A Traveller in Two Worlds Vol 2 sampler

A Traveller in Two Worlds
Volume Two: The Tinker and the Student
DAVID CAMPBELL

First published 2012
isbn: 978 1 908373 32 8
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© David Campbell 2012

For Cinderella, Linda Jane Williamson

david campbell

the tinker and the student
Contents
Acknowledgements 9
Preface 11
chapter 1 The Fallow Years 13
chapter 2 The Folk Revival 28
chapter 3 The Student 34
chapter 4 The Tinker’s Tale 56
chapter 5 Fairyland with the Fairy Queen 76
chapter 6 Happy Days 87
chapter 7 Out of the Blue Again 97
chapter 8 Wheel of Fortune 110
chapter 9 Wounds 128
chapter 10 Into the Wider World 132
chapter 11 Survival Arts 139
chapter 12 Death 153
chapter 13 The Cairn of Stories 162
chapter 14 Moving On 173
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the tinker and the student
Acknowledgements
I wish to thank the many people who have borne with me, encouraged me
and contributed in various ways to the completion of this work.
Firstly, the Williamson family for their warmth, freely given information
and help. Duncan’s widow Linda for the refreshing honesty and eloquence
of her story and her literary camaraderie. My publisher Gavin MacDougall
for his helpful suggestions, and Jennie Renton and the rest of the Luath
team. Diana Cater for her critical acumen and positive comments as the
book progressed. Catriona Murray for help with format, choice and
arrangement of photographs, and Peter Cooke for his permission to use
his material.
For permission to use images I thank Robin Gillanders, the School of
Scottish Studies, Peter Cooke, Linda Williamson and Jimmy Williamson;
I am also grateful to the Evening Times and Herald and to the Hamilton
Advertiser for permission to reproduce photographs in their copyright.
I thank Barbara McLean for her advice, support and editorial insights.
I am grateful to Jackie and Robin Mackenzie for the writing sanctuary
of their flat in Dalkeith when I was completing the book.
My special thanks to my indefatigable and patient assistant Celine Leuty
for her dedicated help in typing, correcting and enjoying my idiosyncrasies.
The financial support of the literary department of the Scottish Arts
Council made the research, recordings and writing of the work possible.
I wish to thank the Estate of George Mackay Brown for use of his
poem ‘Prologue’ and Birlinn Ltd. for use of ‘In Memoriam’ from Norman
MacCaig’s Collected Poems.
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the tinker and the student
Preface
in this second of two volumes I try to fulfil my promise to Duncan
to tell the stories of his life. In bringing the work together I made tape
recorded conversations with Duncan over ten years and interviewed
many of his family, friends and admirers. The first volume of A Traveller
in Two Worlds tells the story of the tinker/traveller Duncan Williamson’s
colourful and eventful early life alongside my own twenty years of fun,
topsy turvy companionship and travels with this charismatic friend. That
book concludes with the death, aged thirty-nine of his wife, Jeannie with
whom he had seven children. Of these, the three oldest boys Jimmy, Willie
and John still lived with Duncan in the travellers’ tent. The two youngest,
Sandra aged three and Isabella aged one had been adopted by Duncan’s
childless brother Jimmy and his wife Edith.
In the first volume Duncan’s life is largely in the world of the traveller.
In this he progressively becomes part of the non-traveller community in
his own idiosyncratic way and becomes a world renowned storyteller and
‘character’.
The title The Tinker and the Student was Duncan’s own suggestion.
Since its core and heart are the consequences of Duncan’s meeting with, and
marriage to, the young American research student Linda Jane Headlee, it is
as much her story as his. She was and is his Pygmalion who brought him to
life in another world and at the time of writing is still publishing and telling
his stories and giving his voice breath. With both of these luminous people
I lived closely for many years, each as remarkable as the other, both with
huge talent and strident wills that made an incendiary and creative flame.
The glow of that flame still warms the hearth of Scottish Storytelling and
sends sparks far beyond.
The Tinker and the Student concludes with Duncan’s death in 2007 and
the effects of these sparks into this ‘beyond’.
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the tinker and the student
1
The Fallow Years
To every thing there is a season,
and a time to every purpose under the heaven:
A time to be born, and a time to die;
a time to plant, and a time to pluck up
that which is planted.
Ecclesiastes iii
duncan williamson, the man born in a tinker’s tent in 1928 on the
shores of Loch Fyne into a family of fifteen brothers and sisters, and now
acclaimed as ‘simply the best storyteller in the English speaking world’, is
sitting beside me weeping in my Edinburgh New Town flat. It is 1998. We
are continuing to record the story of his life.
‘I had never sung since my wife Jeannie died, but I’d never forgotten
about it. I concentrated on writing songs and writing poems. I had a large
book and wrote all these things down. We were sitting one night in the
tent, the boys and me, and I was saying how easy it is to get to Inveraray,
and how long it used to be with horse and cart. That’s when my song
came, the horse song.’
‘Sing it for me.’
