Hello Everyone... these are my "Dad" stories...
Introduction.
By all accounts, my dad (Andrew Hall) must have been a bit of a handful.
Scoundrel, scallywag, you choose the term, but they all seem to describe him well.
He was born in 1933 (91 Tattie Raw) to parents Alexander Mair Hall, and Mabel Harrison.
Those were hard times, just at the ‘end’ of the great depression, and although by no means poor, they must have struggled like everybody else.
Granny and Papa Hall.
Setting the scene…
Alexander (Sandy) Mair Hall was born in 1903, just at the right age to be too young for the Great War. He was born in 130 Commonloch, Auchinleck, Ayrshire.
His father, Andrew Hall worked at the new Lugar pit.
Alexander was eleventh out of twelve children.
At ten years old, Sandy moved with his father and mother to Gorebridge, Midlothian. His dad, Andrew, had got a job at the new Arniston Colliery, and soon Sandy began working there too. He worked hard, and also attended evening classes at Heriot Watt University in Edinburgh to gain the appropriate qualifications for advancement.
With his eyes over the ocean, he soon arranged to travel to New York, USA, to take the position of Marine Engineer with an Uncle who had a small shipbuilding company.
He planned the trip, paid for his ticket, got his visa…
But his plans were thwarted by love. He met Mabel Harrison, a local Dalkeith girl, and forgetting all his dreams of America, they soon were married.
As Mabel entered the last few days of pregnancy, on the 9th November, 1933, just eight days before the birth of his newest great-grandson, Andrew Hall died in Newbyres Cottages, in Gorebridge, Midlothian. He was 70. Years of working in the mines had taken their toll, like so many of the Halls.
The week after, days after Andrew’s burial, Alexander and Mabel Hall had their first son; they named him Andrew after the grandfather he would never see. It had been a tradition for ten generations, one which the newest Andrew would be forced to break with me.
So, with a large extended Hall family, Mabel was probably ruled by Granny Agnes Hall for the next five years. She was reportedly a bit of an ogre, and my dad, the new Andrew, remembered her as ‘always grumpy’.
Agnes Mair ruled in the Hall household for another five years, three days before the turn of the year, on 28th December, 1938, she died, aged 72.
So, at the age of 35, Sandy was the head of his own small family.
George, named after Mabel’s father and eldest brother, was born around then; their family complete.
So… to dad’s stories…
The Tattie Field.
Dad went to Gorebridge Primary School when he was five. As far as I can remember, Will Slight, and Will Knox were his closest friends.
The earliest story was of an infant class project in which all the children were going to study farming. They were all given paper and colored pencils to draw a field of some kind of farmers produce.
My dad covered the page in straight lines, and sat back, job done.
When the teacher came round to see what the kids had come up with, there were fields of corn, carefully drawn green cabbages. Then she came to Dad.
“What’s that Andrew?”
“A Tattie Field, miss.” (Potato Field)
“It’s just lines!”
“Aye, the Tatties arn’ey up yet!” (The potatoes haven’t started growing yet)
Now I don’t know if this got him sent home with a letter from the teacher, but Papa Hall liked telling the story.
Telling The Truth.
Now, Dad went to Sunday School, and Papa Hall was a bit of a disciplinarian, so telling the truth was a big thing in Dad’s life.
So with that in mind, Granny Hall went to a church meeting in one of the ladies houses. It was a bit of a do, and the minister was going to attend.
Dad, probably aged 5-7-ish, was dragged along. He sat next to his mum, a bit overawed by the occasion, looking round the room for ages.
Then, at an appropriate quiet spell in the conversation, proudly informed his mother…
“This hoose is clarty!” (This house is dirty!)
To the dismay of the whole room, the chagrin of the owner, and the ARGH of my granny.
Pans for Spitfires
Gorebridge was close to the A9 road through the borders, from Edinburgh to all places south. An important trade route.
Dad told me a few times, how they used to go down to the Post Road (A9) during the war years and watch convoys of trucks with soldiers in, and big transporters carrying tanks south for the war effort.
Anything metal got used up in those dark days.
There are still plenty of evidence of railings, both in public places and private homes, cut at ground level, in Dalkeith and Edinburgh.
