Harkness – MacGillivray Stories

I have so many childhood memories camping in the countryside. We have already discussed some of them in the previous post Picnics and Camping Trips. In this post, I’ll talk about my parents’ love for heathers as well as Stuart and my love for car spotting.

Camping trips and heathers

I reach into the Magical Memory Box again and take out a photo of us camping at a place my father found at the side of the road along the route to Carlisle. My father’s car, a Wolseley 12, is parked next to my Uncle Gavin’s car, and surrounded by three army surplus tents.

I also remember a camping trip where we had stopped at a shop to buy some more food for the trip. My mother had given me a few pennies to buy a cheap toy at a shop; I bought a small plastic bag of four or five miniature plastic ships in different bright colours (probably made in Hong Kong). These gave me and my brother Alistair endless fun racing the ships against each other in a nearby stream! Our mind’s eye didn’t see little plastic ships struggling downstream, their progress impeded by hindrances such as twigs and leaves, but enormous ships braving a stormy ocean! Cheap thrills! 

My mother had a romantic view of Scottish ‘nature’,  whereas my father tended to take a ‘practical’ view of ‘nature’. Thus, he regarded anything that wasn’t ‘nailed down’ as something that was ‘free’. So he would often uproot shrubs and saplings, so he could re-plant them in our garden at home. This wasn’t always wholly successful, as it is not easy to replant something in a different type of soil.

Whenever we were on car trips driving north towards Scotland, my mother would always make exultations regarding the beauty of the Scottish countryside (as opposed to the milkish English countryside). As soon as we drove into the hills of Scotland she would say something like, “Sic bonny purple hills, th’ bonnie purple heather is sae bonny.”  

But heather had many uses apart from the purely aesthetic. As mentioned, there were no so-called ‘camping stores’ as such in the 1950s. So what did you use as a camping bed? Of course, at this time there were so-called army camping beds, but these would take up too much space in the limited space of my father’s Wolseley 12.

Thus, heather would provide us with camping beds instead of the camping beds and air mattresses available in today’s camping stores. So, we would be employed to rip up heather around the ‘camping site’ (as if we were shepherds living in the hills). In retrospect, heather beds were perhaps far more comfortable than camping beds and air mattresses. 

As a trophy, he would uproot some heather and fasten it to the enormous chrome radiator of the Wolseley 12. This was to show ‘Englanders’ that we had been to Scotland – or at least the Lake District or hilly areas in the North. As a child, my mother had imprinted in my mind that heather and thistles were ‘Scottish’, so I was quite surprised when I later found heather in non-hilly areas in South England!

Car spotting and train spotting

You could buy special books for train spotting; but me and my brothers also did ‘car spotting’. So I remember on this camping trip wherein Stuart, my elder brother, and I, spent time noting down the registration numbers of the cars that passed by. He had a large and impressive red sketch book, while I had a little notebook and pencil. Of course, this isn’t something you could do nowadays, but back then there weren’t that many cars, so it was almost like some kind of event each time a car came along!

It was even more exciting on the rare occasions when a foreign car came along with strange-looking number plates; these cars had oval stickers denoting their nationality. This is also something I vividly remember because two men campers had turned up at our makeshift campsite driving a car with an FR sticker. In fact, this was the weirdest car I had ever seen in my life – a veritable tin snail! – which I later found out was called a Citroen 2CV.

Another reason I particularly remember this was that I had found an impressive looking gold wrist watch with a brown leather strap in the grass. As there were no other campers on the ‘site’, and I had found the watch near their car, I asked one of the men if the watch was his; you can imagine he was more than delighted to get his watch back!

In other words, we were never short of things to do on these trips and were quite clever at ‘amusing ourselves’.

Camping mates

Who went on the camping trips? Well the whole family obviously, including Laddie our dog who would have to sit in the backseat footwell of the car. We also tried to take Poppy our cat with us on one occasion by placing her on the parcel shelf under the rear window; but we only tried this once, as she didn’t like it – she vomited and meowed, and then started jumping around inside the car like a mad little lady! 

But apart from the family who else went with you on picnics, day-trips, weekend trips and short holidays? Sometimes aunts and uncles or friends of my parents would join us on trips.