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Great Aunt Babs
The following morning we drove south to Glasgow to see Scott’s parents, and on the next day we made the last stage of our journey, with Scott’s father (his mother had a cold and could not go), to a nursing home in Inchinnan, Renfrewshire, to visit Scott’s great aunt Babs. At 96, Babs is the last surviving child of Ally Alistair, and we were obviously intrigued to see what she could tell us. She is very elderly now, and quite confused – she thought I was her nephew Rory – but when Scott showed her the pictures of Badnaban and her old friend and relation Nan MacLeod, her memories of childhood were both clear and witty.
Babs stated that her father’s father had moved to Badnaban – he would have been 2 in 1812, and therefore born at Cnocaneach. She also told us:
Ally Alistair. Had horses including one called Ness. His boat was called ‘The Nain’, ands she remembered the ‘lovely big lobsters’ that were sent away to Billingsgate. During the First World War he was in the Navy. He died aged 79 (she said 80), commenting ‘up there they died young’ – apparently, 80 was young and 90 old.
Mary Ann White was from Lossiemouth. She lost touch with her family there because there were no telephones.
Alice and Walter Hooks, her husband, would come back to visit occasionally, by car.
There was a family bible, but Greta buried it.
Lobster fishing still goes on in Badnaban, to this day, as we saw when we were there. Incidentally, another local MacLeod, Neil, of Polbain in Coigach (1855-1938), was a noted Gaelic poet and one of his surviving works, is Iasgach A’Ghioaich, ‘Lobster Fishing’, which paints a vivid picture of the grim reality of lobster fishing:
Sailing along with Barney to the foot of Rhu Mor,
Black and gloomy and grey grew the sky with clouds;
A north wind sought to blow, a snarl on every point,
The Bows were awful, no fun to be near them.
……
When we reached the anchorage and furled away her sail,
We were wet and hungry no spark of fire aboard;
It’s the lobster fishing that took my courage and strength away,
I’d sooner be a mason with a trowel in my hand
Life would have been no less easy for the female MacLeods, waiting at home anxiously for the men to return.
Thus, to our great question of why she and Alice had left Badnaban, Babs was perfectly clear. ‘It was a dump!’ she exclaimed ‘cows all over the place knocking down the fences’. Scott’s mother knows that Babs went down to Glasgow five years after her sister Alice. Alice worked at Kilmalcolm, earning 10 bob a week, and graduated to being the silver service servant – a far drier, warmer and from her point of view socially elevated job than grubbing about in a north-western croft.
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