Up to this point in my father’s never previously published account, the family has bought a) a mobile home, rented b) a plot of land in the West Highlands five hundred miles from where a) is and received official permission c) to put a) on b) and, finally, d) to transport it there. All that now remains is to make d) happen - clearly a childishly simple task. Nothing could possibly go wrong.
When the big day arrived, we went to the farm and waited for the caravan to appear. Although we didn’t know it, matching current form the dramas had started much earlier. The low-loader, a vast and mysterious articulated truck, had left the south coast very early the previous morning, the two-man crew more or less stealing out of town before dawn. There was, it seemed, one little discrepancy about the dimensions of the caravan. Nothing more than ten feet wide is supposed to travel on British roads without an escort of police, security services and the Household Cavalry; but, although the brochure spoke reassuringly about our particular model being exactly one inch under the limit, this was a polite fiction. It was really well over the maximum permitted width. The manufacturers took the splendid attitude (it was beginning to appeal to us quite strongly too) that what the official eye did not see in print, the official heart would not grieve over.
Perhaps this little indiscretion was known round about the factory where the caravan was built, or perhaps south coast policemen are more than usually hawk-eyed; but it was an invariable habit that delivery drives should begin at four o’clock in the morning so that there should be no unpleasantness.
As we were to discover, the two delivery drivers were characters of infinite resource. On the other hand, navigation was not their strong point, because although they started in the south of England and were headed directly for Scotland, there came a time when they stumbled on a road sign welcoming them heartily to Wales. After a very long day’s drive, they somehow managed to sleep in Carlisle as planned.
The following morning they drove the thing up to Glasgow. As coincidence would have it, an uncle of mine saw it hurtling along a city street and wondered, without realising its family significance, how a loaded vehicle that size was going to go any distance without crushing pedestrians underwheel and knocking corners off buildings. In those days, juggernaut lorries hadn’t yet begun to appear on British roads, and similar speculations were to cross other people’s minds as the day progressed.
All went well until the low-loader reached Loch Lomond. The heavy-vehicles route which the crew had been wise enough to obtain before starting the long haul to parts unknown spoke of trunk roads and A-class roads almost the whole way. It reckoned without the eccentric classification of Scottish roads, which seems to depend more on whether a splash of red would cheer up the map, than on any particular civil engineering specification. Part of the way up Loch Lomondside the crew realised that, despite its trunk road status, A82 in those parts is not only single carriageway but takes an erratic route following all the bays and inlets on the shore, with practically no straights to speak of, but rock overhangs, trees, stone walls, S-bends, bankings, blind brows, narrow bridges and half-witted wandering sheep in profusion.
With a high-set cabin, and a certain natural gusto about their driving, they coped happily for several miles; but it’s a feature of the road that the farther north it goes the more tortuous it becomes. There came a point where they encountered a blind double-bend with a cliff on one side and a drop into the loch on the other. The low-loader was simply not going to get round at all if it kept meekly to its own side of the road. By the inevitable workings of what is known here as Macpherson’s Law (Macpherson had an English cousin called Sod), there was of course a great line of traffic pounding down the other way, made up of fish lorries, timber trucks and touring buses. The off-duty driver leapt from the cab and began to wave all this oncoming line to a halt. The whole outfit was gradually squeezed round with backwards and forward shunts, while monumental queues began to form both ahead and astern. At one point it took them an hour and a half to travel ten miles, but they treated the caravan itself as if it were made out of eggshells. There wasn’t a scratch on it when it was delivered.
After a while they got to the borders of ‘our’ county, where, thanks to all our previous excitements, a police escort was waiting. The crew took it quite well, especially as Loch Lomondside was controlled by a different constabulary and the antics there were no concern of the escort.
The main road towards our district is much better than the Loch Lomond one, if you happen to want to transport an ungainly load that would be much more conveniently taken in by a very large helicopter. It does, however, have two very annoying features. Near one of the towns there are two very high, very elegant and very inconvenient hump-backed bridges. On both sides of the road that lurches over these bridges you can see gouges on the surfaces where cars have dented their sumps, and from time to time scrape marks along the parapets show where two approaching drivers have tried to get out of each other’s way by hauling their steering wheels to the left. We’d had nightmares about how the low-loader, which seemed very low at the back, would negotiate the bridges without either ripping half the surface off or coming to a halt with its front wheels stuck helplessly in mid air. Once again, the resourceful crew coped without any trouble; but I’ve often wondered since why one of the bridges, which the week before was ornamented with four heavy stone balls, one on each of its four pillars, the week afterwards had only three.
