I Aye Mind my Life

Reedsy Story

Include the line: “I remember… ”

Title: I Aye Mind My Life

I remember (or in Scots, “I aye mind”) a long life of many events, most of them happy, some regretful. For this story I’ll try to keep to the happy side of my memories. I recall quite sharply a lot of my long life, even from very early on.

For example, I oft mind as a baby some moments of being on an aeroplane going from my birthplace in the Orkney Islands to the big infirmary in Edinburgh for an operation to fix an abscess in my ear. I survived that but a year later I managed to be blown over by a sudden Orcadian gust of wind, landing me in hospital in the mainland town of Kirkwall for six weeks with a broken leg – I remember clearly my leg strung up to keep it still, and very nice nurses! In that hospital I started to talk. At the age of three before my broken leg I wasn’t saying a word! Perhaps it was to do with lonely days watching my father cut peat and tend his cows while mum was teaching in Kirkwall.

OK, I know I said mostly happy stuff at the start and I’ve managed to go into two accidents, but I just wanted to say even from my babyhood, I could remember stuff. My upbringing in the Orkney countryside lasted for over four years, my father having bought a croft, a long way from his home farm south of Edinburgh. I well remember his dog, “Old Jim” who he brought with him – my mother would say it was the first dog she’d seen that laughed! The next group of childhood memories was of kindergarten in the south of England, in a pretty little village full of thatched cottages and with a big green for playing cricket on. The kindergarten teacher, Miss Smythe had a beautiful garden for us to play in. It was an idyllic year but we had to go back to Scotland, my mother following work, this time as a one-teacher school ma’m in the hills of Aberdeenshire.

One of my most abiding memories of five years there was each winter the country road would be blocked. Eventually, the snowplough (or “snawploo” in Scots!) would come to open the road, throwing up 10-foot high walls of snow from the deep drifts.

During this time, I can recall clearly as a young boy, maybe six or seven years old, often looking at a postcard album (I still have it) that my mother had created of a great experience. It had hard embossed covers, deep crimson coloured, and was long rather than tall. The pages were jet black, the cards inside were black and white or in muted colours. They were held on the pages by special stick-ons that you inserted the corners of the cards into. The album was a record of my mother’s exchanging teaching year in Los Angeles one year before I was born.

I looked at this album because it showed me another place, a person I loved in another life before my life. Mainly I remember it as full of exotic things far from things in the north-east of Scotland, a cold hard country without palm trees, orange groves, big cars, white houses, women in light suits and wide-brimmed hats, and other beautiful things.

I have been lucky in this life in terms of strong desires and needs. The strongest urge has been to travel and I have surely satisfied that, and in retrospect fairly easily, including Canada when I was nine. My mother had applied for exchange teaching in Canada and landed a fine posting to Vancouver at Maple Grove School, Kerrisdale, a wealthy apple-and-peach blossom suburb. My mother was pleased that I would have a different teacher to her, and it was a man! This was in stark contrast to her teaching me for five years. One amazing thing about the house whose basement flat we lived in, it had three televisions. In Aberdeenshire we couldn’t have TV because we didn’t have electricity!

We had crossed to Montreal on The Empress of Britain, giving me abiding memories of watching the same film twice a day. Prior to that my film going had been three or four times a year! I also sharply recall playing the piano in a ship’s concert, at my mother’s urging of course. Then we travelled four days from Montreal to Vancouver on the Canadian Pacific Railway. A year later my mother and I crossed the US by Greyhound bus from Vancouver; then I returned to the USA in 1967, travelling east to west and back again by bus, the cost only 99 dollars for 99 days – I managed seven weeks but well worth it.

I remember well it was the “Summer of Love”, especially in the likes of San Francisco with its Haight Ashbury, where all kinds of hippies and some famous people lived. I also went to a city on the east side of San Francisco Bay, called Oakland, to see where Jack London lived and became an oyster pirate in his teens. The bar, “Heinold’s First and Last Chance Saloon”, which he frequented and got many ideas for his writings, is still there, including the original glassware and mahogany bar. In my teens I had the great good pleasure to be able to read many of Jack London’s fine stories and novels.

After the Vancouver year I went to several Scottish schools from age 11 to 18, then Edinburgh University and Herriot-Watt University. One of the best experiences I had living in the fine old city of Edinburgh was going to see the house which Robert Louis Stevenson lived in from age five until he was 28. It was up for sale in 1968, so I was able to pretend to be a prospective buyer! No chance of my doing that in my early twenties! I just wanted to imagine RLS being there, looking out the same windows, the same views through the eyes of the great writer. I like that kind of thing, a good exercise of the imagination.

