After many tribulations, our new home has been transported five hundred miles and is now only a few yards from its destination. This, as my father explains here, is where things really become complicated.
It was all – at long, long, weary last – finished and done with. Dusk was coming, and our other helpers started off home for the second time. I was trying, rather awkwardly, to thank them, when one of them noticed that the tractor and caravan had stopped, now down by the water’s edge as planned, but right in the middle of the field.
Some minor problem, obviously. Perhaps a little trouble with the tractor gears, or just a pause to line the caravan up precisely for its appointed resting place? Well . . . no. The blasted thing was firmly bogged down once again, in a damp patch of field which would not have been any hindrance to a well-balanced outfit. But this was not a well-balanced outfit, and since the caravan was never intended to be moved any distance on its own wheels there was no reason why it should be. The right-hand wheel was firmly bogged down almost to the top of the tyre, and it didn’t take more than a couple of minutes’ frantic worrying to understand why it had happened; discounting the fact that it was our caravan and seem to have been star-crossed from the very start. The weight of the thing was heavily biased to the right, because the plumbing, water tank, stove and kitchen equipment were on that side. Once again, as at the gate, the framework of the chassis was firmly grounded.
This time, only a couple of the neighbours came over to investigate, and I couldn’t blame the others who slipped unobtrusively away. The tractor could do nothing, and efforts by three or four of us to swing the two-bar manually led to nothing more than the chance of a burst blood-vessel. Finally, another farmer went four miles for a smaller tractor, drove back in the afterglow of sunset – in clear conditions at that time of year it wouldn’t get entirely dark – and both vehicles were hitched together to haul the caravan round.
Gloom was descending in more than the sky as we struggled with no success at all to drag the caravan clear of the miniature morass. The stars were beginning to come out clear and cold. Suddenly, the noise of a heavy engine pulling well was heard down the lochside road. With lights blazing, what should roar into view but the low-loader, to which we hadn’t given a single thought in . . . how long was it now? . . . in five hours!
The crew pulled up by the gate, and I crept apprehensively over, to ask how they were. As usual, they seemed just fine, as cheery as ever and to all appearances delighted to have another episode to add to their memoirs.
They’d driven past the grass patch which had been described to them in such glowing terms. Knowing the place as I now do, I can’t say I’d have expected them even to notice it. This paragon of grass patches turned out to be only about half as long as the low-loader, with a wooden fence on the far side of the road, a sizeable ditch alongside and a shingly beach off the edge. No agency, human or supernatural, could have turned a fifty-foot vehicle there.
So the crew had sailed happily on down the narrow road, skimming hedges and fences until they suddenly stopped for a think at a hairpin bend. The angle was such that the only place the low-loader could have gone was off the edge into a sheep-pen below. Even the Hampshire Mafia could see no immediate way out of this little difficulty. They’d reversed up the narrow road for two miles, scouting for likely turning places, and finally stumbled on a little roadside quarry.
If the quarry had been a full-scale affair, they’d have been able to turn quickly and start at last on that five-hundred mile drive home; at least, on the first part of it which would bring them into the country of people who understood more than one word in ten of what they were saying; but – of course – it was a very small quarry. Hardly a quarry at all, in fact, but a kind of indentation in the hillside where the local landowner allowed the county road squads to dig out material for building up the verges and bankings.
The public road was narrow, the entrance to the little quarry was narrow, the grass verge on the far side was too narrow to allow much manoeuvring; but it just happened that they always carried a couple of shovels in their cab, in case of emergencies. They dug away at the entrance until they’d widened it enough to take something more than twice as long as the county council tippers which usually turned in the place. It must have involved a fair bit of digging, but they finally got the entrance just the way they wanted it, even if, as Pat and I saw when we drove down to see the evidence a couple of days later, the scenery looked as if a couple of shrapnel bombs had exploded close by.
Of course, when they did get the trailer through the entrance, they needed to back it well away from the road, to give themselves enough room to swing the cab round so that it faced the correct way at last. But as well as having a (formerly) narrow entrance, this was a fairly shallow quarry from back to front. There was just no space to back the trailer far enough in, while keeping all its wheels on the quarry floor. Not yet at the end of an eighteen-hour day which had started a couple of hundred miles away, they had lost the notion of digging. So what they did was reverse the trailer in until they felt the rear wheels rising up the banking at the back of the quarry – and then jumped on the accelerator so that the trailer shot backwards up the banking at an angle of . . . well, I daren’t think about it, even now.
With the rear wheels of the trailer almost level with the roof of the cab, they engaged a forward gear again and started shuffling about until they managed to have the whole thing heading up the road they’d come down in such a carefree spirit nearly five hours before. In all that time, they hadn’t seen another vehicle. And now, in the gathering darkness, they were stopping to report before driving through the night for another few hours before snatching some sleep in the cab.
When they saw the caravan had still not completed its fifty-yard journey across the field, a hunted look came over them. The linguistic drawbridge was hauled up, the engine was revved, and to forestall any suggestions that they might like to spare a couple of minutes on our own latest problem, they bombed off up the hill, out of sight and out of our lives, but a part of family folklore for ever.
There’s no point in enumerating the problems Mr Stewart and I faced in trying to get the caravan the last twenty yards into position. Forgetting the strained backs, the skinned knuckles, the mighty oaths wasting their sweetness on the lochside air, and the fact that the borrowed second tractor expired under the strain, let me just report that by one o’clock in the morning we had moved the caravan about two feet. The stars twinkled coldly overhead, the moon shone white on the island mountains, and the tide murmured softly at the edge of the loch. We all went back to the farmhouse for supper and a night’s sleep. Next day we worked from nine in the morning until six at night, and the caravan was finally in its position, ready to be fastened down. Pat and I agreed with the Stewarts that after all the toil, tears, sweat and knocking down of walls, it would be there for years to come.
Oh dear. If we had only known.
Ross Finlay
The four parts I have published here make up the first two chapters of Our Little Tin Home in the West. I have never seen any more of it. I know that Dad sent the foregoing to another writer (I’m not sure who) for comments, and there are some pencil marks on the manuscript, not in Dad’s hand, suggesting extra dialogue. The project appears to have stalled after that. Perhaps he took the criticism badly. I didn’t ask him, and now I can’t, because he died in 2004.
I do, however, know how the real story continued. The final sentence, “If we had only known,” must refer at least partly to a tremendous storm (referred to in family anecdotes as a hurricane, though it wasn’t really) which tore through the west of Scotland and caused devastation still apparent at least a decade later. Thanks to the efforts of my grandfather, described early in Part 2, the caravan was not ripped from the ground, as others in the area were, but my parents decided it would be best to leave when the thrashing water of the nearby loch reached it, and we spent the night in the car, where my mother, I have been told, sang nursery rhymes to me.
I don’t remember that, but I do remember living in a caravan site a few miles further down the single-track road. How our home was moved there, given the immense difficulty of transporting it to the original site, I can’t begin to imagine. It was later sold – another complicated process which I believe did not end well – and we spent six months renting what had once been the local schoolhouse before we moved, when I was three years old, to a flat in a medium-sized town overlooking the River Clyde, seventy miles from the part of the world I first knew.
Twice since then I have gone back to live in the area, though I am not there now. When circumstances permit, which happens rarely, I return for a few hours. My oldest ghosts are there, and I like to visit them and assure them that they are still in my thoughts.
Top image copyright David Purchase
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