Benji of Bearsden

By Ferguson MacLeod

Benji Gilzean came of age in post-war Scotland during the 1950s and 1960s. In Benji of Bearsden, author Ferguson MacLeod recounts Benji’s childhood in a suburban area of Glasgow, Scotland.

Based on real events, it shares a young man’s varied life experiences. It includes stories of his involvement with golfers still suffering from World War II stress disorders, tales of his first love and sexual encounters, his schooling experience, and his time as an apprentice plater going through brutal rituals of initiation and a death-witnessing trauma.

A novel, Benji of Bearsden offers an interesting perspective on the cultural clash between a boy from a middle-class background and those from the working-class environment generally referred to as the Red Clydeside.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse UK
• Release date: Jun 22, 2020
• ISBN: 9781728353227

Ferguson MacLeod

Ferguson MacLeod is a 76 year-old retired design engineer, who, for thirty years from 1967 lectured at the University of the West of Scotland; ran his own non-operator equipment hire company, and worked as a consultant engineer. Father of two children and grandfather of four boys, his hobbies include DIY and sailing his restored boat along the West Coast of Scotland.

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© 2020 Ferguson MacLeod. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or

transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse   07/29/2020

ISBN: 978-1-7283-5323-4 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-7283-5322-7 (e)

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are

models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or

links contained in this book may have changed since publication and

may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those

of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher,

and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

To the four A’s: Andrew, Angus, Arlo, and Abe,

all of whom have not long started on life’s journey.

Have a good trip boys! G’Pa

CONTENTS

Chapter 1   The Early Years

Chapter 2   Growing Pains

Chapter 3   Goodbye to Childhood

Chapter 4   The Apprentice Training School

Chapter 5   Initiation to the Plate Shop

Chapter 6   A Family Trip Away From it All

Chapter 7   The Factory Becomes Reality

Afterword

Acknowledgements

About the Author

In the beginning ………

‘Y OU CALLED HIM Benjamin!?’ Mrs Gilzean sat up in bed, careful not to disturb the baby in her arms. ‘Why on earth did you do that? We agreed on Robert.’

Mr Gilzean took a deep breath and began. ‘Well, the registrar said that was the twelfth Robert that morning, and could I not think of something a bit more original. Every baby boy in the west of Scotland was being called Robert, and I thought that was a reasonable point. I have an uncle in South Africa called Benjamin, which is a name I’ve always liked, so I said OK, and before I knew it, he had done the paperwork and handed it to me.’ He added, ‘He also said that if my wife didn’t like it, I had until Friday at two o’clock to come back and change it.’

Mrs Gilzean smoothed the top sheet. ‘Hmm; that’s not so bad then. Well, it sounds like what you would call a puppy to me!’

‘Och, I don’t know. Benjamin—it might suit him. Look at him there.’ Mr Gilzean visibly relaxed.

The baby was all snuggled up in his white woolly christening shawl, snoozing contentedly against his mother, although his chances of being christened were nil due to his father’s disdain of all things church-related.

‘Well, he looks happy enough. Are you, Benji? Do you like that name?’

The baby appeared to smile. ‘There you go. He’s smiling. See, he really likes it!’

The baby gave a long low burp, and his face relaxed …….

And so it came to pass that baby boomer Benji was named in the year 1944. His mum and dad, Mr and Mrs Gilzean, were content that they had a happy, healthy baby. Three years before, they’d had a male child who died of pneumonia, possibly contracted from his father, or so his father thought, carrying a never-ending guilt ……..

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CHAPTER 1

The Early Years

THERE ARE MOMENTS in this life when little things happen that seem irrelevant at the time but stick in the mind and can affect your passage through life. Benji experienced the first of these memorable moments when he was only 3 years old, yet he thought he was stopping bad things happening to his family.

It was in those far-off gentle days when milk in glass bottles was delivered to your door and the pace of life seemed more leisurely and yet filled with the purpose of rebuilding after the war. He had heard his mum say that since the bad milk boy hadn’t put the Bakelite picnic cups over the top of the glass milk bottles, the bad birds had pecked the foil cap off the bottles to get to the cream at the top; this made the milk in the bottle bad, and everyone could become ill if they drank it, which was bad.

