On Doodling

My secondary school was very traditional, with a “good reputation”. Uniforms were strictly proscribed, right down to underwear and swimming costume, for use in the unheated, outdoor pool. Order was maintained by authoritarian teachers who had been there for decades, and prefects, who monitored behavior and whether we were still wearing our boaters and berets all the way home on the school bus. Our first homework was to take home our jotters and cover them, using brown paper – nothing else – to a strict pattern. On the front, using a ruler at all times, we wrote our names, class and the subject. Nothing else.

I became best friends with the second-in-command art teacher’s daughter. The art department was bright and modern, with lots of materials and media for us to use, and foot-operated potter’s wheels. I joined the lunchtime art club and loved making lopsided, fall-apart pots, which never came up to the scratch of being selected for glazing and firing.

Some time around the Summer of Love, our rarely seen, distant headmaster retired, and was replaced by a younger model that you kept bumping into in the corridors. The senior art master also left and a climate of staff changes, hitherto unknown, began. My friend’s dad became head of art, and the potter’s wheels were taken away overnight. Apparently, they cramped our creative style. Uniform code was relaxed – and ultimately “banned” by the headteacher. Most of the petty rules we loved to get angry about were dumped. Prefects were pensioned off. Some giddy-eyed young teachers encouraged us to address them by their first names.

Our new head of art, wings unclipped, sought recognition for his progressive, avant-garde department. It was he that first suggested we doodled on the covers and in the margins of our jotters. There had always been teachers who turned a blind eye to a smattering of doodle on the inside cover – like the thoroughly modern teacher of Russian, and the lazy history teacher who was only entrusted with the first years. Others, of the old school, would reward even a full stop after the subject name with detention. But there came an edict: doodling on and in jotters was no longer a punishable offence. It was to be encouraged in order to bring out our inner artists. Awkwardly, sanctioned doodling began. Pupils became competitive about their flower-power designs. Some gained a talent for cartoons. There was no punishment when my French jotter carried an unflattering but cruelly recognisable caricature of Mademoiselle C, the teacher.

Doodling, whatever the excuse, became a habit.

Doodling expanded onto the pristine walls of corridors and classrooms. Not spontaneous graffiti, however. On the Russian teacher’s classroom wall, we painted St. Basil’s Cathedral in Moscow, with all its onion domes. The windows of the art department became opaque with rainbows of paint. Discarding the conventional, embracing “new” art in its broadest sense, rewarded our teacher with a visit from the Secretary of State for Education. His arrival was carefully contrived to coincide with a doodling-type dance display by two of us girls – of course – to a projected slide containing ink and fairy liquid, swirling and boiling in the projector lamp’s heat, accompanied by drumbeats from a couple of the boys – of course. The Minister glanced in, got the picture, and left rapidly.

The shelving of rules, the constant changes, the abandonment of distance and discipline left those pupils who had started under a very different ethos confused and sometimes angry. So were many of the staff. What do you do with a teenager, programmed to rebel, when you take away all the small stuff that’s been joyfully resisted by generations of adolescents? Some turned to bigger and more dangerous stuff to prove they were different. Sometimes, we took direct action against the new liberal order – such as holding an “illegal” Christmas carol concert when the traditional one was axed.

I left school early. The progressive trend lurched on, at least until the headmaster ran off with one of his sixth-year pupils. The art teacher left to be creative in Devon. About six years later, I found myself teaching in the same local authority, and had cause to visit the school for some event or other. I noted the blank, crisply-painted walls in the corridors. Clear glass sparkled in the windows of the art block. Uniforms, I observed, had returned. The backlash was in progress. It would have been a relief for my generation of rebels in need of tiny causes. I’m not sure if that still holds true – today’s young students have so many big causes to fight and need all the help they can get.

I never lost the doodling habit, though. It helps me concentrate, focus, relax – and learn.

Feral Berries

These fields, which now yawn under the predictable rotation of wheat, barley, potatoes and the occasion excitement of peas or beans, were all berry fields once. It was the biggest and best-known of five plantations around here, where canvas tinker villages sprouted annually at harvest time, and the needs of the workforce were met in this now silent, gone-to-work, wee town by a wealth of grocers, bakers, butchers, innkeepers, tailors and shoemakers. At least five surgeons lived here in case of accident or emergency. The berries that weren’t eaten on the spot or smuggled home by the pickers all went south, on the new branch line connected to the village for the purpose, to become jam on well-to-do breakfast tables.

Now in the quiet forgetfulness of displaced industry and commuter inertia, tangled woods wrap themselves round the margins of large exposed fields. The old track takes you past the farmhouse that is no longer a farm, the steading that is no longer a steading, and wanders aimlessly north, between the remnants of its hedgerows. Long ago, it was the only road north, save for an older track across the moss.

Here and there, a narrow change in fencing or a wooden post marks where one of the many footpaths to and from the berry fields used to run. A curious right of way plummets through someone’s back garden and still has legal status. Patches of No Man’s Land persist, and where they do, the ghosts of the berry fields haunt and echo.

feral berries 1 In the dense shade of a triumphant elder spinney, a smattering of redcurrant bushes blooms and fruits, scant rich redness catching the eye as the berries ripen. They are small and sour, yet somehow incandescently flavoursome. Where the track narrows to a muddy path, wild gooseberries make a wee thicket. Their fruits are also tiny, and round. Are they genuinely wild?

Or the depleted progeny of an old cultivar, maybe Scottish Chieftain or Lord Elcho, prized a century ago, now nearly forgotten?