Back at the farm, we feared the worst as lunchtime came and went, and there was no sign of our allegedly mobile home. In mid-afternoon there was a kind of darkening of the sky: not a sudden eclipse bringing disaster in its wake, although that might not have been inappropriate, but the tremendous bulk of the low-loader and caravan looming up outside the farmhouse window. The crew sauntered over, made a few self-effacing remarks about their journey north, but seemed a little taken aback that they were now on a road which from verge to verge was no wider than the caravan, and lined with trees for most of the way.
Even Mr Stewart looked slightly unsettled by the sheer size of the thing, but he brought out his tractor and led the way down the hill, followed by the low-loader, the police escort and ourselves, who were beginning to feel the familiar icy touch of trouble ahead. Looking for the first time at the caravan perched on its trailer, and not in the spacious quarters of that Yorkshire residential site, we began to realise that it was a lot bigger than we’d remembered. Once we arrived at the field, that impression was very nastily confirmed. Not only was the caravan almost as wide as the gate, but it was longer than the combined width of the road, the two grass verges and the passing-place which, by our only stroke of good luck in the whole episode, was in exactly the right position for the caravan to be swung round.
Just how it was going to be persuaded into the field I couldn’t fathom, but that was a future problem. Of more importance right then was the fact that we had absolutely blocked the public highway just by parking the low-loader on it. The trouble was, the low-loader was longer than the passing-place, and the verges at this point were more like bankings; this meant that, no matter how or where it was parked, there was going to be no traffic up or down until the unloading was finished and the low-loader was no longer with us. Some cars did appear and look vaguely as if their drivers might want to go somewhere, but since this was the West Highlands where when God made time he did it generously, they abandoned any previous plans (not that they had much choice) and hung around to watch the fun.
Very professionally, the crew winched the caravan off the low-loader, but it was still a fairly lengthy task. The police escort, either reckoning that the job was as good as finished, or more likely suspecting that the real trouble was just about to start, wished us well and shot off back to base. We were now left with a caravan which was quite obviously too big to go through at the enforced angle the only gate into its field . . . and a slight problem with the low-loader.
Naturally, the crew felt that their part in the operation was over, since delivery had obviously been made, to the extent that the delivered article was firmly blocking the only public road in the district. They also wanted, I suspect, to get back into familiar human surroundings. During the unloading process it had become hilariously clear that West Highland farmers and foresters have no language in common with long-distance lorry drivers from the depths of Hampshire. Everybody was very friendly, there were grins and laughs and intricate hand-signals; but the two different sides might just as well have been speaking Bulgarian and Swahili for all the practical effect that conversation had.
It was only then, as the crew prepared to take their leave in the late afternoon, that a small cloud appeared on their horizon. They didn’t realise, and somehow I hadn’t mentioned it before, that the road we were on was a dead-end. Not only that, but there were no side-turnings off it where a vehicle that size could be manoeuvred round. Not even the Forestry Commission’s timber lorries came this far along the road. One of the locals saved the day by explaining – with enthusiastic hand-wavings and a few diagrams scribbled on a piece of scrap paper – that some miles down the lochside there was a vast and ideal expanse of grass where two professionals like our Hampshire friends would have no trouble turning the biggest articulated lorry ever built, blind drunk, blindfolded and with one hand tied behind their backs. Ten minutes down the road, two minutes’ turning, and they’d be off on their five-hundred mile trek home.
It sounded perfect, and the low-loader crew obviously thought so as they roared off down the road. But . . . neither they nor we realised that what we had just heard was the spirit of Highland hospitality at work. The West Highlander is usually a gentle soul. The very last thing he wants to do is say something that will upset a stranger. What happens in the west is that if you ask somebody a question, he will give you the answer he thinks you want to hear. For instance, if you are out walking and ask a local how far it is to your destination, he will pause and consider the situation before giving you a careful answer. If you are obviously fit and well, he will say three miles. If you are looking weary, he will say one mile. If you are half-dead on your feet, he will say round the next corner. You and he part with expressions of mutual goodwill, and the certain knowledge that the damned place is really eight miles, two hilltops and an impenetrable peat bog away does not deter him from thinking he has done the right thing.
