JOHN MACLEOD: After half a century, a joyful encounter to lift the melancholy ... trends now
It was October 1970, I was just four and only began to feel unease as carpets came up and my parents, still young, scampered around the house taking down curtains and piling things into tea chests.
That unease became alarm when, at the moment of our departure, Jean Anne and Mima – the lasses next door, lovely black-haired girls with brilliant teeth, dark eyes and soft, flutey Argyll accents – thrust soft toys at us through the windows of my father’s Morris 1300 and burst into tears.
It had been all I had ever known: we in the new Free Church manse in Corpach and the MacPhees, next door, in the old one, running a bed and breakfast.
It was my second home. Hugh, their dad – a soft-spoken son of Acharacle, a veteran of St Valéry and, for five long years thereafter, a prisoner of war – even piled earth high, either side of the corner of the boundary wall, so little MacLeod could readily pull himself over it while his mammy got on with the latest baby.
The move from Lochaber to Glasgow – my father had accepted a call to Partick Highland Free Church – is still the most traumatic milestone in my life.
John MacLeod returned to Corpach, where he stayed with his family in 1970
In the space of a day I was flung from a close-knit Highland community where everyone knew who I was to a vast and noisy city where nobody gave a hoot.
Glasgow, half a century ago, was an awful place.
Tenements black with soot. Dog dirt and foul language.
Great War amputees begging at street corners.
Sirens wailed from the shipyards; our new home lay directly beneath the flight path to the city’s airport, with low-flying jets screaming overhead.
I became a timid, chesty thing, constantly catching colds.
The doctor quietly told my parents I had developed asthma – ‘it’s very common with children who have moved in from the country’ – and yet, perhaps reflecting a certain inner cussedness and despite subsequent decades in Glasgow and Edinburgh, I never, ever shed my West Highland accent.
Thus I learned, as every child of a minister must, that the day will come when you will all have to leave the family home.
Quietly, you accept it, with all the other indignities of living in a tied house – be your father the minister, the policeman or the school janitor.
It’s been 53 years and I trundle north through Fort William, my car so laden – I have even lifted the floor of the boot to pack stuff around the spare wheel – that I have driven from Edinburgh in some caution, especially on tight bends and when braking.
But there is still the sense of coming home when I hit Lochaber. I cross the Caledonian Canal, turn right into Banavie and stop for the night at a pleasant hotel.
Corpach is not ten minutes’ walk up the road.
It’s been a long day. Occasion for joy – my mother is coming home from hospital tomorrow – and for sadness. I have to go home to
