A Dash O Doric Read online

  Dash o Doric

  ONE FOR THE ROAD

  Dash o Doric

  ONE FOR THE ROAD

  Robbie Shepherd

  and

  Norman Harper

  First published in Great Britain in 2004

  by Birlinn Ltd

  West Newington House

  10 Newington Road

  Edinburgh

  EH9 1QS

  www.birlinn.co.uk

  Copyright © Robbie Shepherd and Norman Harper, 2004

  The right of Robbie Shepherd and Norman Harper to be identified as the authors of this Work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored, or transmitted in any form, or by any means electronic, mechanical or photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  ISBN 1 84158 324 3

  British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

  A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library

  Typeset by Palimpsest Book Production, Polmont, Stirlingshire

  Printed and bound by AIT Nørhaven A/S

  To our wives, Esma and Alison, for their forbearance, but also to the many thousands of sons and daughters of the North-east who, like us, hold the culture, the area and the people dearest to their hearts

  Contents

  Foreword

  Babes and Sucklings

  Sweet Bird of Doric Wit

  Kissies and Bosies

  The Shoppie

  Doon on the Fairm

  Characters

  The Toon

  The Papers

  Aches and Pains

  Law and Order

  Please, Miss

  Good for the Soul

  Mony a Gweed Tune

  Mixter Maxter

  The Tales That Got Awa

  Where Credit’s Due

  Foreword

  IT HAS been nearly 10 years since A Dash o Doric appeared, and it has always surprised and delighted both of us when we have been approached, out and about, by readers who enjoyed the tales of North-east humour that appeared in it and in its sequel, Anither Dash o Doric. Sometimes, these readers have related amusing stories and experiences of their own. Funny though these have been, we have always resisted compiling a third volume, partly because we didn’t want to overstay our welcome, but also because a book like this eats up a surprisingly large number of stories, and simply gathering them together and preparing them in sufficient numbers takes more time than you think.

  However, the tales our readers shared were too good to waste, so both of us evolved a system of scribbling brief reminders of them in our respective wee notebooks. We both hoped to be able to produce another “Dash” book when the time was right and when we had accumulated enough material.

  It has taken almost a decade, but here it is.

  Production of One For The Road (or “Dash 3” as it became known in trade shorthand) has not been without its problems. For one thing, it is difficult enough to read our handwriting at the best of times, but when the notes of an especially good tale amount to just a couple of hieroglyphs from seven or eight years ago, the unravelling and the remembering tax the wee grey cells more than we’re accustomed to nowadays.

  We have managed to decipher many of these two-word scribbles and to recall the anecdotes to which they refer, but at least half a dozen funny stories have been lost because our hurried notes have defeated us despite our best efforts, so the mists of time have closed about them.

  If anyone knows what tales were meant to accompany “Green Sweater”, “Fired Plumber” and “Disguised Grandma”, either of us would be pleased to hear from you. Who knows, they might appear in a fourth “Dash” a decade hence.

  Finally, many people deserve our thanks. Our multitude of contributors we list at the back, but we would also to thank the team at Birlinn for their support, encouragement and patience, notably Neville Moir and Hugh Andrew, and also Graham Maclennan for his fine cover artwork and his cartoons, which you will find sprinkled throughout.

  We had also better thank our wives, Esma and Alison, who were ultimately the judges of what should be included and what should not. We hope you think they made the right decisions and that, for a third time, you enjoy your book.

  Norman Harper and Robbie Shepherd Aberdeen, 2004

  Babes and Sucklings

  Even youngsters get in on the Doric-humour act, as this selection shows.

  WHEN YVONNE CORMACK was a young working mum, she would often entrust her children to her retired father, who enjoyed looking after the two of them – Ian (7) and Pauline (5).

  One evening, when Yvonne arrived home from work, she found her dad trying to teach Pauline how to tell the time. Pauline had been a quick study and was confident enough to try to test her grandfather to see if he knew as much as she now did.

  Yvonne heard her ask: “And foo mony minutes in an oor, granda?”

  “Sixty.”

  “And foo mony oors in a day?”

  “Twinty-fower.”

  “And foo lang’s a minute?”

  “Weel, lass,” Yvonne heard her dad say, “that depends fit side o the lavvie door ye’re on.”

  TO ELGIN now, and the Duncan family. Ewen Duncan’s seven-year-old, Carrie-Ann, astonished the family one Christmas when she asked, quite matter-of-factly: “Daddy, what’s a prostitute?”

  Ewen wrote: “We’ve always answered a straight question as honestly as we can, but this one flummoxed me. So I just said: ‘That’s someone who gets paid money to . . . be friendly.’ She seemed perfectly happy with that and the rest of us sighed with relief.

  “On the Saturday night after New Year, when my wife and I were going out for a works do, our usual babysitter came round. The first thing Carrie-Ann told her was: ‘Daddy says you’re a prostitute.’”

  A KEEN Rangers fan got in touch to say that he and his wife had been discussing a piece of vandalism near their home in which an exceptionally rude four-letter word had been scrawled on a garage door.

  Their five-year-old daughter had become interested in the conversation and inquired: “What was the bad word, mummy?”

  “Don’t you worry about that,” Mummy said. “It’s not a word we would use in this house.”

  The child thought for a moment. “Was it Poo?”

  “No, it wasn’t Poo. It just wasn’t a very nice word. Don’t you worry about it.”

  “Was it ‘Bum’?”

  “No, it wasn’t ‘Bum’, either.”

  The child thought for a moment, then her face darkened.