It was a lovely home on three or four floors, full of light, with its own gardens at the back. It was obvious the family had been well off. RLS’s father Robert Stevenson was an engineer, famous in Scotland for building the Bell Rock Lighthouse off the east coast. I think RL was supposed to follow in dad’s footsteps but he took Law for a time at university. The Stevenson lighthouse was a lifesaver, the rocks there being treacherous, so his dad became a hero.

The great writer’s home was at 17 Heriot Row in Edinburgh’s beautiful Georgian New Town. It was totally amazing to stand and look out on the huge back gardens, seeing the same views as Stevenson did nearly 100 years before. He would have enjoyed the gardens, the hills and the same sight of sky. An interesting thing, the gardens contained a pond with a tiny island, and I thought surely the inspiration for “Treasure Island”.

One of the best things I often mind in this university time was with my friend doing summer work as a grave digger. Mostly it was cutting the grass in country graveyards but there was the occasional burial when we would have to put on special plastic coats to cover our work clothes. We were generally left to cut the grass as we wished and eat our picnic lunch (or a “piece” in Scots), lying on the grass propped up against a headstone. Yes, of course we said, “Rest in peace”!

My parents lived eventually in Edinburgh and one of their close neighbours was a lovely old woman named Miss Burrell whose father had been William Burrell. He had a whole museum in Glasgow dedicated to his life and art collection. I recall that one of Miss Burrell’s great stories was remembering how as a child she would bounce up and down on a huge pile of Persian rugs. Her flat was up a long flight of stairs in a terraced row of Edwardian houses in south Edinburgh, each with a basement (for the servants long ago) and two upper floors with large bay windows.

My parents lived in a converted basement, the great advantage of such being access to a garden at the back. They would see Miss Burrell from time to time either going out or returning. She always had a cheery smile and would give a wave with a gloved hand. My mother would greet her warmly and have a chat, loving her aristocratic style. My father had no recognition of such finery and would say to her, “Aye, Miss Burrell, hoo ur ye daen the day, ye auld bugger?” Fortunately, she was a bit deaf, and would reply amicably, “Oh, Mr Bathgate, and how are you? I hope you are well.” My mother intervened with, “Oh, Miss Burrell, how lovely to see you.”

In 1971, on the persuasion of my mother who found an advert for graduate teachers to train at a school in New Zealand, I taught for five years at a good new place, taking time out to obtain my Diploma in Teaching. This proved to be a great move giving me a professional qualification. It surely enabled me to apply for a position at Wellington Polytechnic, where I taught for five years. It was great there teaching all sorts of different adults in interesting jobs or doing training for the likes of journalism and nursing. At polytechnic they gave me one day a week at one of their branches involved with Teaching English as Second Language. I sharply remember one of my classes had nine different mother tongues in it. I loved it!

I did a year away to experience different teaching at a college of Technical and Further Education (TAFE) in Mackay, Queensland. I’ll never forget the young apprentices I helped with communication skills telling me that the pronunciation of their city rhymed with “hay”. I would tell them that I doubted if its Scottish founder, John Mackay would be too happy with that. In Mackay I enjoyed acting and directing in the local theatre. There were also visits to Brisbane and Melbourne to stay with friends, and there were outings to three islands in the Whitsundays off the coast of Queensland. So it was a good year but I was sorry to miss participating in the huge protests in New Zealand against South Africa’s Springbok rugby team touring the country.

I returned to New Zealand at the end of 1981 to do some planning with my partner to go to Japan to try for English teaching jobs. She had just done a year obtaining a qualification at university in Teaching English as Second Language. We were pleased to find work at a good school in Tokyo, and spent the next nearly 20 years helping thousands of businessmen and many others to communicate more fluently. My wife got a good job teaching the wives of Japan Air Lines employees about to be sent overseas to live.

I wonder from time to time if having several countries and cultures in one’s life is all right. I can envy the steadiness and ease of those who chose to stay in one place. I can feel both full and empty: full when travelling to various countries and they are familiar and welcoming; empty when spending time in one of them and not feeling connected to it, but because of having to stay there a while, I can feel that it should be more accustomed, more attaching, generating a more patriotic sentiment even. A certain loss creeps over and into my heart as I recall the deep feelings for Scotland and New Zealand in long-ago days. It's surely wonderful to have them … Japan, too!

We have been back in New Zealand over 20 years now, tending the gardens of various places lived in. I’ll not recount some good stories of this time, thinking enough is enough. You, dear reader must be respected. I hope that this short “remembering” has been interesting enough though.

I’ll leave you with a fine old song from 1961, suitably book-ending these unique tales from my past: “Remember Then” by The Earls