Fifty Years Ago. Saturday, 14 August 1976
Loch Maree — Age 14¾
Bright sun and a dead calm. Awful conditions for fishing. It doesn’t look as though I’ll get any fish.
We set off for the back of the islands. Slioch rises in the distance like a gigantic megalith, bigger than the pyramids. The islands themselves are thick with trees. Everything is on an enormous scale. Across the loch there is a lone shepherd’s hut and almost nothing else. Other boats are always remote. There is hardly any traffic on the only road.
We stop for an hour on Witches Point. The story is that women accused of witchcraft were once ducked there in the loch. If they drowned, they were innocent; if they survived, they were witches. A sensible arrangement devised by adults. The Gaelic name, Rudha Chailleach, means roughly the Point of the Old Woman. (landscapesforyou.scot)
Someone suggests I go for a swim. Naturally, I am the only one who does. It is very cold.
A fish starts taking bread from the back of the boat and I try to catch it. I would never have been allowed a net or live bait. It is fly-fishing or nothing, even when the fish itself appears to have different ideas.
With the fishing hopeless, the ghillie finds things for the child to do. I pan for gold. I try to carve a spoon, almost certainly using his knife. Then I sunbathe. I have always been rather lizard-like where sunshine is concerned.
Eventually the wind comes up, so we have sandwiches for lunch afloat. We come in at five.
Dad gets talking to a French couple staying at the hotel. We have already noticed that north-west Scotland seems surprisingly popular with the French. The conversation moves through politics, Russia’s rearmament and my education.
Russia is ordinary Cold War conversation. My education is perhaps more interesting. I am at a traditional all-male boarding school: Latin, church, conventional subjects and conventional values. In France, I gather, pupils at a lycée may actually study politics, philosophy and global economics—the things being discussed around them in the real world.
Dad may even be speaking some French. He had got an A in French in his end-of-year examinations in the late 1940s, roughly his equivalent of our A-levels.
I leave them talking and sit in the car to listen to the news. I turn the ignition on for the radio, thereby risking a flat battery.
I want current affairs from Great Britain, though up here even the news feels Scottish. Perhaps some of it is even in Gaelic.
Outside, Slioch is still there, considerably larger than Russia
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