This particular morning, Benjamin’s mum was down the front steps talking to a man wearing a strange suit and hat. Benji had noticed over the past few weeks that this guy shoved lots of paper stuff through a slot in the front door, which he thought pretty bad because it always made him jump in fright when the guy did it. One time, he was playing at the foot of the door and the nasty man had floored him with a bundle of paper. He was sure it was deliberate, and since then he’d always viewed postmen with an element of suspicion.

Whilst his mum chatted, Benji noticed that the bad birds had been at work and pecked the foil tops off the milk bottles. Having become aware that this made the milk bad, Benji picked up the two bottles and carted his dangerous cargo with some difficulty into the house. He then dropped them together down the toilet bowl. This was good, because these bottles were bad, and the toilet was where you put stuff that disappeared like magic in a big whoosh of water. Unfortunately, the toilet bowl broke under the milk-bottle barrage and flooded the bathroom with a mixture of milk and toilet water, craftily concealing lumps of broken glass.

Benji got his first memorable row from his mum—and boy, did she let him have it, making a deep impression mentally and a light one physically. Suffer the little children, right enough. Apparently, what he had done was bad, and this left him quite upset. He didn’t understand, and let’s face it, when you’re 3, Mummy is a serious piece of equipment, and if she says it’s bad—it’s bad! But oh, the confusion. The milk boy was bad, the birds were bad, the milk was bad, the toilet broke, which was bad, and somehow this made him bad when he was trying to do good! The confusion was compounded when, minutes later, she crushed him to her bosom, joining in his tearful wail and saying how much she loved him.

To sympathise with the vehemence of his mother’s explosion, one would have to understand that she was at her wit’s end, as they say; her husband was in a sanatorium with double pneumonia and not expected to survive. His business partner in the garage that they had owned had just done a runner with all the finances he could lay his hands on; her two daughters were at primary school and needing those basic things which children require. They had not long ago bought the bungalow in Bearsden, a very middle-class suburb near Glasgow but not of Glasgow. The general opinion of the good citizens of Glasgow was that Bearsden had been bought and taken over by the bourgeoisie. Benji’s parents had used the house as collateral for a mortgage and a business loan.

Now, with zero income and a host of angry creditors, a busted toilet should have been the last straw. But it wasn’t. That had come moments before, when the postman, who she’d always thought was a nice man, had made a lewd proposition as to how she could pay some of the bills he was delivering. She had turned back into the house in a state of mild hysteria, the proposition having taken her near to a breaking point just in time for her to hear the crash of the milk bottles and the toilet actually breaking. If she’d had a cat, she would probably have booted it from Bearsden to Belfast. She didn’t, but in the moment, she had Benji, and he’d do.

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This unexpected tirade from a normally loving and caressing source threw Benji into a state of mental confusion and alarm which, having been inflicted on him at an early age, was imprinted on his young mind. It was the first-ever assault on his little bubble of self-concern, a physical whack of reality, a reminder that there was more to the world than him. This trauma would manifest itself as a lack of self-confidence, which, dependent on circumstances, underscored his life. If chastised for something by anyone perceived by him as an authority figure, his self-confidence ebbed as surely as the tide.

His mum’s solution to her immediate financial problems was to let out the spare room to a lodger, which in turn allowed the rebuffed postman to pass risqué comments to the neighbours about the shenanigans in the Gilzean household. However, the lodger, a very upright individual, upon hearing some of the rumours, introduced himself to the postie by shaking him warmly by the throat. He advised the man strongly as to where not only his letters but his complete bag was going if another word was heard. The neighbours’ tongues were eventually stilled when Benji’s dad came home a year later, having sidestepped death. He persuaded the lodger to stay on, as they needed his income and the whole family liked his company—Benji in particular, perhaps because the lodger was the only male in the first years of his life.

Mr Gilzean’s plan was to set to immediately restoring the family fortunes by training as a technical teacher and repairing and servicing cars at the weekends to make good the accumulated debts. Sadly, this meant he would have little time to spend with his boy. Thus Benji acquired an honorary uncle: Uncle Jim the lodger.

Benji eventually figured out the lodger was only a kid-on kind of uncle, but he loved his Uncle Jim, and it was mutual. Uncle Jim, a confirmed bachelor, was a salesman for Cadbury Chocolate and therefore travelled a lot. For Benji’s fifth birthday, Uncle Jim took him to London on an overnight train, all by himself, to stay with Jim’s sister in Wimbledon for a whole week. This was just before Benji started primary school, and it was the biggest adventure he had ever had. He felt safe with Uncle Jim.

