think they have dispensed with their bicycles.

Sikh salesmen

The Onion Johnny posed no threat. He merely pedalled past, bothering nobody and leaving a faint whiff of onions in his wake. But there was a class of regular visitor to our village which put fear into the hearts of housewives and caused us children, if one was sighted, to run back to our houses to issue loud and breathless warnings. These were the Sikh door-to-door salesmen. Our house was opposite a bus stop, and we could see one as soon as he stepped off the bus with his suitcase of wares to do the rounds of the local houses. In truth, these were magnificent specimens. Tall dark-skinned men with large beards and brightly coloured turbans on their heads wearing smart suits. I have no idea how they made a living as the attitude towards them was outright hostility. Children were told by their mothers to go and warn other mothers in the street and my own mother prided herself on never buying anything. Even as a child I could not understand why she bothered to answer the door only to confront them and tell them to go away. They had the trick once the door was opened of inserting a foot inside to prevent it from closing. I well recall comical scenes with my mother shouldering the door closed while the gentleman on the other side pushed back, all the while politely trying to convince her in a strange accent, that she really did need some of what he was selling. As a child I was simply curious to see what they were selling; if I encountered one of them on the street, they were invariably polite. Their courage in arriving unannounced and, largely, unwanted in a village in rural Aberdeenshire is hard to grasp but they persevered, and many cities have well established and completely assimilated Sikh communities. I next encountered them as a student in Edinburgh where they were a prominent and unmistakable group of drivers on the city buses. They still wore turbans in those days but spoke with broad Edinburgh accents.

The only gays in the village

Sex, in the sense that Philip Larkin referred to it, had only just been invented and homosexuality did not exist. I only found out decades later when meeting an old school friend that my long-suffering piano teacher of six years, a single man who lived with a landlady, had been a homosexual (I don’t think the word ‘gay’ was uttered in those days). Looking back, this elegant immaculately dressed pipe-smoking gentleman, also a teacher at my school, with his pencil moustache may well have been gay. Nobody knew and nobody cared. Another character, latterly a  minor celebrity on Grampian Television, was—on reflection—clearly gay. He paraded the streets, colourfully dressed, in his mincing walk and spoke to absolutely everyone he met. ‘Effeminate’ was the word that people used to describe him. He lived above the shop my father managed so I saw him regularly. Again, people may have known about his sexuality but again, nobody cared. More outré, however, was the local lesbian. All the hallmarks were there: single, short-cropped hair and her private car registration plate prefixed with ‘LES’. I think a few of us might have suspected, especially as we got older. Again, nobody cared.

The Jewish tailor

A few doors away from my father’s shop there was a tailor. He was a garrulous and pleasant man who sat cross-legged on a raised dais at the rear of his shop surrounded by reams of cloth, with needles in his mouth and threads of all colours hanging around him. Perhaps there was nothing exceptional about the tailor except his name ‘Mannie’. He was clearly Jewish although that was never mentioned. It never struck me at the time and only occurred to me many years later. Running into Mannie in the street on his way to and from his shop, even as small boy, was to end up in a long conversation about how you were, how was school and how was the family. It takes a village to bring up a child and Mannie was one of the people I remember bringing me up. Mannie ran his shop with his sister with whom he also shared a house. With my parents and I spent many happy evenings there. Mannie’s house was a regular venue on New Year’s Eve and his hospitality was generous.

Prisoners of war

My father was a Second World War veteran. While he survived the war unscathed, including time in the Far East, many of his contemporaries did not. There were several men who had been Japanese prisoners of war. Mostly they did not speak about it, but one was a shopkeeper, and his trauma would occasionally come to the fore when, on the rare occasions a Japanese tourist would enter his shop, he would throw them out. News travelled fast in the village, everyone would be speaking about it and the shopkeeper was all but impossible to speak to in the aftermath until his feelings subsided. Even at the time I would feel sorry for these innocent and invariably polite people being treated in this way. But the trauma which men like our shopkeeper had suffered was unimaginable. Clearly scarred by their experience and probably having flashbacks until the day they died, these men came back from war, resumed their careers and businesses and did not inflict their suffering on the rest of the people around them.

The train

We also lived opposite the local station which, given how Banchory was surrounded by so many other villages, was quite large and formed a goods distribution point. The station was very busy, and I used to see the commuters, who worked in Aberdeen, going off in the morning and returning at night. The trips I made to Aberdeen were sometimes made on steam trains, although most were being replaced by diesel. Thanks to Mr Beeching and his drastic rail cuts, Banchory railway station closed in 1966. I just happened to be on the bridge out of the station when the last train passed up to Ballater at the end of the line and it was a steam train. It went under the bridge, and I was engulfed in smoke. By the time I crossed over to see the train go up the line and the smoke cleared, and the train was gone.

Cold and frosty mornings

It wasn’t all fun and games. My father ran a shop, and we lived in the days of paraffin heaters which meant he sold this evil potion. While barely heating your home, it caused rivulets of condensation to run down the gloss painted walls which adorned most kitchens. Worse still, I had to help at the shop which meant cycling there in the mornings before school to fill dozens of metal gallon paraffin containers from a thousand-gallon tank behind the shop. Until you have had your hands covered in paraffin in sub-zero conditions sapping the heat from your fingers and tried to re-cap a metal container with a wonky stopper, you have not experienced misery. Worse still, the smell of paraffin is indelible, and you had barely got rid of it from your hands before it was time to get up and do it all again.

Other memories flood back but I will spare the reader and my reputation. After all, collecting Robertsons’ Gollies, pinging girls’ bras and stealing apples are no longer the stuff of legends.