Dad was aged 6-11 in the war years.
Once in a while, trucks would come through the village, asking for metal pans and such to be made into spitfires. Dad would run into the house, looking for anything to give for such a worthy cause. He was that kind of boy. Head first into everything, regardless of the consequences.
Of course, the pans never actually went to making actual Spitfires, but, hey, it was a good con.
Kestrels
This one’s my favorite…
One spring as the birds laid their eggs and reared their young, Dad and younger brother George were walking alone down the Glen, down the road to Kirkhill House, when they spotted a Kestrel’s nest, high in a tree.
Dad wanted a closer look.
So upwards he climbed.
“I was only going for a look” he would later admit, but when he got thirty or forty feet up, (Yeah, kids of today, thirty or forty feet!) he actually got a look inside the nest. With the momma kestrel buzzing round his head, squawking and trying to peck him, he saw two baby kestrels, both with the start of feathers.
He couldn’t resist.
Grabbing one, and tucking it inside his shirt, he carefully climbed back down the tree to a waiting George, the momma kestrel pecking him all the way.
When down on the ground, he proudly showed George his prize.
“Where’s mine?” George asked.
Now most kids would have just told the wee brother to shut up, and they’d share or something, but not my dad. He stuck the bird carefully in George’s shirt, and went back up for the other one.
Same route, same outcome, the poor mother bird going nuts trying to defend her last chick.
“Now we’ve got one each.” Dad proudly stated when he’d got back down.
But the story doesn’t stop there.
They decided that they’d train the birds, and fly them when they got older.
The whole scenario was told later in the classic British film “Kes”, made in 1969. Funnily enough, about a scruffy ruffian boy in a coal mining town who makes friends with a kestrel. Hmm.
Well, the boys had air rifles, and they were good shots (George ended up joining the Royal Marines), so picked off sparrows, cut them up and fed them to the chicks. Things were going well.
Except that they were dragged kicking and screaming on holiday with their parents. Granny Hall loved the highlands of Scotland, so they probably went there.
Dad’s schoolmate, Willie Knox, agreed to look after the birds, and shoot fresh meat every day.
When the Halls came back from holiday, the birds were gone, and Willie Knox nowhere to be seen… turns out Willie was a really bad shot, and never got any meat for the chicks. The birds had died of starvation, and the Hall boys were devastated.
Fish into the paddling pool
Dad was a hobbyist. But the problem was, he wasn’t that good at keeping it going, he lost interest quickly. (I also now have the same problem… thank’s Dad.)
He kept fish in our garden shed. Tropical fish. All went well until we forgot to open the door one sunny day. (I was about seven years old, I think) Dad came home from work, found the floundering hot fish and proceeded to lift the tanks outside, putting them in my paddling pool to cool down. Emergency Cool Down!
Bird Obsession
1. Wild Birds & Sticky-sticks.
Yup… dad seemed to have a penchant for having fleeting hobbies; stuff he was passionate about for a year or two, then dropped as the next craze swept through his head. We lived next door to the Slights (Lynn Slight, and James Slight are still on Facebook), and my dad and Will Slight started keeping wild birds, and breeding them.
For us kids it was a great biology lesson in our own back garden; we got to see birds laying eggs, chicks hatching. We’d feed them, and yuk, we’d clean the cages out with bird poo.
The dads had a specific way to catch the birds, they’d take a caged bird out, a proven singer, and place ‘sticky sticks’ around it. These ‘sticky sticks’ were thin branches coated in a special ‘for-your-eyes-only sticky mix. The birds would get caught, and they’d be goners.
We had goldfinches, yellowhammers, warblers, blue tits, coal tits, it was a sight to behold, to see these marvelous birds up close. I still remember the smell of the hut we kept them in. I still remember blowing the spent seed husks off their small feeders.
2. Canaries & Budgies.
From wild birds, it was a small step to canaries. Bright yellows and small patches of black, sometimes a flash of blue or red. Budgies came next, sorry, budgerigars for the posh. Those birds were truly magnificent, the closest thing I ever got to owning a parrot. I swear some could talk. We had greens and blues that you thought were so vibrant, you’d swear we’d painted them.