Uncle Jim was flattered at being allowed to take part in Benji’s development and decided as the boy’s unofficial mentor to provide Benji with a secret weapon—just a little something between the two of them. He had been trained as a commando for the war and knew a thing or two about hand-to-hand combat, and he delighted in passing on some of the safer skills that he had learnt for self-defence and restraining an opponent. As they tumbled around, playing on the floor, Uncle Jim found that Benji was quick to learn when it was something that interested him.

Jim also explained to Benji that talking your way out of a fight and adopting a certain look—which was to stare with a dead expression in your eyes unblinkingly at the bridge of your aggressor’s nose—could unnerve people and was usually a far better option than getting into a fight, as sometimes the other guy was better than you or could get lucky. Either way, he might do you damage.

The unofficial self-defence training and tuition from Uncle Jim went on until Benji was nearly 8, when his uncle was suddenly relocated to London. Benji experienced his first heartbreak, and although Uncle Jim came to visit periodically, they never regained the same intimacy or bond they’d had during Benji’s early years when Uncle Jim lived with them. However, the training he had received from his uncle, the secret weapon, stood Benji in good stead when mixing with his peers. It helped re-establish the self-confidence his mother had slightly and unwittingly undermined after the milk-bottle busting up.

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Because he was born at the end of January, Benji was not eligible for school until the September following his fifth birthday. His mum worked at home as a bookkeeper, so he had been gently ushered into a routine of self-amusement from the age of 4. The family pet, a newly acquired playful terrier pup, became Benji’s playmate. His relationship with the dog did in fact help reinforce his complacency when it came to seeking the company of others.

Benjamin grew into a relatively reserved boy who was always seen to be there or thereabouts but never pushed to be the centre of attention. However, in Benji’s case, ‘no man is an island’ really was quite a relevant quote. Although he didn’t involve other people wittingly, involve them he did—resulting in a journey of mixed fortunes and experiences which were all part of his life’s learning curve.

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His mum took him to primary school for the first two days but realised that her presence wasn’t required. Benji was quite unperturbed about school, as he knew his sisters were there. They had been at school for some time, and as far as he was concerned, he should have got to go sooner. He already knew the way: it was a straight road and about a mile from the house to the school gates. From the age of 4, he would sometimes take the dog and go to meet his sisters when they got out in the afternoon.

However, not long after starting at school, he thought to wander off the straight road. He had been returning to school after lunch, or dinner as it was better known then, and this was only the second day that he had been allowed to walk to school on his own. He had been firmly instructed to go straight there, but he had gone wandering through the local roads with a dawning surprise. He discovered that when he went down one road and kept turning left up the next then along the next one, he came back to the road he had been on but just a bit further back.

This had to be investigated. Fortunately for him, the Killermont housing estate, on which he lived, had been built with a boring symmetry. He tried the same thing again a couple of streets further on, but this time kept turning right, and he was quite pleased to see that he came out again to the street he had been on, and as he had suspected, he was a bit further back.

This, when you’re 5, is quite a discovery—so interesting, in fact, that he was half an hour late in getting to school. But he didn’t care. He was just so impressed that he could go round corners and still get to school.

When he got to the school playground, Miss Allen, his extremely nice teacher, was standing at the classroom door.

‘Benjamin! Where on earth have you been? You are half an hour late. Another minute, and I would have been sending out search parties.’

But that was way over his head. Realising from her tone that she was unhappy with him, he thought he was going to get a row, but he couldn’t see why. After all, he had been learning things about roads.

‘Um …’ Benji paused, his little brain going into overdrive. ‘Well, there was nobody at my house.’

This seemed like a good line, as the frown on Miss Allen’s face changed to a look of surprise. Maybe he wouldn’t get a row now.

‘Um, I had forgotten I was to stay at school for dinner, so there was nobody in, but I had forgotten and I waited and waited and waited but nobody came, then I remembered, and so I came back here.’

He was suitably impressed with his own quick thinking. Sadly, of course, it was pretty limited and didn’t allow for any response.

‘So you’ve had no dinner!’ his teacher exclaimed. They were now in the classroom. Everybody was watching and listening.

‘No!’ replied Benji without thinking. His face started to burn at the lie he had just told and the attention focussed on him.

