When I was five it was time for school. On the first day, not knowing how to ask to be let out for the lavatory, I wet my knickers. I was seated in the back row and the floor had a slight slope and so it ran down the floor. The shame has always remained with me. It was cold in the winter and I was always late running like the wind, hands tucked into the sleeves of my coat. How I envied anyone with a muff. This was a piece of fur sewn into a tube and a cord which one hung round one's neck. You slipped your hands into each end. On one occasion there was a concert and I recited a poem about a little piggie.

At the side of the house the stack of peats stood, shaped like a rectangular pyramid. It provided a place to put the odd bits of broken china with which we played hoosies. The odd pieces of broken cups and plate were tastefully arranged on our dresser.

Cutting the peats was a most enjoyable time for us. We ran wild among the heather chasing butterflies and looking for small lizards. We helped to stand 4 or 5 peats in a stook to dry after the heavy black turf which was cut by a special spade and turned over in rows by the side of the cut edge. Later when the small stooks were dried, they wee built into the peat stack and later in the summer taken by horse and cart to be built again beside the house. This was your fuel for the winter. In one year a wood which was circular in shape and planted with pine trees in the middle of the moss (which was the area where peats were cut) was cut down leaving a fringe of trees around it. The scent of the cut pines was unforgettable and we watched the cut trees being load and taken away. Because the area was cleared of trees the raspberries flourished,big and sweet;, we ate our fill. The sun always seemed to shine in the moss and we ate our sandwiches and drank cold tea from a bottle in the hot days, while grandfather and a neighbour cut the peat , and mother helped. Our especial treat was to ride in the cart taking the peats home.

Jenny in Balintore 1920-37

When I was six, Mother took me to Grannie’s house in Balintore, no 3 Park Street where I was to stay. When we arrived Auntie Teenie gave me a piece with blackcurrant jam and I ran outside through the vennel or path between no 3 and no 4 gardens, over the banks to the shore. It was beautiful, the banks covered with bent, the spiky grass which grew on the sand dunes , the space, the big bay. Thus began a love affair with that place which lasted always.

Life was very different in the Highlands to that of the farming and cottar folk of Aberdeenshire.The Aberdeenshire people whom I met were usually associated with the land, either working for farmers and moving on to other farms in May or November , or the owners of small farms themselves. But in the village where I now lived, the church or kirk was the focal point of the community. Every morning and evening, the ritual was the taking of the “books”. When we rose in the morning the family who lived or stayed there overnight gathered round the fire after breakfast with our bibles. The chairs were hard uprights round the living room table, but I had a small stool with a diamond shaped hole cu in the seat. Uncle Davie, my father’s older unmarried brother, who lived with Grannie took the books in Gaelic. First a reading from the Bible , also in Gaelic which I never mastered, then a psalm was sung, followed by a prayer, and for this we knelt on the rug by our chairs and me by my stool. As this was a foreign tongue to me, I collected spit in my mouth and tried to aim it through the diamond hole on to the floor. Although I never understood more than a few words, the soft lilt of the spoken words were soothing and embracing. This ritual was repeated before retiring to bed.

On Wednesdays there was the prayer meeting attended by the adults, where prayers wee said, Bible read and psalms sung. The men dressed in navy blue suits and the women invariably in black. Most of them were widows from World War I. This prayer meeting was held in the church hall in Park Street at the end of the houses and had a wall around it. On Sundays the morning services wee held in Chapelhill church about 3 miles from the villages and when I was young we walked there and back. First there was a Gaelic service at 11 a.m., but the biggest congregation arrived for the 1 p.m. service. The church and manse stood by the roadside and we greeted each other as we entered the church, putting our offering in the plate by the door- mine was a penny. As a young girl , I found the services very long and dull so I spent most of my time composing the adventures which befell my heroine called Rosa Martin.