As the exhaust note of the low-loader died away in the distance, it was painfully obvious that back at the caravan the beautiful sunny day, now creeping perceptibly into early evening, was nothing like finished. Mr Stewart had hitched his tractor onto the tow-bar at the front of the caravan, and was manfully jerking it towards the gate into the field. It didn’t take long to realise that since the caravan was only eighteen inches narrower than the gate, and was coming at an angle which meant it must have more space than that, there was just no way in which the one was going to get through the other.
This was where Highland hospitality showed another of its faces. Mr Stewart said, without any hesitation:
“We’ll take the gate off its hinges and pull out the posts.”
It was done, and there was still too small a gap. So it came about that two or three yards of the old drystane dyke, lovingly assembled stone on stone by some tenant farmer of a hundred years ago, was ripped down in an instant, although the stones were carefully laid aside for Mr Stewart to rebuild the wall later.
At last the way seemed open, and it looked as if the road blockage which had now lasted an uncomfortably long time was about to disappear. We had attracted more company now, everybody willing to lend a hand. Having told somebody to put flat stones over the holes where the gateposts had been, Mr Stewart climbed back aboard his tractor and hauled the caravan over the rise of ground at the entrance to the field. There was a quiet cheer, as the others prepared to get back into their cars and head for home, another job well done. Suddenly there was a jolt, the whole thing shuddered to a halt, tractor wheels spun furiously on the grass, and I’m sure I heard a few indistinct Gaelic remarks from the front, in the tone of voice sheep farmers normally reserve for hurling insults at their dogs. Only one of the foot-diameter gatepost holes had been covered, and the caravan’s right-hand wheel had unerringly sought out the other, sinking inches into it and leaving that side of the chassis perched solidly on the grass.
The rest of our posse of locals came back over. So did Pat and Mrs Stewart, who’d been whiling away the hours alternately worrying about whether one side of the caravan would be ripped to pieces in the process, and soaking up tea and biscuits in the farmhouse kitchen, which was mercifully well out of sight of our antics. If the caravan had been a little holiday model, there were enough of us there to have lifted it up and flung it over the wall like a cube-shaped caber. But it weighed three and a half tons, and there was just no way in which mere manpower was going to retrieve the situation.
Our new neighbours, who must by this time have been wondering what kind of cuckoos were coming to the peaceful lochside nest, had a quiet think. One of the other farmers produced a hydraulic jack, and the theory that if the caravan could be hoisted up until the offending wheel was above ground again, the flat stone that had been forgotten in the first place could be slipped into position over the hole. When the jack was let down, tractor and caravan could then proceed merrily across the field. The snag was that the caravan was already resting at an angle on the rise of the ground, and the jack would have to be at an angle too, bearing down on a slab of rock hauled under for that purpose.
I hadn’t played much useful part in the operation so far. All I’d done was hang around like a knotless thread while a pair of professional low-loader men and a group of obviously competent farmers and foresters did all the difficult work. This could have been my chance to shine, but nothing was going to get me under a three and a half ton caravan, pumping up a jack which might slip at any moment and being the whole thing crashing down on my skull.
One of the foresters, a small, slim and quiet man, took a puff on his pipe and murmured that he would have a go. He slipped underneath, worked away confidently, and soon the caravan began to rise. Then there was a crack like a rifle-shot as the slab of rock supporting the jack shattered under the strain. Right in front of me I saw the headlines in the next week’s Oban Times: Local Man Killed in Caravan Disaster; Police Censure Callous Behaviour of Owner.
When the headlines drifted away, there was the forester standing by my side again, still puffing thoughtfully on his pipe. Everything was in place, and the caravan was ready to roll. The tractor lurched over the field entrance, and made its way in a big anti-clockwise curve towards the site that had been laid out so that we would have a long view down the loch from the front windows.
Ross Finlay
Top image copyright David Purchase
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