28

ON THE GALLOWS’ HILL

Number 1 Gallowhill was our new home. There was a small row of houses, long since turned into flats, and we were in the first one. It was an area steeped in history. Where several roads met there was a place called the Chains, and in that place over a hundred years ago criminals hung from the gallows while cattle were driven by, filling the street with dung. The place was haunted by stories of drunken murders and whisky-fuelled drovers seeking red bisoms of prostitutes after they’d sold cattle at the Tryst, their ghosts still wandering in a shadowland of waste ground opposite our home. Lying below this grassy stretch was Crieff’s graveyard. Dark marble statues towered on monuments above small cheap stones, but each carried the same bleak message—‘we all go the same road.’

Back home for Davie was back to square one for me. I didn’t like the place, not in the way I do now. As a child travelling in my bus, Crieff was a stop-off point before the ‘berries’. We might pass through a winter or two there before gathering at the real travellers’ meeting place, Blairgowrie, where the raspberries hung their ripened fruit onto long green bushes for us to work through a fun-filled summer.

Now July would come and I knew that the berries would not wait on me. I was stuck just like all the other flatties—static—imprisoned.

Although this upstairs flat was new to me, to Davie it was a home he had lived in many a time, because it was the home of his deceased grandparents, Sandy’s parents. I never met this pair of grandfolks, but tales abound about how well-respected they were in Crieff.

James and Margaret were their names. His work was selling fruit around Crieff with a horse and cart, and wood-cutting. It was not that different from how my old relatives lived, just that they carted themselves from place to place, whereas he did the same with fruit. Old Maggie, his wife, was a stern body, so I’m led to believe, who seldom went further than her own front door. As I said, they had long since passed away when I came on the scene, but I’ll tell you later that Maggie still crept about that house, and she seemed to have a thing about how I made the bed!

Davie soon got a job, and Margaret was as pleased as punch to have her little grandsons only ten minutes down the road. Things settled easily into the ways of scaldie folk, except for one tiny flaw—me—I wasn’t one. I needed to get away, but after many an argument Davie knocked holes in my arguments for moving around the country and said I was being selfish. The boys needed stability, and anyway, how many times had we heard stories from travellers about the extermination of their kind from the roads of Scotland. I was aware of the situation when I lived in my bus, and matters had became worse. What was left for my kind? Where would we go? How could we make a living? Yes, I think it was round that time my mind told me that memories of the old ways was all I had, that I should just lump it and be content with my lot.

So, for the first time since I had my boys, I got a job. I was twenty-three years old. Yet I felt like an auld humpy-backit wife stuck hard in her routine. Davie would come in have his tea, we’d do the dishes and I’d go to work in an old folks home. At ten pm I came in, kissed the bairns goodnight and went to bed. Yes, a scaldie life was just grand—aye, right!

Well, there you have it. So why not fill that cup and come back with me to those happy old days when life was full and clocks had no faces. This story is from our days in the bus.

If that old mutt of yours needs a walk then take him, I’ll wait until you come back. If you don’t own a dog, then read on.