Well, Miss Allen, being of a practical nature and knowing that little people needed fuel regularly, wrote a note. She gave the note to one of his classmates who lived nearby to see if his mummy had any food she could spare for the poor starving waif. The saviour of the starving returned with an exceptionally large portion of apple pie, with exceedingly thick pastry, covered with even thicker cream. It was in a very large plate, with a great big silver spoon the size of a canoe paddle.

Since it was going to be on display, the munificent mummy had obviously cracked open the good crockery and cutlery to accompany the ample portion of apple pie and cream. Benji tried choking it down under the watchful eye of Miss Allen, who had decided to give his mother a word or two at the parent-teacher meeting, which happened to be that evening.

Benji got in a right state as his classmates were all gawping and sniggering. He couldn’t eat even half of the pie. There was no room in his tummy after the good dinner his mum had given him not an hour before: soup, mince with potatoes and peas, steam pudding and custard, rounded off with a piece of chocolate.

Moreover, he couldn’t handle the enormous spoon. He couldn’t figure out what you did with it. He tried ramming it into his mouth, only to let out a cream-soaked squeak as his lips stretched to the breaking point. He felt as if he was taking part in the Mad Hatter’s tea party, which his mum had been reading to him lately.

The teacher’s face, which seemed to have grown to the size of a large balloon, kept egging him on to eat more. He had heard his dad say something about being born with a silver spoon in your mouth, and he reckoned that that must be a real uncomfortable experience all round. He had cream all around his mouth, and a big blob stuck on the end of his nose. He pressed down hard with the great spade of a spoon on the pastry, which suddenly broke. It skidded off the plate and dumped a large dollop of apple pie and cream down his front and on to his legs. The class dissolved in merry hysteria; everybody was giggling and enjoying the show, except Benji and probably Miss Allen.

He started sobbing, and Miss Allen, her maternal instincts in full flow, took him out of the classroom and along to the staff room, where she cleaned him up and tucked him up on a couch with a blanket. He fell asleep quite quickly, which, considering how full he was, wasn’t surprising. She confirmed that his sisters, who were in primaries three and six, hadn’t been home for dinner, without determining that they didn’t go home at dinner time anymore. Convinced of parental negligence, she woke him once school was over for primary ones and, checking that there would definitely be someone at home, sent him on his way. Then she got herself fired up for a talk with his parents at the meeting that evening.

Well, his mummy was not best pleased at having to refute accusations of negligence, especially as the woman who had done her angel of mercy bit with the apple pie had the biggest gob in Bearsden. That probably explained the very large spoon. His dad wanted to know why he had lied about not having his dinner, but he couldn’t say. Basically, he had thought he was going to make Miss Allen happy. But as he grew older, he could still feel the searing embarrassment of being the centre of sniggering attention whilst he wielded his large spoon and dumped most of the cream-soaked apple pie from the large plate on to his lap.

That stayed as his earliest memory of primary school—that and his old man telling him afterwards to tell the truth at all times.

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Benji’s dad had him help fix cars on the weekends as soon as he was able to lift a spanner. Benji was too young to know that his dad had taken self-help to a whole new level, probably spurred on by the catastrophic financial situation into which his family had been plunged due to the duplicity of his business partner and his illness.

Mr Gilzean must have been one of the founding fathers of DIY. At the age of 6, Benji helped his dad build a holiday hut, which was made out of bits of wood and millions of bolts and stuff called hardboard—a sort of squashed stiff cardboard, it seemed to Benji. The hut was a uniquely cunning design and came in sections of all the same size. When bolted together, it formed this novel holiday hut with six bunks, a sink, and a cooker. All of it was transported on a purpose-built trailer, which his dad also built. Neither Benji nor his dad realised it was in fact the first flat pack of anything and way ahead of its time.

‘Right, son, we are going to turn that,’ his dad said, nodding at the pile of wood and hardboard, ‘into that.’

He waved his hand over a sheet of paper with what looked to Benji like some fairly neat scribbles. Benji beamed and nodded eagerly. He was so pleased that his dad seemed to be noticing him more lately, and although they didn’t play the sort of games that he had played with Uncle Jim, he felt better playing with his dad, even if the games always seemed to involve noisy tools and machines.

‘First off,’ said his dad, ‘we’re going to make a jig, as a lot of the wood batons we need have to be exactly the same length.’