After the service we stepped out smartly for home as Sunday dinner was the highlight of the week. First he grace was said and then the big pan of broth with the vegetables from the garden and a big hunk of Johnstone’s beef. He was the local butcher and kept the very best of meat. The broth consumed, we had beef, tatties and veg either carrots, turnips, cabbage or parsnips, cauliflower in season though it was years before I grew to like cauliflower. We had the meat and veg in our soup plates. After this there was tinned pears or peaches and creamola, a type of thick custard.

Sometimes instead of beef , we would have mutton broth. This was very fatty but gave a good flavour to the broth. I ate it with relish and then ran to the garden and sicked up the fat..

On Saturday nights the vegetables were diced and the potatoes scrubbed and left in their jackets. The preparation for dinner was never done on Sunday - that was the Lord’s day.

As the church in Chapelhill was about 3 miles from the villages, part of the congregation came from the surrounding countryside in Nigg parish. Most of these people worked on farms and there was a slight social gap. In the villages of Balintore and Shandwick which comprised the rest of the congregation, we were classed as fisherfolk and were a bit superior about it. As the years passed this disappeared.

Shandwick , the smallest of the three villages had no men at the fishing at that time. There were a few boats went out from the harbour at Balintore and in Park Street where our house was, a street of 12 or 13 houses, standing alone between Balintore and Shandwick, there was a coble with sails. The crew was Uncle Davie, John Ross and another man. They went line fishing sailing in the small boat about 3 miles into the Moray Firth for haddock, whiting and cod.

Fishing in these small boats was sometimes dangerous especially when the wind was strong . I used to go with Grannie down on the banks (sand dunes) and watch while the boats battled their way home, sails almost in the sea. The bad part was the harbour entrance and I once saw a boat being caught by the wind and dashed on the rocks and the crew drowned.

Uncle Davie and Cuppie as we called John Ross who lived at no. 9 baited the line with limpets, sand eels (sunnels) and lug. The limpets were found on the rocks but mostly they took the boat over to Carn-nachron(?) which was a rocky bay and yielded lots of limpets and mussels. The sunnels were scraped up from the beach when the tide went out in Shandwick Bay. Uncle Andrew helped when he was at home and himself and Uncle Davie were very adept at catching those little fish. They used a special scraper, scoring the sand in a curve and the sunnels jumped and we pounced on them. we did this in the warm summer evenings. the lug was also got from the sand with a long handled spade-like thing called a caip. They knew where to dig as the lug have a hole and inches away the worm casts of sand. Uncle Andrew was particularly clever at it and used to bring the worm up in the air wriggling from the end of his caip.

Then came the baiting of the line. Grannie and Auntie Teenie did this most times. The line was redded from the basket or creel where it had been put when the fish was removed. I never saw the line with the fish on as they were taken off at the harbour and sold. Always a few were taken home for a meal. The line was very long and about every six inches there were short lengths on which the hooks were fixed. When the line was baited for sea, the creel had a layer of bent at one end, then the bait was fixed to the hook and laid at the left hand side and the next one spaced an inch or so on till the end of the row. This was covered over with grass and the process started again until all the hooks were baited. The line itself was allowed to drop into the bottom of the creel. These creels were made of cane and were carried on the back by a piece of wide webbing.

Most of the year the lines were baited in the living room but in the summer it was done in the garden where they sat on a seat by the shed and were sheltered .Grannie and Auntie Teenie wore rubber aprons while doing this. Uncle Davie repaired the line. The short lengths with the hooks were usually of white thread and were twirled 2 or 3 strands and the hook was bound to this with horse hair.

At that time there lived in our house Granny, Uncle Davie and me and old Nan. She was crippled and was the sister of Babba (grandfather) who died from a cold which turned to pneumonia after he attended my father’s funeral in Aberdeen. Old Nan had never married and she slept in the closet which led off the living room. She sat in a chair in the corner near the fire and spoke only Gaelic. I didn’t speak the Gaelic and I don’t think she knew who I was, because every time I passed her chair she took a swipe at my legs. She was over 90 and when she died I was 10 (I think) and was over in no. 9 (Cuppie’s house). I danced for joy singing “Old Nan’s dead”. Grannie never took any of old Nan’s pension of 10/- a week, and when she died there should have bea good sum of money, but there wasn’t. Old Nan used to sit on the banks by the sea, and it was thought she hid it in a hole. There were ‘bunkers’ dug out on the banks from the first world war. Rumour had it that W.M. had found money in the banks , but it was only rumour.

