What follows was written not by me but my father, Ross Finlay, who is not in a position to object to me using it. He’s dead now, as is my mother, so as far as I’m concerned I own the copyright. It has never been published before, and would probably not have been published exactly the way it is, since it reads to me like an early draft, but I’ve resisted the temptation to do any significant editing.
I don’t remember any of what is described, for reasons explained in the opening sentence, but it seems to have been quite an adventure. It is also entirely characteristic of my father that he would become involved in such a complex project, and of my mother that she would go along with it, indulging only occasionally in a sigh or shake of the head.
When our family made a democratic decision to leave town and head for the hills, Patricia and I were thirty and David was one, so didn’t qualify for a vote. At the time, we lived quite happily in a small town north of Glasgow. It was a pleasant, residential place on the edge of open country and high moorlands. One drawback was that the road where we lived in a five-roomed semi-detached seemed to be inhabited mainly by the families of rising young executives; and I was a failing freelance journalist into whom the ageing process had begun to dig its claws.
Somehow, a great idea dawned, familiar to most people who try to hammer out even a meagre living from a typewriter. Whether it was brought on by starry-eyed reading of the memoirs of best-selling novelists settled in Hawaii or the French Riviera, I don’t remember; but it amounted to the fact that if I was a writer, even of sorts, then I ought to be able to make a living anywhere in touch with the world’s postal service. There were any number of flaws in this impulsive argument, but none of them managed to survive the great burst of enthusiasm with which we greeted the original idea. Our notions of where to go were not quite as grand as the Pacific or the Mediterranean, and not only because we’d have been hard put to find the fare to these places, let alone the price of somewhere to live. We wanted to go to the West Highlands, preferably by the shore of some quiet sea-loch among the hills.
At that time the prices being paid for houses in the Highlands were not quite as astronomical as they are now; but they were high enough for us to know that we wouldn’t be buying any landed property, especially with practically no income with which to entice our building society to increase our current mortgage. Patricia is an Aberdonian by birth, and although she left the place at the age of four months, retains enough native caution and knowledge of appreciating property values to reject outright any idea of renting a house. Apart from taking a tent and living like tinkers, there was only one solution – a very big caravan; or, as they turned out to be known rather sanctimoniously in the trade, a mobile home.
We snooped quietly around some caravan sales sites in the west of Scotland, peering in at windows and becoming adept at making non-committal noises when pounced upon by eager salesmen. We also looked at some residential sites. These expeditions produced little but gloom. Many of the mobile homes seemed poorly planned, an dhad about their actual construction an appearance that would be described in these parts as ‘hand-knitted’. The residential sites were long on toilet blocks and water supplies, but short on privacy, which was one thing we wanted more than almost anything else.
Not much happened until we were on holiday in Surrey, and noticed in a newsagent’s window a magazine devoted to . . . mobile homes. We bought one copy, flicked through the pages, Patricia caught sight of a splendidly equipped kitchen, and said in a voice that brooked no argument, “That’s the one!” And so, by one of those mysterious processes that all married men recognise but can’t explain, it was.
A telephone call to the manufacturers, somewhere on the south coast, revealed that very few examples of this particular model had so far been built, but we could have a look, if the owner didn’t object, at one that had recently been delivered to a site in Yorkshire. We went there on our way back to Scotland, prowled round it under the approving eye of the enthusiastic owner, and decided after a couple of minutes that this was indeed it. A brisk inspection of such things as sinks and cupboards revealed to the housewifely eye that whoever had designed it knew about the problems of dish-washing, cooking, storing food and packing away dishes. It had a lounge, kitchen, batheroom, single bedroom and double bedroom within its imposing forty-two feet length; the ceilings were high compared with the usual caravan; there was central heating; and the general standards of finish and equipment were all that anybody could have wanted. All the way home we talked about nothing except house-selling, site-finding and a new way of life in the west. It all seemed so simple and logical.
After a week or two of panic when it looked as if nobody in the Western Hemisphere had ambitions to live among the rising young executives in a quiet residential town north of Glasgow, we suddenly found a buyer. Letters back and forward between us and the manufacturers soon got work on the caravan under way.
Stage two was to find somewhere to put it. We composed what seemed like a persuasive advertisement directed at farmers and the like, and sent it to the Oban Times, which circulates all up and down the west coast. It’s one of those splendid local papers in which the small ads are read as thoroughly as the news items. When we later came to take a copy every week, we ploughed through absolutely everything, down to the notices announcing that the chiropodist would visit the island of Tiree next Thursday.
The advertisement attracted one answer, from a farmer in one of the most beautiful seaboard districts. We wrote back accepting his invitation to drive over and talk about a suitable site.