Benji smiled with a slight frown. This was just a bit confusing. They had been doing a highland jig in school yesterday, and he didn’t quite see how it fitted in with the wood, but he nodded anyway.

His dad lifted his treasured yardstick with the brass sleeved ends. Benji swallowed and wondered if his dad would notice that, when he was playing with the yardstick yesterday, he had broken one of the brass ends off when he stuck the stick between two paving stones and tried to jump over it. On looking at the damage, Benji had seen that there was only a little bit of wood inside the brass end, which soon came out with the help of a screwdriver. Then, using a little hammer, he tapped the brass end back on to the yardstick, which of course it now wasn’t.

‘Listen carefully, Benji,’ his dad was ordering now. ‘On second thought, I’m going to make what is called a gauge instead of a jig. I’m going to measure the length we need with this yardstick on one of the bits of wood, then after I cut it, use that bit of wood to measure all the other bits of wood. That way, they’ll all be exactly the same length. Understand?’

Benji nodded affably. So they weren’t dancing a jig then. That was good, because yesterday at school, as they went jigging round and round, he had sort of accidentally tripped fat Bessie Brown. She went splat on her podgy face, and she had bawled for hours.

His dad carefully marked the first length of wood with the yardstick and proceeded to mark and chop millions of bits of wood, using the first bit of wood as his gauge. Benji felt uncomfortable, although he didn’t know why. It wasn’t holding the end of the wood as his dad sawed, but he just felt something wasn’t right.

‘Now,’ said his dad after his labours, ‘these bits we’ve cut will fit along the bottom of the hardboard, which is exactly the same length as the yardstick. Like so.’

There was a long pause. ‘That’s odd! This bit of wood is too short,’ said his dad. ‘What the hell has gone wrong here?’

As he picked up his trusty yardstick, the brass end fell off. He gazed at the broken end for a moment. Then he realised he was alone.

‘Benji!’ His voice echoed out of the empty garage.

Benji was learning that the memory of the tornado unleashed by his mum because of broken milk bottles and bust bogs had its uses.

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Despite Benji’s assistance, the holiday hut was eventually completed. They used it in the summer for the long school holidays, which were spent down in Galloway in South West Scotland at a campsite called New England Bay on the shores of Luce Bay. However, when the hut was first erected on the site, another camper of mean spirit claimed it offended the concept of camping. He promptly christened the creation Hardboard Hall, much to the chagrin of Benji’s dad.

The set-up at the campsite was good and safe. All the kids got together and could roam free and wild in the rolling gorse-covered countryside. There was many a game of hide and seek and cowboys and Indians, although these were brought to an abrupt end by an overly enthusiastic Indian whose daddy had given him a real bow and arrows with sharp brass tips. They were all crowded around this new toy when the proud owner pulled back on the bow for the first shot.

‘Bet you can’t make it go as far as Hardboard Hall,’ said someone.

The arrow flew in a gentle trajectory towards Mr Gilzean’s stately home, fell short, and stuck itself in the soft sandy soil. Benji got next shot, not realising that helping fix cars and construct flat-pack holiday huts builds muscle even at the age of 6. He pulled back strongly on the bow, and the arrow shot off at high speed. Half the shaft disappeared with a satisfying thunk into the wall of Hardboard Hall.

Mr Gilzean, sitting quietly reading his newspaper and sipping a coffee with his back to the wall, started up at the sight of a gleaming brass arrow tip just to the left of his shoulder. He spilt his coffee and suddenly became aware that although he had thoroughly weatherproofed the hardboard walls, they afforded little protection from marauding Indians. He rushed outside only to see the retreating Indians scatter amongst the gorse bushes, but he recognised one of them.

‘Benji!’ his voice echoed over the empty dunes.

Benji was getting good at quick reactions.

The ensuing conversation with the generous daddy who supplied the weapon was along the lines that if he, Mr Gilzean, wanted his ears pierced, he would use a potato and a darning needle like anyone else.

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Ignoring arrows, the holiday hut was a great success and lasted five summers, by which time it was beginning to resemble a rather sad sagging cardboard box. Benji’s parents loved these holidays; the kids disappeared from morning till night, only turning up for food. If it was raining, the various children on the campsite would congregate in someone’s tent and play noisy games, and the adults drifted off to Hardboard Hall, which was becoming the equivalent of the local pub. Everybody was happy and having a right good time.