When Nan died , Uncle John who was the youngest of Grannie’s family , moved into the closet. He had one leg shorter than the other and wore a surgical boot to even his stance. He had developed TB in his knee as a baby and his leg was rigid. TB was very common and he had contracted it from the milk he had as a baby. It was not known then to boil all milk as cows often had TB. He had served his time as a tailor and was working in Aberdeen and in digs with my family when my father died. He had a treadle sewing machine and once made a navy blue nap cloth coat with a red flannel lining for me. It was warm but I envied the other girls with their satin linings.

On wash days the fire was lit in the shed in the garden under a large boiler. Water was fetched from the Pumpie which was an iron pipe between Shandwick and Park. This water must have come from a spring higher up the bank which was behind Park and Shandwick. This pump supplied all the water for Park and Shandwick and was carried home mostly by the men in 2 pails with a grid separating them and where you walked clasping the handles of the pails. Wash day was an all day affair. We had a very old mangle with wooden rollers and turned a handle to roll out the clothes. It was very efficient and did the blankets and heavy clothes with ease. Blankets and covers were washed once a year by stamping them in a tub of soapy suds made from cut up soap and water. The pillows also were washed, the feathers (chicken) taken out and washed and the ticking also. Our beds were heavy cotton filled with chaff and every year or so this would be emptied out, the bag washed and new chaff put in. These beds were lovely and soft and no-one had heard of allergies.

We had a fairly large garden and a path ran down the middle of it lined with box wood. The uncles grew all the veg. needed for the house, and on a Saturday some of the neighbours came and asked for veg for Sunday’s broth. They were always given it but I said “Why don’t they grow their own?”, but Uncle Davie or Andrew just said “we have plenty”. They also grew lots of flowers: roses, sweet peas, honeysuckle, gentians, nasturtiums and lots more. There were blackcurrant bushes and gooseberries and rhubarb,as well as a few apple trees. We would gather seaweed to put on the garden in the autumn and bracken with which we covered the pit where the potatoes were stored to keep the frost out.

We loved to go for the bracken. It was russet and decaying then and we were given a small scythe to cut it. The bank above Balintore was covered in bracken and we tied it up in bundles with rope and slung this over our shoulders.

Our house, no . 3, had three windows to the front and a door. We entered from the street to the passage where the stair rose to the rooms upstairs. In the recess under the stairs the pails of water were kept and there were shelves made of slate where the meat and other perishables were kept. One door to the right of this passage led to the living room, from which opened the closet. At the other end of the passage a room opened to the back of the house and further along another room which was ‘best’ and visitors were shown in there. Upstairs were two landings with cupboards. The room over the kitchen was Grannie’s, and mine was at the far end. In the middle was Uncle Davie’s.

Uncle Andrew had married Ethelredda Adams whom he met when working at the Invergordon docks after the war. She was Welsh but lived in England. Then he had heart trouble and they came to live in no. 3 in the best room and the adjoining one. Their family grew to 5 and they eventually took over most of the house, built a kitchen at the back and bathroom and put in a door to the street.

In the summer when it was daylight till midnight, we never went to bed until darkness fell and that was only twilight. We played games and searched the rocks and pools for dulce and wilks (winkles). These we boiled in an old can over a fire on the banks. The beach was ours entirely and we were in and out of the water all day long. On the beach half way between the east and west rocks was a spring of fresh water. Sometimes the high spring tides washed away the sand and there was a gravel bed. Then the big rock stood clear of sand but at other times the sand was washed back and the big rock was almost covered. There were lovely small shells at the water’s edge and when he seas were rough in Autumn the tangle was washed on the beach. we chose a nice fat head and ate this. It was lovely. Jellyfish came in at certain times and there would be thousands stranded on the sand. These were firm and round with purple bluish markings and we played with them, but the others, big obscene with long tentacles, yellowish and brown, these we knew would sting so we hacked them to pieces. Uncle Dave when pulling in the lines had very sore hands due to the poison in the water from these jellyfish.