3. Pidgeons.
Yup, and we graduated onto pidgeons, and that’s where I saw dad’s hatred of cats come to the fore.
We’d let them out in the morning, and we’d call them back to roost in the evening like some demented idiot.
Birds… thank goodness it stopped there, because he took a real keen interest in the main passion of his life… the fishin’.
The Fishin’
Ever since mum had known him, dad had been a keen angler.
When mum disappeared into Edinburgh on Saturdays to see her folks (taking me with her), dad got on a 95 bus on the post road… destination? The Borders.
He fished every river there, and many more. He’d come back home, and we’d have trout for tea. Fresh, just in the river hours before.
And of course, I got ‘hooked’ too.
There’s many tales I could tell, but one always comes to mind… more about his bloody-mindedness than the fishing.
We were fishing downstream one day, when we came to a large viaduct, its arches a good fifty- sixty feet high in the centre.
We had three choices…
1. Walk down in the water itself, but it was rough, treacherous. We had waders on, but just thigh high.
2. Walk under the arches, but it looked marshy.
3. Walk up the hill, across the road, and down the other side. But it was a bit of a climb.
I chose the latter, leaving dad to be stupid himself and try to make it across the marshy ground. I got to the other side to see him knee deep in mud, having made it halfway across.
I watched as he resolutely waded forward, despite my entreaties to turn back. (More like, “You’re being a bloody idiot! Turn round!”) Soon, he’d gotten to thirty feet of me, but was now thigh deep, and in danger of losing his waders.
By this time I knew I had to act, because it was getting kinda scary. I waded towards him, and got myself as far as I could go without me getting stuck. One by one he threw all his accessories to me; rod, basket, the lot.
I could see the seriousness on his face… even dad was a bit scared.
Then I heard shouts from above; a builders lorry (truck) had seen our (dad’s) predicament, and had stopped on the bridge.
“We’ll drop a piece of plywood!” the guys shouted. I envisaged a small board that I could throw to him.
Oh crap.
An eight feet by four feet piece of plywood, sailed down to us like a piece of paper, swinging in the fall, one way then the other. If it had hit any of us, it would have taken our heads clean off.
Long story short, I got the plywood across the marsh to dad, and he climbed onboard.
So much for fishing!
More like International Rescue!
Cockerels and Fly-tying
Because we fished so much, and were constantly buying new fishing flies, Dad decided to try his hand at tying his own. He made a fly-tying vice, and we spent many nights tying flies for our hobby.
We even went to night-school, both in Musselburgh and Edinburgh to learn new techniques.
Great times.
But my dad always looked for an ‘edge’; some way to cut the fiscal corner.
He bought six cockerels, with the right capes (neck feathers) for fly tying, real good quality too, and for a while kept them in the greenhouse. These were far better feathers than the shops sold, real good quality. We’d wake up to the sound of cockerels crowing at odd hours of the night (my bedroom was right over the greenhouse, at the back of the house). Soon the neighbours complained, and we transferred them to a farmer my Dad knew, up near Drem Airbase, in East Lothian.
The plan?
To pull the feathers out of their necks, that gave us one harvest. Then we’d wait for them to grow back, kill the birds, get another feather harvest, and six good sized chickens for the pot.
Great plan. But of course it met with the usual Hall curse.
A fox got into the henhouse, killed all the chickens, and the poor farmer plucked the tail feathers for dad…. the wrong feathers for fly-tying.
Back to square one.
My first/last embrace, and our last words.
This one is harder to write than anything I’ve ever done.
The last time I saw dad alive was outside Edinburgh Airport, one early morning after one of my solo visits (I'm thinking 2005). He’d given me a lift to the airport, and ‘had’ to get my luggage out of the car boot for me.
He closed the boot, turned, and just hugged me.
The ONLY time I can remember him doing so in my whole life.
Man, just writing that brought tears back.
His last words to me are impossible to forget.
He was in the hospice, and the nurse thought it was important for me to talk to him direct. We chatted for about a minute or two, then, after a short pause, he said… “I love you, son.”
“I love you too, dad.” I said as he hung up. Karla, my wife, said she could hear the words across the room.
Like the hug, it was the first time I could ever recall he’d ever told me he loved me.
Dad wasn’t much for demonstrative displays of affection.