The day we went to the west was one of the most nail-biting of our lives. The farm, we could see from the map, was on a narrow road down the east shore of a long sea-loch. I’d been part of the way before, although only as far as a forestry village three miles from the farm. The drive through the forest was as beautiful as ever, thanks partly to the screen of old hardwoods which prevented the ranks of spruce from coming right to the roadside. To a couple of townies, the little settlement of timber houses set down beside one of the arms of the sea-loch looked like just the place it would be pleasant to have as the nearest outpost of civilisation.
Beyond the village was a bay which fronted an old whitewashed manse with a curving driveway of mellow trees and daffodils above a river, overlooked from the hillside by the church itself. Along the lochside, in front of a farmhouse, and then the road climbed away from the sea again, past and old schoolhouse and back into the forest. When we came to ‘our’ farmhouse we realised that any possible caravan sites must be still farther on, since there was practically no unforested land around. We wandered on, and just as we came over a rise of ground and began to leave the shore-side plantations behind, a view unfoled which, after all this time, still brings a tightening of the throat every time I return.
The road swept down towards the level of the loch, hugging closely to the foot of th high forested ridge that rose on the landward side. Arable fields appeared on the right, with a small rocky crag crowned by silver birches. Ahead were the sparkling waters of the sea-loch, and the horizon was dominated by great island mountains. There was a half-derelict roadman’s cottage at the brow of the hill, and another more solid one down by the edge of the loch. A farmhouse stood on rising ground a mile away, and the only other houses in sight were far away on the other shore. There was peace, and beauty, and a feeling of repose.
As we drove slowly down the hill, we came to the last field on the right, before the lochside narrowed to a patch of scrubby woodland. Over a wall there was a stretch of field and then a stony shore. The field levelled out before high water mark beside a tiny bay, with a low rocky point on the far side. There was a solitary ashe tree bending slightly in the breeze. The tide was lapping gently in, and with a superb view, protection from cold winds out of the nort and east, it looked like a perfect place to set up house . . . or a least a mobile home.
But what if this perfect place should be outside the boundary of ‘our’ farm, and therefore beyond reach for ever? We drove back to the farmhouse, wondering what feeling of desolation would hit us when some other site was offered. There had been walls and fences, and with another farm nearby we had no idea just where the bounds might lie.
Mr Stewart and his wife were welcoming and friendly. It turned out that he’d been born only a few miles down the road, and had a real feeling for the place. He had the weatherbeaten face and keen eyes of a man born to farming, unlike the hlalf-amateur playboys who are in many places a feature of the West Highland scene. After the polite opening conversation of the west, and a few cups of tea in the farmhouse kitchen, he must have sensed that we were on edge, because it wasn’t long before he invited us to come with him and select a site. We drove out of the farm, turned along the road the way we’d been before, out of the forest by the old roadman’s cottage, down towards our perfect place, and still he didn’t stop. In half a mile down the hill towards the sea the tension grew almost to bursting point, and then he pulled into a passing place at the side of the narrow road, and got out and nodded casually over the stone wall towards the solitary ash treen and said without noticing the stars in our eyes . . . “Now, would somewhere over there suit you?”
Through a gate into the field, and we pottered about looking at one of two possible places, but soon settled on the one we’d already selected, a level patch of ground south-west of the ash tree. There were unrestricted views all round, and a water supply near at hand. A mountain burn which tumbled down from the forested ridge had been culverted below the road and brought under the field in tile drains. It came to the surface again more or less at the roots of the ash tree, before flowing a few more yards into the bay. The water was cold and clear, and to the casual palate uncontaminated by the activities of the sheep which wintered in the fields before going to the rough summer grazing on the hill.
An annual rent for the ground was mentioned and accepted. A smaller gate could be led into the wall by the public road, and we could make some kind of patch down to the site itself, which was to be fenced off from the rest of the field. A line of wooden electricity pylons came down the hill, across the bay and over the field, not big enough to be obtrusive. There would surely be no difficulty in linking the caravan up to the public supply, when all its heating, lighting and plumbing system would start to work. Water would be pumped from the outlet of the ash tree burn.
So . . . not only was a it a superb site scenically, but it seemed to have all the practical advantages too. It turned out that the roadman’s cottage at the top of the hill had been empty for the best part of a year, and was currently on offer, despite its poor condition, at a price several hundred pounds higher than the substantial cost of our new, fully-furnished mobile home delivered to the site. It didn’t seem worth it for two damp lower rooms, two tiny attic bedrooms with no windows and in which a tall man couldn’t stand upright, a leaky roof and a position which some grim nineteenth-century official had carefully devised to give the house no view at all. There was a much more pleasant cottage a few hundred yards farther on, at the far end of ‘our’ field; but this had suffered a familiar fate and was rented by the Forestry Commission to a family from the south of England, who paid only very occasional holiday visits. In fact, we never once saw them to speak to.
Ross Finlay
Top image copyright David Purchase
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