In Part 1 of my father’s previously unpublished account, our family home near Glasgow was sold, a forty-two-foot caravan purchased and a plot of land in the West Highlands of Scotland rented. It is at this point that things start to go dramatically wrong.
Back home, we decided that the caravan was as good as in position, and diverted our attention to what we thought were pressing problems, like what to call it. Borrowing part of a local name, we decided on Ard Raineach (prounced Ronn-yach), which meant something like Bracken Point. We also let the caravan manufacturers know the location of the site, and began to get involved in bureaucracy to the extent of applying to the local authorities for planning permission to put a caravan down by the lochside.
At first, in the generally naive attitude we displayed to the whole business in its early stages, we had thought that this formality wasn’t really necessary, but it turned out that the full majesty of a planning application was waived only for caravans being used as extra accommodation beside a house. We were asked to provide a twenty-five inch to the mile sketch of the proposed layout, and discovered that there had never been a map of our part of the coast on that scale. Laboriously, with tongue stuck between teeth to help concentration, I managed to enlarge a tracing from a six-inch map to the required scale, drawing in the caravan, a hut we meant to put beside it, and a bunker for our solid fuel. When I handed it in to the office, the county official who was looking after our application said, “I meant to say earlier, don’t bother about a twenty-five inch sketch if you can’t find a big enough map.”
He came along to sample the water supply, and pronounced it acceptable although with some harmless ‘solids in suspension’. The talk passed, rather gruesomely, to the subject of sewage. There was no question, of course, of our being allowed to pour our waste straight into the loch, and we meant to have a septic tank built. Having over-delicate city susceptibilities, we weren’t too keen to know all the ins and outs of the septic tank business, and the revelation that the final act in its construction was for somebody to break a phial of bacteria inside it before bolting down the lid was almost too much for us. However, since a septic tank needs plenty of water, and we wouldn’t have a full water supply until electricity was installed, the subject was, mercifully, left in abeyance for a while.
The one other thing which seemed to interest the planning department was colour. If possible, the caravan was to be unobtrusive and merge with the background. Since, from the public road, the background was an unobstructed shoreline on which even the little ash tree stuck out with some clarity, neither Pat nor I could begin to think of a colour scheme which would allow a forty-two foot box to disappear from view. I reported that the caravan was already being built, and that it would be in the manufacturers’ standard colours, which would no doubt have been devised with local authority requirements in view. I don’t think I made it crystal-clear that these standard colours were white and light blue, and nothing more was said.
It was a relief to hear that the Scottish Development Department in Edinburgh, and the local county council, agreed that we could put our caravan on the lochside site as planned. Even so, it did seem a little extreme that the official permission was couched in terms that would have allowed us to run a hundred-caravan holiday site.
Eventually, everything seemed ready. On the Saturday in May before the week in which the caravan was supposed to be delivered, my father and I went over to prepare the place. He is a blacksmith, and brushed aside my vague suggestions of holding the caravan down against the winter gales with bits of rope as the nonsense they later turned out to be. The system he devised would have given a Saturn rocket something to think about at blast-off time at Cape Kennedy.
First of all we dismantled a piece of the drystone wall which separated our field from the road, put in a couple of metal posts, and hung a small gate. The caravan was to face south-west into the direction of the prevailing wind. To have offered it sideways-on to the south-west gales would have been just asking for trouble, and even with its front to the wind it would not have been secure without some kind of bracing. Father’s scheme was to dig five small pits, two on each side of where the caravan would be, and one at the front. When the caravan was put into place, we had four metal posts which would slot into the open ends of the chassis cross-members and then be sunk into a two-foot pit of concrete. In the pit at the front there would be sunk a ring-bolt, which would be lashed with a wire rope to the tow-bar. We were sure that fastened down in that way the caravan would not be shifted by any natural force.