Love you too, dad.
By all accounts, my dad (Andrew Hall) must have been a bit of a handful.
Scoundrel, scallywag, you choose the term, but they all seem to describe him well.
He was born in 1933 (91 Tattie Raw) to parents Alexander Mair Hall, and Mabel Harrison.
Those were hard times, just at the ‘end’ of the great depression, and although by no means poor, they must have struggled like everybody else.
Granny and Papa Hall.
Setting the scene…
Alexander (Sandy) Mair Hall was born in 1903, just at the right age to be too young for the Great War. He was born in 130 Commonloch, Auchinleck, Ayrshire.
His father, Andrew Hall worked at the new Lugar pit.
Alexander was eleventh out of twelve children.
At ten years old, Sandy moved with his father and mother to Gorebridge, Midlothian. His dad, Andrew, had got a job at the new Arniston Colliery, and soon Sandy began working there too. He worked hard, and also attended evening classes at Heriot Watt University in Edinburgh to gain the appropriate qualifications for advancement.
With his eyes over the ocean, he soon arranged to travel to New York, USA, to take the position of Marine Engineer with an Uncle who had a small shipbuilding company.
He planned the trip, paid for his ticket, got his visa…
But his plans were thwarted by love. He met Mabel Harrison, a local Dalkeith girl, and forgetting all his dreams of America, they soon were married.
As Mabel entered the last few days of pregnancy, on the 9th November, 1933, just eight days before the birth of his newest great-grandson, Andrew Hall died in Newbyres Cottages, in Gorebridge, Midlothian. He was 70. Years of working in the mines had taken their toll, like so many of the Halls.
The week after, days after Andrew’s burial, Alexander and Mabel Hall had their first son; they named him Andrew after the grandfather he would never see. It had been a tradition for ten generations, one which the newest Andrew would be forced to break with me.
So, with a large extended Hall family, Mabel was probably ruled by Granny Agnes Hall for the next five years. She was reportedly a bit of an ogre, and my dad, the new Andrew, remembered her as ‘always grumpy’.
Agnes Mair ruled in the Hall household for another five years, three days before the turn of the year, on 28th December, 1938, she died, aged 72.
So, at the age of 35, Sandy was the head of his own small family.
George, named after Mabel’s father and eldest brother, was born around then; their family complete.
So… to dad’s stories…
The Tattie Field.
Dad went to Gorebridge Primary School when he was five. As far as I can remember, Will Slight, and Will Knox were his closest friends.
The earliest story was of an infant class project in which all the children were going to study farming. They were all given paper and colored pencils to draw a field of some kind of farmers produce.
My dad covered the page in straight lines, and sat back, job done.
When the teacher came round to see what the kids had come up with, there were fields of corn, carefully drawn green cabbages. Then she came to Dad.
“What’s that Andrew?”
“A Tattie Field, miss.” (Potato Field)
“It’s just lines!”
“Aye, the Tatties arn’ey up yet!” (The potatoes haven’t started growing yet)
Now I don’t know if this got him sent home with a letter from the teacher, but Papa Hall liked telling the story.
Telling The Truth.
Now, Dad went to Sunday School, and Papa Hall was a bit of a disciplinarian, so telling the truth was a big thing in Dad’s life.
So with that in mind, Granny Hall went to a church meeting in one of the ladies houses. It was a bit of a do, and the minister was going to attend.
Dad, probably aged 5-7-ish, was dragged along. He sat next to his mum, a bit overawed by the occasion, looking round the room for ages.
Then, at an appropriate quiet spell in the conversation, proudly informed his mother…
“This hoose is clarty!” (This house is dirty!)
To the dismay of the whole room, the chagrin of the owner, and the ARGH of my granny.
Pans for Spitfires
Gorebridge was close to the A9 road through the borders, from Edinburgh to all places south. An important trade route.
Dad told me a few times, how they used to go down to the Post Road (A9) during the war years and watch convoys of trucks with soldiers in, and big transporters carrying tanks south for the war effort.
Anything metal got used up in those dark days.
There are still plenty of evidence of railings, both in public places and private homes, cut at ground level, in Dalkeith and Edinburgh.
Dad was aged 6-11 in the war years.
