Approaching Garson

Nearly high water as CMC walks towards Garson.  We were across in Hoy for a meeting in the Hoy Kirk. 

A stringer reports that he as found a rare copy of Harry Alexander Ross Gordon’s ‘From the Periphery’ published in 1927.  It has become to be recognised as a ‘Scottish William’ series; it is based on the capers of a young boy in 1920s Edinburgh suburbs.  Apparently it has been posted to me.

He emailed me an extract:

The ivy that had slowly twirled its way around the drainpipe, and up towards the window of Ogilvy’s bedroom, was glistening wet.  Ogilvy precariously hung out of the window and noticed that looking through the raindrop hanging on the ivy leaf gave him an inverted view of the neighbourhood.

Ogilvy gradually regained consciousness.  His mouth was full of laburnum pods and he was looking into the eye of a blackbird.  He was lying in the laburnum bush handily placed beneath his bedroom window.  In the living room Ogilvy’s father thought he had heard something sliding down the roof; it must be the melting snow he thought.  However on checking the date of the Scotsman he was reading he realised that in July this would be a first.  He hadn’t noticed a sudden drop in temperature so maybe the scraping noise was Mr Grassick trying one of his wireless experiments again.

Having painfully crawled through the garden, the lobby, the parlour and upstairs, Ogilvy rubbed his bruises with his home made unguent; made with two parts of his Uncle’s pomade, one part glycerine and a few drops of eucalyptus.  The last thing Ogilvy remembered was falling out of his bedroom window, seeing the world the right way up, and desperately grabbing hold of a piece of slender wire that was trailing over the wet roof.   

At the sudden unexpected tension on the other end of the wire Mr Grassick, unwittingly starting a club for terrestrial fishermen, pulled on the wire as a mere reflex.  It was interesting, he noted, the wireless signal he received was always better from a point directly behind Ogilvy’s room.

Although still quite groggy Ogilvy distinctly remembered that earlier in the day he had overheard his father telling their neighbour, Mr Grassick, that he had been fiddling with his cat’s whisker.  Ogilvy couldn’t yet fathom this out.  Just why would his father take out a cat’s whisker and fiddle with it; indeed where did he keep it ?  Perhaps that explained the matchbox he could see protruding from his father’s waistcoat pocket. 

Earlier that year, when contacted by Mrs ‘..with one t..’ Paterson, the police had been so understanding.  They realised Mr Grassick had been a dab-hand with the piano wire in the wooded area as the enemy advanced towards their gun emplacement; but that had all been part of his duty for king and country.  Now this was peacetime.  And, after all, the piano wire was very slack, and being slung over Ogilvy’s house roof it was rather too high to decapitate anyone. PC Constable had measured the length of the wire and noted it probably came from a grand piano.

Later Ogilvy reflected that the chances of a lost member of the German infantry crawling across the roof above his bedroom were minimal.  And although Ogilvy had never ventured outside Scotland he was confident he would have recognised a member of the German infantry anyway – even upside down through a raindrop. 

 To try out his latest theory he once more leaned out of the bedroom window.  Mr Grassick had never before experienced a twelve year old boy landing on him.  Not in his neighbour’s garden anyway.

Coming out of the anaesthetic in hospital Ogilvy had announced to the whole ward he would be spending a few weeks with a woodcock in Potsdam.  “Is it a woodcock that we know Ogilvy?” enquired his father, looking around the ward embarrassed, and trying to placate his son.  “Hush”, said Ogilvy’s mother “don’t annoy the wee man.”