Early morning memories

Early Morning Memories.

As I look back at last century and realise I was in it I think of all I saw and which has gone away. Distance of time dims memory somewhat, but not entirely. My early days, with three younger brothers and three younger sisters, were in Whitehall Farm in Stronsay in the Orkney Islands, a 450 acre rented farm. Backdrop was the Island with 1000 people then, the 1930s, a herring fishing station in summer in Whitehall Village, quiet in winter save for farming and island life and the “Steamer” on it’s regular calls, The Earl Thorfin, the smaller Earl Sigurd. Coal burning steamships with slow moving engines, we loved to watch them through the doors to the engine room, thumping our way across the seas, or sometimes up and down more than across, named after two notable Viking Earls. But this is not a treatise on the Island, it has been done before. It is rather putting down my memories of an earlier life before it is too late, how one small boy saw it.
Before 1938 and before the War of 1939-45 our farming was as it had been for a very long time, oriented on horsepower in the real sense, no machinery which today has replaced the horses and replaced also the many men who worked them. So for a small boy growing up in that time the first stop in the early morning was to awake, clothes quickly on and out into the darkness heading for the stable or the cattle byre before breakfast. No electric light then, the warm soft but dim glow of paraffin lanterns all that showed. Still, we knew the path so even in the darkness we found our way. Early though it was, there was always someone in the stable before us, the paraffin lanterns lit hanging by a rope from a pulley attached to the rafters, the other end held fast to a hook on the wall. All were taken down and set upon the corn-chist, glass chimney to be cleaned and polished, paraffin oil to be refilled, wicks to be trimmed, the lantern lit and raised again to it’s high place in the rafters. Only then could one really see all the horses and the stable. One horseman, each in turn, did the wakeup shift, week about, and woe betide the sluggard who did not have the lamps going by the time the rest of the men came in.
Each pair of horses was one man’s charge, his very own to feed and groom and cherish, to check the horseshoes, to steal a smidgen of grain from the loft other than the normal rations so that his pair were better, sleeker, prouder than any of the others, a theft to which father rightly turned a blind eye. First task was to put feed before the horses, a box of grain, unbruised whole oats, perhaps a swede turnip, a little hay in the rack above their heads, clean the stall while they were eating. The clean bedding straw was stacked against the wall behind each pair of horses, the soiled straw and dung thrown out onto the stable midden. Then, horses tended, the horsemen went to their nearby cottages for a first breakfast, strong sweet tea, porridge, loaf bread from the travelling grocer shop, or home made oatcake, berebread, flour scones, then return to the stable to get their orders for the day, to go to this or that task as the boss or the foreman dictated. And there were so many differing tasks to be done, each in season.
Even as we were in the stable or the byre a glimmer of light would creep into the cold sky, not yet true day but enough, though in mid-winter the men were usually “yoking” the horses even in the dark. Yet it was never really dark, always some smidgen of light to find ones way from stable to cart shed, to back the horse between the cart shafts, to hitch up the various chains to the horse’s harness. Six o’clock in the morning was dark most of the winter, real light in the North sometimes only by nine. On a rare occasion the Merry Dancers were still in the Northern sky. The air was clean and sharp in ones nostrils, snell is the better word, deeply catching ones breath at times.
This is a mere taste by way of introduction, greater detail will follow as we turn back the clock. But it was our mornings, stolen time before the day got going properly.

As for we boys, my brother David and myself, it was back to the house for breakfast and then to school, walking the two miles there in whatever weather came along, no school transport then, nor central heating - the old black coal stove in the corner being our sole heating, nor school meals, a bottle of milk and a pack of oatbread or sandwiches taken from home sufficed.