On the way back to Glasgow, where Patricia, David and I were temporarily camping with my mother and father, I thought I’d be a good citizen, and dropped in at the local police station in the nearest town to report that a large caravan and low-loader would be trundling by on the Wednesday. I remember exactly how I introduced the subject to the duty officer, great, stupid, naive imbecile that I was:
“Just though I’d let you know, constable . . . “
Back in Glasgow, it was just a matter of waiting; but we didn’t have quite aslong to wait as we’d expected before things started to happen. At lunchtime on Monday came a telephone call from the county police.
“Mr Finlay? Just one detail. Could you tell us the all-up weight of the caravan and low-loader?”
“About ten tons, from what I’ve heard,” I said casually.
“Ah.” There was one of those pauses. “Now that’s a bit difficult. You see, there’s a three-ton limit on the lochside road, and nothing weighing more than that is allowed anywhere near it.”
For a moment it just didn’t click. Then I assumed it must just be a minor breakdown in communication, some lack of co-operation among the various departments.
“I have,” I began patiently,” approval from the county council and the Scottish Development Department to take the caravan down that road.”
“Not really,” said my policeman. “What you have is planning permission to put your caravan on a certain piece of ground. There’s nothing in the planning permission to say that you can actually take your caravan there. We’ve found that a three-ton limit was applied to that road in . . . 1925, I think . . . yes, I know the road has been rebuilt just recently, but the limit has never been removed. The police authorities have no power to waive it. Perhaps you’d like to get in touch with the county council. They’re the only people who’re likely to have powers to alter the regulations.”
Perhaps I . . .? Too bloody right I would get in touch with the county council. But first, a phone call to the manufacturers to see just what was going on at their end. What was going on at that precise moment was that the caravan was being heaved onto its low-loader, before setting out for Scotland very early the next morning. Well, look, could they hold off for a while? We’d struck some minor legal trouble. Obviously baffled that anything could have gone amiss at this late stage, they said they would delay things; but not for too long, because the low-loader was an expensive piece of equipment to have hanging about all ready with nowhere to go.
The first phone call to the county council headquarters produced the kind of reply I’m sure you can only get in the West Highlands:
“Mr MacTavish is not in the office at the moment. He has gone to a funeral.”
“Well, when do you expect him back?”
“In about three days.”
Things were beginning to look more serious, and I phoned back to the county police, this time with a certain amount of forelock-touching, to let them know that stalemate was approaching. Suddenly we had an inward call, which was a relief on a day when my father’s phone-bill must have gone sky-high. It was from somebody in the county council’s legal department, to say that he’d heard about the problem and would look into it; but he couldn’t promise anything.
Another call to the factory, this time more worried, asking the manufacturers if the could possibly hold off delivery for at least a day, because the low-loader’s five-hundred mile journey might come stuck almost at the very end. They didn’t sound exactly overjoyed, but we had only one trump card in the whole agonising episode: to save storage charges we had already paid for the caravan, and that put us slightly one-up for a while.
As we waited in anguish for the legal man from the county council to phone back with some magic formula, Pat and I speculated on some way out of the mess. First of all, we’d heard that some contractor about fifteen miles from the farm had a landing craft. Suppose we arranged with him to have the caravan off-loaded on the nearest main road and sailed round to the site? But the cost might be colossal. And how would we get the blasted thing from a beached landing craft up to its site, when it weighed three and a half tons and might bog down for ever on the shingle?
Maybe the best plan would be to abandon the idea of a mobile home . . . mobile! . . . for ever. Suppose we managed to sell the caravan back to the manufacturer. We might buy a Dormobile and a ten-foot trailer caravan, and high-tail it to the south of France after all. A life of beachcombing in the sunshine would suit us just fine. But what about making a living?
The wild schemes were cut short by the long-awaited phone call from the legal expert of the county council. The news was grim.
“There seem to be no chance of waiving the weight restrictions,” he said, in a tone of voice that seemed to mingle interest and regret. “Apart from Forestry Commission vehicles and so on, the only conditions under which an overweight load would be allowed on that road would be if the vehicle involved was delivering building materials to a house or premises down the road. The trouble with you,” and even in the depths of despair I couldn’t help admiring the neat way he put it, “is that it’s the house or premises you want to deliver!”