In addition, at the end of the first summer at Hardboard Hall, Benji’s dad had an epiphany. There was little point in being by the sea and not be able to get on it. By Jove! What was missing was a boat! Aha, another challenging project.

The following winter saw Benji hanging on to a five-pound mallet whilst his dad battered together a twelve-foot sailing dinghy made from wood and zillions of rivets. It had a mast and sails and a dagger board, which is a kind of removable keel.

There were, of course, the occasional hitches in production.

‘Right, now we’re going to make a jig,’ his dad said, smiling at Benji, whose ears were still ringing from the noise of the big power saw his dad had been using to cut planks whilst he held the plank ends.

Benji felt a strange sensation sweep over him. Then it passed. He would learn later it was called déjà vu.

‘We’ve cut all the wood and formed the frames,’ said Mr Gilzean. ‘Now we need to drill holes along the edge of the hull planks for the rivets. So I’ve made this jig that locates in the first hole you drill and fits over the edge of the plank. The next hole will be in exactly the right position. Then you move the jig into the hole you’ve just drilled and so on. Understand?’

His dad peered at him inquisitively. Mr Gilzean was pleased that Benji appeared comfortable working with his hands, because he certainly didn’t seem to be shining at school like ‘the girls’, as his sisters were called.

‘So it’s not a gauge then?’ asked Benji in all innocence.

He got a withering look in response. Mr Gilzean had never really got to the bottom of what happened to his yardstick.

Things progressed slowly, and Benji found himself pottering around the boat whilst his dad finished a car that he was servicing in the driveway. The next plank for drilling was lying in the bottom of the now partially finished hull, as was the drilling machine. The jig was to hand. Benji felt like being helpful. He drilled quickly along the plank with the machine and the jig and felt rather impressed with himself … until he lifted the plank to put down the next one. He discovered that he had drilled not just the plank he had his foot on but through the bottom of the boat as well—not just once but several times.

‘Benji?’ His mum appeared at the door. ‘Would you go down to the shops for me and get some butter?’

Benji shot off with great alacrity. What a helpful obliging little boy he’s turning into, thought his mum.

Just then, Mr Gilzean came into the garage to drill the plank that he had left.

‘I didn’t know you let him use that machine on his own,’ said Benji’s mum.

‘I don’t,’ replied his dad.

‘Well, he was … in there.’ She nodded at the boat.

Mr Gilzean lifted the drilled plank with a feeling of impending doom, which took the form of little shafts of dusty daylight shining hazily through holes in the bottom of his boat.

‘Benji!’ His voice echoed down the empty street. Benji was learning that discretion was the better part of valour.

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The boat, when finished, was solid and sailed well. It had fine red sails that his mum had stitched as a labour of love. It also had a five-horsepower Seagull outboard motor fitted to the stern transom. Transported to the holiday site the following summer, the boat proved too popular for Mr Gilzean’s liking. Everybody wanted a shot, but being uninvolved in the blood, sweat, and tears that had gone into its construction, and not being of a nautical nature, people abused the iconic craft with hard shoes and rocky landings. He finally restricted the use to himself and Benji after one particularly traumatic incident.

There was a boy, Albert, who was a slow-witted but gentle child, and Mr Gilzean had decided to take him out with Benji as a charitable act, as the other children tended to ignore Albert and some of the parents viewed him with a jaundiced eye. Albert had a propensity for getting things wrong, causing accidents, and breaking things.

They had been fishing with weighted deep-sea lines, and although they had only been out for twenty minutes, Albert was already a litany of disaster. He had managed to cut himself with a knife used for gutting fish, stick a fish hook into the dog’s paw, nearly have a self-burial at sea by stepping into a loop of the anchor rope as it was dropped, and banjo Benji with an oar. Benji had retreated to the bow by this time, as far away from Albert as was physically possible.

Mr Gilzean was thinking of calling it a day when Albert suddenly declared that he needed a pee. The normal practice was to go to the bow, balance your knees on the gunnel, and pee over the side. Mr Gilzean looked at Albert and decided that this procedure was too risky, as Albert was definitely more than a little accident prone.