Once in a while, trucks would come through the village, asking for metal pans and such to be made into spitfires. Dad would run into the house, looking for anything to give for such a worthy cause. He was that kind of boy. Head first into everything, regardless of the consequences.
Of course, the pans never actually went to making actual Spitfires, but, hey, it was a good con.
Kestrels
This one’s my favorite…
One spring as the birds laid their eggs and reared their young, Dad and younger brother George were walking alone down the Glen, down the road to Kirkhill House, when they spotted a Kestrel’s nest, high in a tree.
Dad wanted a closer look.
So upwards he climbed.
“I was only going for a look” he would later admit, but when he got thirty or forty feet up, (Yeah, kids of today, thirty or forty feet!) he actually got a look inside the nest. With the momma kestrel buzzing round his head, squawking and trying to peck him, he saw two baby kestrels, both with the start of feathers.
He couldn’t resist.
Grabbing one, and tucking it inside his shirt, he carefully climbed back down the tree to a waiting George, the momma kestrel pecking him all the way.
When down on the ground, he proudly showed George his prize.
“Where’s mine?” George asked.
Now most kids would have just told the wee brother to shut up, and they’d share or something, but not my dad. He stuck the bird carefully in George’s shirt, and went back up for the other one.
Same route, same outcome, the poor mother bird going nuts trying to defend her last chick.
“Now we’ve got one each.” Dad proudly stated when he’d got back down.
But the story doesn’t stop there.
They decided that they’d train the birds, and fly them when they got older.
The whole scenario was told later in the classic British film “Kes”, made in 1969. Funnily enough, about a scruffy ruffian boy in a coal mining town who makes friends with a kestrel. Hmm.
Well, the boys had air rifles, and they were good shots (George ended up joining the Royal Marines), so picked off sparrows, cut them up and fed them to the chicks. Things were going well.
Except that they were dragged kicking and screaming on holiday with their parents. Granny Hall loved the highlands of Scotland, so they probably went there.
Dad’s schoolmate, Willie Knox, agreed to look after the birds, and shoot fresh meat every day.
When the Halls came back from holiday, the birds were gone, and Willie Knox nowhere to be seen… turns out Willie was a really bad shot, and never got any meat for the chicks. The birds had died of starvation, and the Hall boys were devastated.
Fish into the paddling pool
Dad was a hobbyist. But the problem was, he wasn’t that good at keeping it going, he lost interest quickly. (I also now have the same problem… thank’s Dad.)
He kept fish in our garden shed. Tropical fish. All went well until we forgot to open the door one sunny day. (I was about seven years old, I think) Dad came home from work, found the floundering hot fish and proceeded to lift the tanks outside, putting them in my paddling pool to cool down. Emergency Cool Down!
Bird Obsession
1. Wild Birds & Sticky-sticks.
Yup… dad seemed to have a penchant for having fleeting hobbies; stuff he was passionate about for a year or two, then dropped as the next craze swept through his head. We lived next door to the Slights (Lynn Slight, and James Slight are still on Facebook), and my dad and Will Slight started keeping wild birds, and breeding them.
For us kids it was a great biology lesson in our own back garden; we got to see birds laying eggs, chicks hatching. We’d feed them, and yuk, we’d clean the cages out with bird poo.
The dads had a specific way to catch the birds, they’d take a caged bird out, a proven singer, and place ‘sticky sticks’ around it. These ‘sticky sticks’ were thin branches coated in a special ‘for-your-eyes-only sticky mix. The birds would get caught, and they’d be goners.
We had goldfinches, yellowhammers, warblers, blue tits, coal tits, it was a sight to behold, to see these marvelous birds up close. I still remember the smell of the hut we kept them in. I still remember blowing the spent seed husks off their small feeders.
2. Canaries & Budgies.
From wild birds, it was a small step to canaries. Bright yellows and small patches of black, sometimes a flash of blue or red. Budgies came next, sorry, budgerigars for the posh. Those birds were truly magnificent, the closest thing I ever got to owning a parrot. I swear some could talk. We had greens and blues that you thought were so vibrant, you’d swear we’d painted them.
3. Pidgeons.
Yup, and we graduated onto pidgeons, and that’s where I saw dad’s hatred of cats come to the fore.
