The Forgotten Highlander - Alistair Urquhart [11]
We passed through the fishing town of Stonehaven with its picturesque harbour. Near by spectacular Dunottar Castle towered above sheer cliffs, jutting out defiantly into the grey waters of the North Sea. Here ‘Braveheart’ William Wallace had burned the English garrison alive in the castle chapel and, later, 167 radical protestants had been squeezed into a small dungeon and left to die in Scotland’s own ‘black hole of Calcutta’. I shuddered to think of it and was glad that we had moved on from the cruelty of the Middle Ages, or so I thought. Next we passed through Arbroath. The lofty ruins of the red sandstone abbey dominated the skyline, rising above the cottages of the fisher-folk in the area known as the ‘fit o’ the toon’, where each house seemed to boast a haddock-smoking shed in the backyard, producing the famous Arbroath ‘smokies’.
For a lot of people Arbroath was the spiritual heart of Scotland. In 1320 the Scots had boldly announced their determination to resist English domination. The words of the famous Declaration of Arbroath echo across the ages: ‘It is in truth not for glory, nor riches, nor honours that we are fighting, but for freedom – for that alone, which no honest man gives up but with life itself.’ Now it was us that were to be fighting for freedom and a more reluctant band of freedom fighters would be hard to imagine. William Wallace and his men may have been warriors. We were most definitely not. A collection of timid, ill-trained clerks and farm boys, we were to be pitched into a conflict that would plumb the depths of medieval barbarism – against a ruthless and blood-drenched foe with a decade of fighting experience.
As we shoogled across the Tay Rail Bridge, the piers of the old bridge poked out of the waters below, serving as an eerie memorial to all those who had drowned in the famous disaster of sixty years before. I was quite literally entering an unknown world. My thoughts turned to home and a happy childhood. Mum, Dad and Auntie Dossie would be hugging the kitchen fire now, and I smiled as I thought of Dad and Auntie Dossie bickering over who should poke the coal fire, the only source of heat in the house.
Dossie was Mum’s sister. Her real name was Kathleen but she was known as Dossie. Mum and Dossie were as thick as thieves, always laughing and joking. They would constantly be ganging up on Father. I don’t know how he managed to put up with the two of them.
My father was a very serious, regimented man. He lived his life wrapped in the security of a grey suit and a rigid routine. Every night when he returned home from work at the college Mother would have the tea ready to put on the table. Father sat at the head of the table and was always served first. Talk was strictly discouraged, as was reading. To us he was the strictest father in the world.
After dinner he would sit in front of the fire. Ignoring the incessant chatter between Mum and Dossie, he would read a library book for half an hour then put it down and pick up his card tray and play patience for half an hour. Then he would read for half an hour, play patience, and so it went on until it was time for bed. It would be the same story every night except on Saturdays, when at nine in the evening he would catch a tramcar to Castlegate. He would pop into the same pub to stand at the bar and drink a half pint of beer. Then he would go to the market, where he could buy unsold produce cheaply, and come back with some discounted fruit or meat. He did that every week – year in, year out. He was a real creature of habit.
Dad stayed an aloof figure in the household. Born in the reign of Queen Victoria, he was a product of his generation and