Harkness – MacGillivray Stories

Apart from trips and holidays, I also have a couple of childhood memories that occasionally play in my head like episodes — perhaps of a sitcom, sometimes of horror movies. This story in particular is the sort of memory your stomach and heart remember. This also usually brings back stories of childhood perils that have been passed down by our matriarchs.

When I was two or three years old, I found myself in my pram hurtling down an embankment at Chesser Loan, Edinburgh. Later, when I was much older, I recounted this vague ‘body’ memory to my older brother Alistair.

He wickedly cackled like some old witch and told me it was true – “You were hurtling down the long, and steep embankment, but by some miracle you weren’t smashed to bits.  I was the one who was supposed to be ‘looking after the baby in the pram’ at that time,” he said to me.

Well, he was probably only about five or six years old at the time.  I don’t know how, but I somehow managed to survive my childhood with my careless older brother being given the responsibility of looking after me. However, in a much more serious and darker tone, I could not say the same for my great uncle Hugh about fifty years before. He was not so lucky.

Catching Manx Shearwaters

My great grandfather Roderick was the father of my great uncle Hugh. He was a crofter and the Ferryman on the Isle of Eigg so he obviously couldn’t keep an eye on his ten children all the time. His wife Sarah was paralysed and bed-ridden for the last eight years of her life. His sister Flora helped to look after the children, but she was 60 years old. She wouldn’t have been able to constantly watch over a gaggle of children in a small croft. So the children were probably allowed to roam free on the island.

The boys would scour the beach looking for sea food, or climb the crags and cliffs of the island in search of birds’ eggs. Unfortunately, Hugh was unlucky and fell to his death at the age of six while searching the dangerous cliffs of Eigg for the eggs of the Manx shearwater birds.

Another similar story happened to my great aunt Mary. That time, young girls often spent time gathering plants or berries to make jam with. Great Aunt Mary was only five years old when she and a girlfriend had gathered what they thought were blackcurrants to make jam; these turned out to be belladonna, also known as deadly nightshade. After making and eating the jam from the belladonna berries, her friend vomited but survived. Sadly, Mary wasn’t so fortunate and died.

These are ‘true’ stories which my grandmother told to my mother, and which my mother told to me. So compared to the lives of my great-aunts and great-uncles of half-a-century before, when they were children, my childhood life was relatively free from peril, despite the ‘hurtling pram incident’.