But the raspberries, they are everywhere; an abundance that makes cultivation seem a frivolous and needless expenditure of time. They spring from lawns and borders in untidy local gardens, in numbers that cannot be put down to the activities of a large and hungry population of blackbirds. They line the hedges that border the track, they rise lushly above the willow herb and tall grasses of woodland clearings. They are bountiful enough to gather for the freezer, but, more often, they make a wayside breakfast for people out with their dogs on sunny summer mornings, staring vacantly into the trees, popping raspberries like pills.

In one small hedge remnant, the raspberries go unseen and untried by strangers. These IMG_20190727_093257760 diminutive rasps are a pale golden yellow. They hide behind fiercely protective stands of nettle, and amid the jaggy stems of the hawthorn. These are the sweetest, most succulent of the feral berries. They melt in the mouth and almost dissolve in the hand. Any attempts to gather a large quantity fail; they are nought but juice by the time they get home. Those who know about them keep a close eye, and say nothing, then give the game away when it’s picking time by beating narrow paths through the grass and nettles to get at this choice fruit.

All in the past now, the Auchtergaven and Bankfoot berry fields. The history of a place often speaks through its plants, and may have something to say about its present..

There are Trees in Sutherland

The last time I was in Assynt I was nine or ten, on my first visit to Scotland. My big sister and her boyfriend took me camping on a road trip that began in Glasgow and ended at Cape Wrath. For a child from the suburbs of East London, it was nothing short of life-changing. As we returned to their flat in Glasgow, my sister asked me which places I liked best.

“Wester Ross,” I said.

“Not Sutherland?”

I thought for a bit. “I liked it. But I liked Wester Ross more.”

“Was Sutherland too harsh and wild for you?”

I sensed a trick question. My sister always wanted to toughen me up. She reveled in wild and empty open spaces, the complete absence of people. I wanted her approval. But something in her question rang true. It wasn’t that Wester Ross was softer, meeker, but somehow – I couldn’t explain – somehow there were more….

“Trees,” I announced. “I like trees. There were no trees in Sutherland.”

I’ve had decades since to reflect on my response. At that time, the North-west Highlands were remote, empty of people. Settlements were sparse, inhabitants few, and tourists virtually non-existent. But I could see where people had been. The ruins of dry-stonewalled houses and whole villages stood everywhere, a testimony to clearance, plague, poverty and emigration. Crumbled walls, sometimes just foundations, a gable or a chimney pointing here and there to the sky. You couldn’t miss them. Our wild campsites were up the remains of old tracks that led to derelict hamlets. I remember one that I would walk around every morning. A little way from the ruined houses I saw a weird cairn-like structure of four or five strategically placed, flattish stones. I lifted them. Below a deep, dark hole blinked at me. There was a melancholy, metallic splash when I dropped in a stone. I’d discovered the well, and it stared back at me, naked and accusing. The cover stones might have been placed just yesterday. Feeling a sickness and strange fear in my stomach, I tried to replace them exactly as I’d found them – in case someone came back.

I don’t think I’m just speaking with informed hindsight when I say that I sensed there was something wrong about the bleak emptiness and the ruins. The further north we got, the more pronounced it became, perhaps because of the lack of tree cover. Maybe there were trees in Sutherland back then, but I didn’t see them. My guardians preferred walks on bare hills, peat-bogs and wind-blasted coasts.

trees in sutherland But last week I was in Assynt again, and if there were many changes, it was the trees I noticed first. It’s nearly 26 years since the first ever community buy-out of land in the area by the Assynt Crofters Trust, and there have been others in the area since. The first trees I found myself looking at were less than 25 years old. I walked in vibrant young woodland at Little Assynt, above the shores of the great loch. Deer fencing surrounded large tracts of land. Birch, rowan, hazel, Scots pine…… willows, elders, hollies and even aspen…… planted by Culag Community Woodland Trust or regenerated naturally within the fences. Outwith the fences, though, trees were also regenerating, especially birch and willow. Sheep, ironically, seem to have been cleared to the coasts. Deer pose for tourists around townships, but their numbers are controlled. Bluebells and primroses are appearing under the bracken.

So, there were woods here before, then.

The Assynt downy birches are wonderful stunted specimens, all arms and legs as they branch and branch again and gesticulate over a landscape of ferns and mosses and blueberries. I saw very old birches in woods up a river valley – huge, shaggy trunks breaking into wiry, angular limbs about three feet from the base, and still sending up new wood. It seemed pretty clear they’d been pollarded for their timber a long, long time ago.

There were woods here before, and they were valued and sustainably harvested.

There’s a native tree nursery at Little Assynt, whose owners work tirelessly among the midgies to produce more trees, all from seed they’ve gathered locally. They’re pretty excited that after last summer, the aspens have flowered – a rare event in a species that prefers to clone itself vegetatively – bringing welcome genetic diversity into the local tree stock. At the Falls of Kirkaig, we bumped into a naturalist friend from near home in Perthshire (Scotland being such a gloriously small country), who had observed the same phenomenon. So, there we were, all getting excited about the future of a tree species in a place I’d remembered as treeless.

Of course, there are other changes. You have to look hard to find any old townships from pre-clearance times. The earth has swallowed them up. The roads are more solid, with no grass through the middle, so there are more motor vehicles and far more people. Mostly (but not all) tourists. A few whizz about, thinking it some kind of achievement to “do” the North Coast 500 in a day, or delude themselves that they can capture the essence of Sutherland from the inside of some huge, self-contained box-on-wheels that couldn’t fit into a passing place even if the driver recognised one. Sutherland could perhaps use fewer of these. But many linger, fall in love with the mountains and the deep valleys, accept the weather, and engage with the landscape – and come back. Sutherland has become accessible to tourists. It has learned to cater for them, and yes, it is busier, less remote, less empty.

But there are trees in Sutherland.