‘I’ll sing it now if you want to record it.’
He gathers himself and we record it. In his eye-holding, intent and
Ancient Mariner way he sings the first song he’d made after the death of
Jeannie, ‘My Old Horse and Me’.
O the summer time has come again, it surely breaks my heart
When I think of the happy days I’ve spent with my old horse and cart.
The roads they were not long for him nor yet too long for me
It’s on the road I used to go, my old horse and me.
O many’s the time on a winter’s night he stood tied to a tree
With no a bite to gie to him and no a bite for me;
With a wee bit hap across his back to shelter him from the snow
And I kent it’s in the morning on the road we’d have to go.
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Many’s the time upon the road, my old dead horse he’d cast a shoe
Up to the smiddie I would gang, to the smiddie man I’d view
‘I cannae buy a new shoe,’ to the smiddie man I’d say,
‘O put me on an auld ane, I’m sure it will have to do.’
His tenor voice wavers, tears cloud his eyes and he weeps, pours himself
another whisky and lights another fag. It is not only the horses that are gone;
it is not only that the tractors, combine harvesters, milking machines, and that
mechanical tattie howkers have replaced itinerant workers and the Travelling
People. It is the more bewildering and incomprehensible end of a way of life.
The loss of his wife Jeannie, mother to seven of his children, the death of
his father, seem nails in the coffin of his past. ‘It’s all gone, David, all gone.’
There was no denying Duncan was sad but he could inhabit nostalgia with
thespian panache. His tears lubricated the telling and, within the sorrow,
was always the consciousness that we were recording the stories of his life.
He saw himself as a protagonist in the scenes of his own existence. The
storyteller’s greatest story was his own.
‘So, here was I, David, Jeannie gone, my father gone and I was left
with the three boys; Jimmie was nineteen, Willie seventeen and Johnnie
fifteen. The two wee girls Sandra and Isobel as I told you had been given
to my young brother Jimmie and his wife Edith. Jimmie had said, “I’ll take
Sandra and Isobel and bring them up as my own. And you keep the boys
because you can look after the boys better.”’
And so he did.
According to Jimmie, his eldest son, he looked after not just the boys but
a small tribe of them – two cousins and often two or three others. Duncan’s
tent was an open invitation, ‘And,’ said Jimmie, ‘he was always gathering
waifs and strays.’ Gathering them and feeding them, cooking succulent
oxtails, sausages and his famous giant pancakes in his famous giant pan.
And now, the horse and cart gone, he could visit his mother in just two
hours. He was relieved to find his mother hale and in good spirits, living
not in the tent at Furnace but in a hut by courtesy of the Duke of Argyll at
Inveraray where she was working in the castle kitchen.
‘I couldna forget my wife, right enough, but life must go on. The boys
and I worked all summer long at the whelks.’ Family ties, the incessant
work on the shore, the balm of passing time were healing the grief. There
were other distractions, but caring for the boys was his priority.
The other distractions included periods of drinking and socialising with
other traveller families. Perhaps the drink and convenient amnesia put
from Duncan’s mind a liaison with Mabel Townsley who lived in a bus at
Tayinloan on the road to Campbeltown. It is something he did not speak
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the tinker the fallow and the years student
of but the consequences of what his son Jimmy and wife Nancy speculated,
was probably a ‘one night stand’, were to emerge dramatically from the
womb of time. However, his main concern was looking after the boys.
Camped near Campbeltown, half a mile from the old mill in Tanguy
Glen (where his father was born and married), Duncan took the boys for
a walk up the old farm road to see the mill, a place pregnant, not to say
fertile, with family histories, a Gretna Green to the travelling folk. Here he
told the boys the story we now recorded:
There were two brothers, one was blind, my father tellt me, and a
sister, and they ran the mill with a great big water wheel, a wooden
wheel, and the grist mill was for the local farmers coming in with their
horses and carts and bags of oats.
The older brothers and sister in those days had a pantry outside
in the side of the wall; no fridge or freezer or anything. They would
keep milk and meat and cheese in this pantry outside. These things
were put there in case a runaway couple came. The pantry was never
locked. The old brother and sister let the young people have access
to their pantry. All three of them enjoyed the company of the young
people sleeping in the barn – a kind of Gretna Green, as I said. You
slept one night together in the mill and you were married. That was
accepted. The older brother who was not blind, would come around
in the morning, shake hands with them and ask if they had a good
night. He was like the blacksmith in Gretna.
My father was married at the mill and he was born at the mill.
You see, my grandfather and granny had run away. They had stayed
the night in the old mill. Many years later the young couple were on
the road – just like my mother being born in a cave, as I told you –
and they took shelter in the old mill and my granny gave birth to my
father. Yes, he was born in Tanguy Mill, where his parents had run