We used to set a line when the tide went out between two stones, a scauntac , probably a Gaelic word. We baited it and then when the tide went out again, rushed down to see if there was a catch. Most often we got flounders which we gutted and had fried for tea.

We always had plenty of fish at that time, a big ashet of boiled haddock and potatoes , or fried. There was also cod and whiting, but these seemed insipid after haddock. We also had a shed or bo'an where the haddies were smoked. Grannie used to say they went up the Hill of Nigg to collect fir cones for the smoking but I can’t remember what we used and where it came from. Grannie was in her seventies at that time and she used to tell how she and the other women used to carry their men folk to the boats so that they started out dry. This was before the harbour was built. At this time herring was plentiful and we would have a big basin full for 6 D (pence). They were lovely coated in oatmeal and fried. But in the winter there was salt herring and tatties for dinner. We had a barrel with herring salted down but I never liked these and longed for the fresh ones. Grannie in her young days used to go out with her creel and sell smoked haddies to the country folk. She would have to walk back , though later there was a bus which ran from Portmahomack to Balintore, Fearn and Tain. She told me how she walked to Ardjachie Farm, 2 miles out of Tain with Aunty Bell when she went into service after leaving school.

Near the harbour on the roadside going toward Park, there was a curing shed for processing herring, but I never saw this in use and it stood derelict for years . It was a long building and must have dominated the village, but it was eventually pulled down, and the stones used for houses. On the other side of the road halfway between Park and Balintore there was a hollow. The bent grew in the sand and this was all part of common land. we ran like fury past this place. No one knew why it was ‘haunted’ but ‘they’ said so, and we believed them. Many years later the council decided to build houses on this land and when excavating found several stone sarcophagi. It had been a burial ground thousands of years ago (?).

Behind Park Street there was a piece of flat land and the boys played football there.

Then the ground rose about 100 ft to form what is called a raised beach. Across this area was a path which connected to a narrow road called the ‘Broken Roadie’ and this joined up with the road which ran along to Nigg , Cadboll and Balmuchie. This pathway was much used by men on bicycles and horse and carts going to and from Shandwick.

Park Street had 12 or 14 houses, some were half houses. When I was young,every house, except 2, was occupied by relatives. No. 1 was Laiky (Alexander) cousin of my father’s.

No 2 was Kirsty and her unmarried son, Sandy Vass. No 3 was our house. No. 4 belonged to Johnna and Davan Vass. I think their mother was awhen I went to live in the village. They had a sister Macka who had two boys and they stayed there at times. They were younger than me. (This probably refers to John and David the sons of Margaret Vass, the grandfather’s sister, and their sister Margaret.)

No. 5 was Auntie Kirsty and Bobba. They were also Vass . I think she was a sister of my grandfather. They had 3 daughters? sons? , Christina who married John Ross (Cuppie) of no. 9. Katie married Hugh (Huge) Vass , and Bella married his brother and lived in Shandwick.

No 6 was Katie Main from Nairn or that area and she married a Vass from Balintore. She had a son called Willie who later took his natural father’s name of MacIntosh and his brothers were Andrew, Roddy and Johnnie.

No. 9 was John and Teenie Ross (She was my father’s first cousin). They were my adopted family. They had Georgie, Jessie, John, Chrissie and David. Uncle John Cuppie used to say, when I went in, “Jenny’s Clark” and if at mealtimes there was a big pan of tatties on the table, he would say “Here’s a tattie laughing at you”. This would be a potato which had burst its skin. He would ask me to sit down and eat, but I always stood by the window clutching the hot tattie in my hand, too shy. I adored David.

In No. 10 lived a Mrs MacKintosh. She was the odd one out. She had a son called Andrew William whom I disliked as he said vulgar words. They kept a cow which was housed at the foot of their garden.