We’d let them out in the morning, and we’d call them back to roost in the evening like some demented idiot.
Birds… thank goodness it stopped there, because he took a real keen interest in the main passion of his life… the fishin’.
The Fishin’
Ever since mum had known him, dad had been a keen angler.
When mum disappeared into Edinburgh on Saturdays to see her folks (taking me with her), dad got on a 95 bus on the post road… destination? The Borders.
He fished every river there, and many more. He’d come back home, and we’d have trout for tea. Fresh, just in the river hours before.
And of course, I got ‘hooked’ too.
There’s many tales I could tell, but one always comes to mind… more about his bloody-mindedness than the fishing.
We were fishing downstream one day, when we came to a large viaduct, its arches a good fifty- sixty feet high in the centre.
We had three choices…
1. Walk down in the water itself, but it was rough, treacherous. We had waders on, but just thigh high.
2. Walk under the arches, but it looked marshy.
3. Walk up the hill, across the road, and down the other side. But it was a bit of a climb.
I chose the latter, leaving dad to be stupid himself and try to make it across the marshy ground. I got to the other side to see him knee deep in mud, having made it halfway across.
I watched as he resolutely waded forward, despite my entreaties to turn back. (More like, “You’re being a bloody idiot! Turn round!”) Soon, he’d gotten to thirty feet of me, but was now thigh deep, and in danger of losing his waders.
By this time I knew I had to act, because it was getting kinda scary. I waded towards him, and got myself as far as I could go without me getting stuck. One by one he threw all his accessories to me; rod, basket, the lot.
I could see the seriousness on his face… even dad was a bit scared.
Then I heard shouts from above; a builders lorry (truck) had seen our (dad’s) predicament, and had stopped on the bridge.
“We’ll drop a piece of plywood!” the guys shouted. I envisaged a small board that I could throw to him.
Oh crap.
An eight feet by four feet piece of plywood, sailed down to us like a piece of paper, swinging in the fall, one way then the other. If it had hit any of us, it would have taken our heads clean off.
Long story short, I got the plywood across the marsh to dad, and he climbed onboard.
So much for fishing!
More like International Rescue!
Cockerels and Fly-tying
Because we fished so much, and were constantly buying new fishing flies, Dad decided to try his hand at tying his own. He made a fly-tying vice, and we spent many nights tying flies for our hobby.
We even went to night-school, both in Musselburgh and Edinburgh to learn new techniques.
Great times.
But my dad always looked for an ‘edge’; some way to cut the fiscal corner.
He bought six cockerels, with the right capes (neck feathers) for fly tying, real good quality too, and for a while kept them in the greenhouse. These were far better feathers than the shops sold, real good quality. We’d wake up to the sound of cockerels crowing at odd hours of the night (my bedroom was right over the greenhouse, at the back of the house). Soon the neighbours complained, and we transferred them to a farmer my Dad knew, up near Drem Airbase, in East Lothian.
The plan?
To pull the feathers out of their necks, that gave us one harvest. Then we’d wait for them to grow back, kill the birds, get another feather harvest, and six good sized chickens for the pot.
Great plan. But of course it met with the usual Hall curse.
A fox got into the henhouse, killed all the chickens, and the poor farmer plucked the tail feathers for dad…. the wrong feathers for fly-tying.
Back to square one.
My first/last embrace, and our last words.
This one is harder to write than anything I’ve ever done.
The last time I saw dad alive was outside Edinburgh Airport, one early morning after one of my solo visits (I'm thinking 2005). He’d given me a lift to the airport, and ‘had’ to get my luggage out of the car boot for me.
He closed the boot, turned, and just hugged me.
The ONLY time I can remember him doing so in my whole life.
Man, just writing that brought tears back.
His last words to me are impossible to forget.
He was in the hospice, and the nurse thought it was important for me to talk to him direct. We chatted for about a minute or two, then, after a short pause, he said… “I love you, son.”
“I love you too, dad.” I said as he hung up. Karla, my wife, said she could hear the words across the room.
Like the hug, it was the first time I could ever recall he’d ever told me he loved me.
Dad wasn’t much for demonstrative displays of affection.
Love you too, dad.