away and got married. Isn’t that amazing?
When me and the boys got there the old mill was derelict. It was
in ruins. The old mill folk, the old brothers and sister, were gone in
history. But the walls and pieces of the old mill was still there.
Time for a break, David. Maybe one day I’ll take you up to that
old mill.
I didn’t ever see that old mill with Duncan, but the legacy it symbolised
was soon to be once more realised. Willie, now seventeen, was a strong fit
young man and restless. Restless for adventure and he wanted to join the
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Army. Duncan wouldn’t have it. ‘In no way would I let him, David.’
Not only had Duncan heard the history of family First World War
tragedies and witnessed the psychological bruising of his own brother, but
he had a deep hatred of uniformity, regimentation. Willie was seventeen,
Duncan refused to give his permission and wouldn’t sign the papers.
Duncan’s family, like my own, had been scarred by the sufferings of
two world wars, the deaths and legacy of grief and psychological trauma.
For my mother until she died, aged ninety-four, the 20th of July was a day
of sorrow. On his twentieth birthday, my brother was killed in a Stirling
bomber and the shock aborted the child that my mother was carrying.
I always could feel the pall of sadness on that day.
I noted in a journal I kept a conversation Duncan and I had in my house
on the subject of uniforms, which were anathema to both of us. ‘Strange
to say,’ he’d told me, he had fallen in love aged nine, totally in love, with
a girl named Rosie. But their big disagreement was when Rosie joined
the Brownies, and got a Brownie uniform and said loud and clear that he
should join the Cubs and have a uniform. But somehow deep down inside
he said he could not, would not wear a uniform, ‘not even for these big
blue eyes, no way, David, no way!’
I recalled for him my total resistance to overtures to join the ccf
(Combined Cadet Force) at George Heriot’s. My urge was confirmed when
I heard the raucous, saw-edged bullying school boy sergeant bawling at
young recruits. It didn’t help that my incompetent Maths teacher was in
charge of these recruits, nor that there were rumours of queer goings-on in
the tents at night on ccf summer camps.
On Armistice Days, I told Duncan, when I was a twelve-year-old,
I hid. All the cadets were in uniform. At the school cenotaph a service was
held and the boys who had lost a father or brother were invited to be in
the front row. I hid, even at that age horrified at being part of a uniform
lament when my own sadness about the death of my brother was totally
private. Both of our dislikes of uniform went deep. Duncan would not sign
the papers for Willie’s enlistment, but astutely kept him happy by buying
him ‘a nice wee Ford 8 car’.
Willie satisfied his combative instincts by joining a Kung Fu club
in Muthill and later became, as his brother Jimmy told me, a British
champion in that art. The purchase of the wee car, however, was to have
its consequences. Willie was now his own man. What a horse had been to
his father, the car was to Willie, recognition of his independence. Up from
the field where Duncan and the Williamson boys were camped near Crieff,
was Mr Simpson’s farm:
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the tinker the fallow and the years student
A young woman about nineteen came down from Mr Simpson’s farm.
She came down for the company because she lived there with her
parents, a wee country gurie. The boys used to tease her. She became
well known. She came almost every night and played with the lads
and carried on. She was a bit of a tom-boy and was a hairdresser in
Crieff. Saturday night everybody would go off to town. Willie went
away in his Ford 8 car and off to the pictures, took some of the boys
with him. Next morning was Sunday. We got up, came to the fire, put
the kettle on, when in comes a Land Rover! George Simpson from the
neighbouring farm.
‘Good morning, George, you lost a dog or something?’
He said, ‘Is the boys all home?’
I looked. Willie’s car wasn’t back. I said, ‘No, George, Willie never
came back home last night. I hope he didna get into any trouble. He
went to the pictures in Crieff.’
‘Well,’ he said, ‘Margaret never came home last night. Her
bedroom’s empty.’
Margaret phoned from London. Willie and Margaret were in
London. Old Violet, George Simpson’s wife, went berserk.
‘You know what you’ve done? You’ve put us to disgrace, your
father and me, running away with a tinker boy.’
Margaret said, ‘He’s a traveller boy. I love him, and he is gaunna
be my husband. If you can’t accept him you can’t accept me. I’m not
coming back.’
They phoned the police, phoned all around. George’s wife, Violet,
phoned her brother who was a lawyer, told him her daughter had run
off with a tinker boy.
‘What age is Margaret?’ her brother asked.
‘Nineteen.’
‘What age is the young man? Older?’
‘No, he’s younger.’
‘Well,’ he said, ‘if I was you, I’d forget it.’
Next time Margaret phoned her mother she was expecting a baby.
‘If you want me back you’ll have to accept Willie.’
‘Ye’d better come back then.’
So they came back, made Willie welcome, and they stayed with her
father and mother. Willie joined the Kung Fu club in Perth working
with old George on the farm. George got them a council house in
Auchterarder and Margaret gave birth to a wee baby boy, Graham
they called him.
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