Harkness – MacGillivray Stories

As mentioned, I was born at New House Farm, Holmrook, in Cumberland. I was fortunate enough to have grown up in many places we could go to for ‘free’ for picnics and camping trips during holidays. Whichever direction you travelled from the farm, north, south, east or west, you would come to areas and locations of natural beauty. If you drove a mile or so to the west you came to the Drigg sand dunes and the beach. If you drove eastwards you came to Eskdale in the western Lake District National Park, popular with tourists, and an area of natural beauty.   

Picnics

In the 1950s, a feature of day trips was the picnic. Picnics were also a part of the 1950s and 1960s ‘do-things-yourself-for-free’ culture. The ‘beg, steal, and borrow’ philosophy was important here. You didn’t camping equipment if you could make, improvise, or ‘borrow’ them. You also made sure you didn’t go home empty-handed by ‘finding’ ‘free’ things in nature’s big freebie shop, such as fish, rabbits, birds’ eggs, firewood, fruit, berries, nuts, flowers, plants, saplings, turf, peat, earth for plants, rocks, pebbles, shells, and so on, and so on.

If you did buy something, it would be something cheap like a fly for your home-made fishing rod, or a bag of small brightly coloured plastic toy ships (made in Hong Kong), which we kids were more than happy to play with for hours in any stream that happened to run past our campsite or picnic area. You can read more about this in this post: Heathers and Car Spotting.

The word ‘campsite’ is perhaps misleading here. My father would never pay to use a campsite, but was an expert at finding ‘free’ campsites near the road or the beach; and things like getting the car stuck in the sand only added to the ‘fun and suspense’ of a trip!

Of course, there were costs. You had to fill the car with petrol. My father would always fill the car at BP (British Petroleum) stations, avoiding American petrol stations such as Esso and Shell. So even filling the car with petrol was like a patriotic act and a continuation of the war effort (in my father’s mind)⁴⁵.  

Things you need for a camping trip

First of all, you needed something to sit on – any old army blanket would do. There weren’t that many roadside cafe stops, and why waste your money when you could prepare all your eats and drinks at home? Thus, a thermos flask was mandatory. My mother would fill it up with strong tea, and pack a can of sweet carnation milk. But the thermos was mainly for short stops, as it would soon be emptied en route; so, if you were going on a proper picnic you needed a big kettle to brew up the tea on a fire made out of dry sticks or a primus stove.

I reach into the Magical Memory Box and take out a photo showing my mother and three brothers and the big black army surplus kettle! However, primus stoves were infamously unreliable, so it was better to make a fire for your kettle. If you went on a short weekend camping trip a fire in the evenings would help to keep you warm. You also needed a big holdall to put all your gear in. I can’t imagine my father would ever buy a kettle or a holdall, these were items that he had ‘obtained’ at work, borrowed, or got hold of ‘free’ as part of army surplus. 

You can say that the Scots are Brits, and Brits can’t survive long without a ‘cuppa’. In fact, my mother could hardly survive one hour without a cup of tea. She even had a Teasmaid on her bedside table, that is, a machine for making tea automatically, so she could have a cup of tea as soon as she woke up! When I was a little older, I became her ‘tea-houseboy’, that is, her ‘tea-making machine.’ We couldn’t sit together in the living room for more than half an hour without her saying, “Mak’ a nais wee cup o’ tee Ian.” My mother would prepare the food, such as boiled eggs, sandwiches, pork pies, bottles of milk, fruit, cakes and biscuits, and so on.

Back then, there was no such thing as camping gear stores, at least not of the type we have today. So plates, cups, and utensils would be what you used in the house, such as regular cups and saucers, or army surplus camping cutlery and utensils ‘obtained’ by my father. He served in the Royal Navy during the war, so he and his friends already had army surplus equipment stored from that time. I can remember we used to sometimes drink out of army surplus mugs – they were made of enamelled metal, with a white enamel coating and had a blue trim.

I also remember one trip where my mother even ‘made’ sleeping bags for us. These consisted of old Second World War moth-bitten, cream-coloured, rough, woollen army blankets folded into two along their longest edge and fastened together with kilt pins. Perhaps my mother had accessed her Scottish ancestral memory of her clannish forefathers, when devising this ingenious makeshift sleeping bag!? It worked quite well at first, but she only used two or three kilt pins, so that when you turned over in your sleep a gaping and draughty hole would appear in the ‘sleeping bag’!

This particular short trip is well etched in my memory, because of the draughty sleeping bag, but also because of the struggles of my father, uncle, and brothers had erecting the army tents and getting the old brass primus stove working – I was too young to participate at the time; although, I was allowed to hammer some of the tent pegs in the ground with a mallet. My father, Uncle Gavin and brothers took turns at trying to get the old primus stove going. Sometimes they even managed it! 

⁴⁵ What is hypocrisy? EU admits it has given Russia €35 billion for energy since the illegal invasion of Ukraine war began, while supplying €1 billion of military equipment to Kyiv. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10692127/EU-admits-given-Russia-35billion-energy-Ukraine-war-began.html Read 10 April 2022. But perhaps I am being naive here. It is impossible to be a politician, unless you have been awarded a doctorate in ‘hypocrisy’.