I stalled, waiting for inspiration of any kind.
“How is it,” I wanted to know, “that there’s a three-ton limit on that road, but no weight limit sign at the start of it?”
“Funny thing, that,” he admitted. “There was a sign up until . . . oh, eighteen months ago, I suppose. Until the road was widened at the bottom of the first hill. It just never got put back.”
He went on to explain kindly that he would have been delighted to help if only the regulations (they all said that), when a devious thought struck him.
“Are you planning to put up a hut or anything like that beside the caravan?”
Yes, yes . . . anything he wanted.
“W-e-l-l,” he began, obviously seeing the plot unroll slowly before his eyes, “if you mean to have a hut beside the caravan, and if you delay having the caravan delivered until the hut is built, then we could say officially that you were having the caravan delivered to the hut.” He started to talk more quickly as the consequences of this delicate sideways manoeuvre suddenly revealed themselves. “And there’s no doubt that a hut, even if it isn’t a house, is definitely premises!”
It was brilliant in its way, and a splendid example of oblique West Highland thinking. But it saddened me. What a waste of brainpower just to get round an antique regulation. And there was one other thing. I didn’t have a blasted hut. We hadn’t even ordered it yet; so this nefarious scheme still couldn’t get the caravan delivered within the next couple of days, and the manufacturers would no doubt start examining the small print and muttering about penalty clauses for inability to accept delivery.
I was mulling over the possibility of claiming that we actually had a hut there all the time, assuming that the authorities wouldn’t realise I had been less than frank until we all turned up, complete with caravan, at the lochside, when the little green light I’d been hoping for started flashing at the back of my mind. Premises . . . that was what he was after. Premises!
“Look,” I said. “It’s just struck me. The piece of field we’ve been offered for the caravan has been approved by the authorities. In fact, we have an official caravan site licence for it, issued by the Scottish Development Department in Edinburgh. If the Development Department recognise it as a site, surely the county council will consider it, at the very least, to be premises?”
There was silence for a few seconds. I wondered if he was going to say he’d need an established legal precedent for such a definition, at which point I was going to lay down, leap straight out of the first-floor window and hope for the worst at the foot of the drop. Would he buy it? Could we end this hellish afternoon on a note of relief? Well, it was getting rather late in the day, when all good council officials should be ready to leave for home. I don’t know if that had anything to do with it, or if he was impressed by all the emphasis on the Scottish Development Department who were the big wheels in this kind of business, or whether he’d meant to ease off anyway; but he finally hedged for a little and then said OK, we should just go ahead.
Too wrung-out to go to the extent of dancing about the room, I celebrated by phoning the county police and saying that delivery of the caravan would go ahead more or less as planned, implying “thanks for nothing” that they had started all the rumpus in the first place. Ah, but it wasn’t over yet. Despite the fact that half the county now knew a forty-two foot caravan was to be delivered down the lochside road in two days’ time, the police needed official confirmation from the manufacturers that this was actually going to be the case. As if all this panic had been some kind of joke!
“All right,” I said wearily. “I’ll phone them to phone you back right away.”
“I’m afraid that won’t be enough, sir. We must have written confirmation and a full forty-eight hours’ notice.”
“But if the bl- . . . sorry, officer, if the caravan is supposed to be delivered to the site at noon on Wednesday and it’s now five o’clock on Monday afternoon, how can we possibly get you forty-eight hours’ notice? After all, this is the first time you’ve mentioned anything like that.”
Perhaps it was the break in my voice that made him realise things were getting to fever pitch – I was thinking myself that there are times in life when there’s no way out except a nervous breakdown – but he agreed to accept a telegram from the factory and forty-three hours’ notice. A third phone call south to arrange this final bit of paper-shuffling, and Pat and I finally relaxed after the most shattering five hours of our lives. It was a mercy we had one full day to recuperate before the caravan was delivered. In any case, from now on it was just a simple transport problem.
We didn’t hear it at the time, but somewhere in the background there was a sardonic laugh.
Ross Finlay
Top image copyright David Purchase
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/legalcode.en
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