No. 11 had a cousin Kate Dawney, a Ross, living there who left and married a factor in Gloucestershire. she had a son Craig Ross.

No. 12 was Grannie’s brother Thomas. he lived in a but and ben with earth floors. He was very old and lay in his high bed and told stories. He was reputed to be a bone-setter. His daughter Shonie (Jessie) lived with him , and her family: Jessie, Bill ,Tommie and Katie. They were Merrick to name , and Jock? Merrick drank. The floor of the but and ben was earth and it had clootie rugs and sacks on the floor. They seemed very poor.

The road ran between the houses in Park Street. Originally the road was to be built at the foot of the gardens, but the owner of no. 7 had a tree which he prized and he objected to it being cut down for the road.

Grannie had 7 children.: David, Alex (my father), Christina (Teenie), Margaret, Andrew, Bella and John the youngest. I didn’t know my grandfather who died of pneumonia from a cold caught at my father’s funeral in Aberdeen. Grannie’s mother was Margaret (Peggy) Bannerman and we heard how she walked from the croft in the Strath of Kildonan to Helmsdale to marry my great -grandfather who had a fishing boat which fished as far as Iceland. Peggy Bannerman was said to be a very pretty girl , but she would have been a stranger, a foreigner in Balintore, which was a very closed community. Years later my niece Margaret had a quarrel with a Shandwick girl Irene, Daisy’s and Jessie Picka’s granddaughter when they were children. This same Jessie Picka intervened and said “None of your Peggy Bannerman nonsense here.” She herself must have been a child when Peggy Bannerman was alive. they have long memories in remote areas.

Grannie’s family : she was Isabella Vass and she married David Vass. She advised her own family never to marry in the village as there was so much inbreeding., and she told me the same. Her family mostly took her advice. David did not marry. Alex my father married Jean Masson from Aberdeenshire. Andrew married Ethelredda Adams from Wales. Teenie married Andrew Ross from Shandwick (Johndans) and they had a son Andrew my age who never married. Maggie married Dan Mitchell from Rockfield. they were courting but Grannie wouldn’t agree to them getting married as Maggie was only 19. (Grannie herself had married at 29). Dan went off ton America and years later came back and married Maggie. I must have been 12. Dan used to write Maggie , and Andrew Ross and I would sing , “Duncan Grey came here to woo” and Maggie would chase us. They lived at No. 17 Rockfield village but had no family. Bell married William Gorman (Irish?). He was a shipwright with the navy and they met when his ship the Repulse? was in Invergordon and she worked in the canteen. He was over 6 ft and handsome. They had three children : Mary, David and Christine, and lived in Rosyth.

John married Alice Graham from Rosyth and had a boy David and girl Lesley. Alice died a few years later from cancer, and he eventually married Jessie.

A favourite outing was a visit to Maggie and Dan in Rockfield. Teenie took us by bus going to Portmahomack. We came off at the memorial to servicemen killed in the First World War, and then walked a mile or so past Bankhead Farm to the top of the brae and down the cliffside road to the village. There were probably 20 houses then and most of the people were called Mitchell and were related. It was a lovely village sheltered by the cliff from the winds, except the easterly which on a high tide, the sea could be swept over the wall and reach the houses. One year there was a tremendous lot of seaweed swept up and when it rotted the smell was awful and the iodine or whatever was so strong, all the paint was stripped from the wood of the houses. The village was so isolated that when we walked along the street, you could see the curtains move and eyes looking at you all the way. We were unkind in those days and said they were the “missing link”. The sheds in front of the houses were usually half boats upended.

Maggie always made us very welcome. There was a feast on the table of cakes and biscuits from the van which called once or twice a week . we had soup and meat boiled in the soup with cabbage or cauliflower from Dan's garden and usually a jelly separated in three layers made from eggs, milk and gelatine, with tinned pears or peaches. Maggie did us proud, but I think she was lonely and never quite fitted into the village.