The joy of old books...

This was my father's book.  He was at heart a Gallovidian, having been brought up in St John's Town of Dalry, and travelled through God's own country for his firm in later years.

S R Crockett was born in 1859 the illegitimate son of a dairy maid, brought up on his grandfather's farm.   A "lad o' pairts", he went to New College in Edinburgh to train for the ministry, and became Free Church minister in Penicuik.   In time, as his writing career took off, he gave up the Church to write full time.    Early success wasn't really sustained and his later work was heavily criticised as being over-sentimental.  

I once gave a paper on him to a quite Learned Society.   And in preparation looked for him in many places.   At the farm of Little Duchrae, where he was born, across the river from Avignon where he died in 1914, at his grave in Balmaghie Kirkyard.   Much more recently I found his wife, Mary, buried in Peebles Cemetery.  

But he was remembered in far-off Vailima, where R L Stevenson lived and now lies buried on a hilltop.    (I had a particularly exhausting experience being taken up to the RLS grave site, high above Apia in Samoa, being guided by a bunch of very fit sixth formers!)

In his home at Vailima, Stevenson wrote a poem entitled "To S R Crockett".   

Blows the wind to-day, and the sun and the rain are flying,

Blows the wind on the moors to-day and now,

Where about the graves of the martyrs the whaups are crying,

My heart remembers how!



Grey recumbent tombs of the dead in desert places,

Standing stones on the vacant wine-red moor,

Hills of sheep, and the howes of the silent vanished races,

And winds, austere and pure:



Be it granted me to behold you again in dying,

Hills of home! and to hear again the call;

Hear about the graves of the martyrs the peewees crying,

And hear no more at all.