‘Here, do it in this,’ he said, handing Albert his treasured boat bailer that had been his great-grandfather’s and passed to succeeding generations. It was a handsome artefact, designed for the job with a deep bowl made from beaten brass and a beautifully carved and varnished wooden handle. As the boat rocked about, Albert pissed everywhere with the exception of the bailer, it seemed to Benji. However, there was obviously some in the bailer, and turning to Mr Gilzean, Albert, with a puzzled frown, said, ‘What will I do with it now?’

Mr Gilzean smiled tolerantly and, in teacher mode, said, ‘Well, Albert, what do you think we would do with it? Hmm!’ He gave Albert a quizzical expression. ‘Throw it over the side, of course.’

Albert paused for a second, then a look of dawning surprise passed across his face. ‘Yes,’ he breathed on understanding—and then he leaned across the side and dropped the bailer into five fathoms of water, as Mr Gilzean made a futile grab, crying, ‘Noooo!’

Nevertheless, the boat was brilliant, and that summer, after some tuition, Benji effectively commandeered it. He was soon sailing single-handed around the bay, which kept him within a half mile of the shore. But it separated him from the other kids, as their parents wouldn’t let their little wonders out on the briny with a novice 7-year-old sailor. He loved the feeling of freedom and began to understand the sea, the wind, the waves, and all their combined foibles. One day, he overreached himself.

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Luce Bay was used as a bombing range by the RAF, and on bombing days, a red flag flew from the little pillbox hut situated at one end of the campsite next to Hardboard Hall. Loud booms could be heard coming from the direction of the target, which was anchored a couple of miles offshore. If one watched through binoculars, plumes of spray could be seen as the bombs burst.

There was a fine offshore wind, and Benji had been cruising back and forth across it, practising tacking, gybing, and sailing figure eights to retrieve cans that he had chucked overboard. He had got the hang of this; he needed a bit more of a challenge. The notion to visit the target crept into his head.

‘What do you reckon, Randi?’ Benji smiled at his dog, who woofed at the waves and wagged his tail. ‘That’s good enough for me, boy. Let’s set the jib out the other side, and we’ll be flying. Yoo-hoo.’

On seeing no red flag or anyone watching him, Benji set off downwind towards the target.

Meanwhile, back at the campsite, the sergeant in charge of the flag was stumbling out of his jeep.

‘Morning, sergeant,’ cried Mr Gilzean. ‘If you don’t mind me saying, you look a little rough around the gills.’

‘Oh God,’ said the sergeant. ‘It was the commander’s farewell party in the mess last night, and did we say cheerio. I’m never touching alcohol again. I’ve got a head on me like one of these bomb bursts out there.’

He gazed dimly towards the bay, then at his watch.

‘Oh, Christ! I’m about an hour late. I better get the red flag up, because the defenders of our skies are due in half an hour for a live practice. I hope to God none of these bloody fishing boats have gone out there.’

They both gazed out to sea and froze.

‘Benji!’ His dad’s voice echoed in the wind. Benji was oblivious and concentrating on his target.

It caused a great stushie when the sergeant managed to get through to HQ and Benji was seen by the RAF spotters on the shore. The bombers were diverted as he and his faithful hound goose-winged on sedately towards the target, blissfully unaware of the red flag and the chaos they were causing in the skies overhead. The motor torpedo boat used to replace the target and stationed in Drummore, just along the coast, was duly dispatched. Benji, boat, and dog were towed ignominiously back to port, with warnings of dire consequences if he ever sailed beyond the confines of New England Bay again.

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Benji’s dad’s DIY enthusiasm grew. After building the boat, he decided the following winter that they would convert the attic of their bungalow into two bedrooms with dormer windows. This would let ‘the girls’ have a bedroom each. At 8 years of age, Benji was pirouetting on roof trusses, haudin’ this an’ haudin’ that, and helping his dad break through the kitchen ceiling for the staircase access. Benji began to realise that his dad was slightly obsessive when the man decided to continue this particular project on Christmas Day, no less.

‘Do you have to do that today?’ his mum girned, looking up at the kitchen ceiling. Benji noted that his mum did not look happy.

‘You’ll not even notice when I’ve finished,’ replied his dad, knotting the clothes rope which appeared through a hole in the ceiling, formed a loop, then returned back through another hole in the ceiling. ‘I’ll just put up a couple of dust sheets taped to the ceiling, and all the dust will be caught in behind as I cut through the ceiling. You’ll not