I’m from John o’Groats originally. This is my story…

THE 1950s

life in a but and ben

My claim to fame is that I was born in John O’ Groats. You can’t get much further north than that, well apart from Shetland, where I ended up further down the line - but that story is for another day…

Anyway, I was born in a but and ben (a small, two roomed cottage for the benefit of ‘soothmoothers’) and above you can see a picture of my mum and dad, Jeannie and Leslie Randall, my brother Ian and myself. We had very little money, but we were never aware of that. Life was fun, and we never felt in any way deprived.

One of our favourite activities was to go to the beach nearby to gather shells, particularly small cowrie shells known locally as ‘Groatie Buckies’. With these shells and others we would make ornaments of ladies which we would then varnish and give as presents, or put on the mantelpiece as decorations.. 

Not too far from our little cottage was a pond where we spent many happy hours gathering frog spawn with nets. We would put them in jars of water and watch with fascinated amazement as they gradually changed into tadpoles and finally frogs, whereupon we returned them triumphantly to the pond  

My brother Ian and myself were hardy critters, and we walked two miles to school and back every day. The winters thenadays were still very snowy, and I clearly remember the winter of 1955 when I was old five years old. I remember walking to school with the snow at the side of the road banked up to shoulder height. We depended on vans to come round selling food, but the roads were blocked with snow that year, so a helicopter was sent out to drop food parcels to us. As a small child I was fascinated watching the helicopter hovering over the snow covered field in front of our cottage, lowering down the much appreciated food supplies for us.

I know it’s hard to believe, but we only paid ‘two and six’ a week in rent for our cottage. This was two shillings and six pence, the equivalent of 12.5 pence nowadays. For some unknown reason never explained to me by my parents, our rent suddenly doubled to five shillings (25 pence today) which we could no longer afford. This crisis initiated a move to our next home in Shetland, where we stayed for a year and continued our adventures…