  “It wasn’t ‘Celtic’, was it?”

  SEVERAL YEARS ago, Alan Grant, of Kemnay, was driving towards Aberdeen with his son Ryan sitting in the back of the car, when they had to stop at a pedestrian crossing at Bucksburn.

  The driver of the car behind hadn’t noticed in time that Alan had stopped, and collided at about 15mph. “I checked Ryan was all right,” Alan said, “then I got out to see the damage. It wasn’t much apart from a cracked bumper and a smashed tail-light glass, but the other driver was decent enough to admit it was all her fault.

  “Ryan was very quiet after we drove off, and I began to worry that maybe he had concussion, but he assured me he was feeling fine. After a good 10 minutes he asked what the lady and I had been talking about outside the car.

  “I explained that we had been exchanging names to keep the insurance people happy. At that point, he became really upset, almost to the point of tears appearing, and said: ‘So fit are ye caaed noo?’”

  A CORRESPONDENT who signed herself only as “Betty” told us of her three-year-
old daughter running screaming and crying downstairs.

  The little girl’s grandfather had been staying the night and she had just seen him shaving with his electric razor, which had thrown her into a tremendous panic.

  “Fit’s adee, quinie?” Betty asked.

  Through sobs, the child replied: “Granda’s ironin his face.”

  SOMETIMES, a child says exactly what you wish you could say yourself. At a Moray school’s nativity play in 2002, while proud parents in the audience were brandishing camcorders and Instamatics, there was a silence, filled eventually by a four-year-old voice from the darkness saying clearly: “Mummy, this is just rubbish, isn’t it?”

  FARMER’S WIFE Jean Lorimer, from near Fraserburgh, said her seven-year-old had tugged at her apron one September morning and asked: “Mam, foo mony days tae Christmas?”

  “I dinna ken,” Jean said. “I suppose it must be aboot a hunner. Fit wye?”

  “Well,” said her daughter. “I wis jist winderin if it wis time for me tae start bein a good girl.”

  SPELLING IS a challenge for most youngsters, and it certainly was in a class being taught by Elizabeth McGregor, who now lives near Lossiemouth, but who recalled her time at a Deeside primary school, especially one afternoon when the class was stumped on spelling “dahlia”.

  “I always maintained it was best that the children used their own initiative to find out answers,” Elizabeth wrote, “so when one wee boy asked how to spell dahlia, I said I wasn’t sure. I wanted to see if he would go to the class dictionary himself and look it up.”

  The lad did exactly that, but then Elizabeth heard one of the other class nickums lean across to the dictionary lad as he studied and say: “Ye’re wastin yer time. Spell it ony wye ye like. She disna ken hersel.”

  ONE EASTER in the 1970s, Marianne Taylor, of Broomhill Road, Aberdeen, was looking after her six-year-old grandson and discovered quickly that modern children needed constant activity. After all the outdoor activities had been exhausted, Marianne brought out a box of crayons and a pad of paper and set him to work at the kitchen table.

  “It was blissfully quiet at last,” she said, “so I peeped in on him and saw him working away furiously, tongue out at the corner of his mouth. I went in to congratulate him on being such a good little artist.”

  “Did you have crayons in the olden days?” he asked.

  Marianne said she did, but that they weren’t nearly as nifty as the ones he was using.

  “No,” he said, going back to his drawing. “Yours must have been black and white.”

  IT’S CHRISTMAS, and the spirit of the season has seized primary schools throughout the North-east. Lindy Cheyne recalled a nearby teacher asking her class to draw a Christmas card with a nativity scene. The teacher surveyed them all, but was puzzled by one young artist’s rendition.

  It certainly included the three wise men, the donkeys and the sheep, Joseph, Mary and a bright glow round the baby Jesus, but there was also a large brown blob in the background.

  She asked the artist what this was supposed to represent and was told crisply: “That’s the stable bear.”

  A NEW fire-and-brimstone minister had come to one of the wee kirks at St Combs in 1927. His services became notorious for the histrionics he displayed while he lectured his flock about their evil ways. He thumped the pulpit, stamped his feet, bawled, shouted, waved his hands and generally worked himself into a red-faced fury.

  “Mam,” one small boy was heard to whisper nervously in the middle of the congregation, “fit happens if he gets oot o his box?”

  EILEEN LEIPER was a school nurse who did the rounds of wee country schools in mid-Aberdeenshire from the mid-1940s to the mid-1970s. Part of the examination of the children involved weighing them. At Fisherford, one six-year-old girl refused to step on the scales, much to the embarrassment of her rather ample mother.

  “Come awa, quinie,” the mother said. “It’s jist scales. We’ve got scales at hame. Nithing tae be feart o. Ye’ve seen me usin oors. Jist you dee the same.”

  The little girl slowly left her mother’s side, stepped on the scales then clapped her hands to her mouth, looked down and cried: “God Almichty!”

  ALAN McALLISTER, from Ellon, had taken the family on holiday to Spain for a fortnight, but hadn’t read the small print closely enough, and discovered on the first morning at the seaside that they were just a couple of hundred yards from a nudist beach.

  “It wasn’t so much the embarrassment,” Ian said, “as the fact that my eight-year-old, Jordan, was just staring pop-eyed at three young blondes. My wife and I didn’t know what to do or say.”

  “When the three lassies got up to leave, Jordan was studying them intensely and I thought: ‘This is it; the father–son talk.’”

  “Then he turned round and said: ‘Dad?’”

  “I said: ‘Yes, Jordan?’”

  “God Almighty”

  “He said: ‘Can I hae that can o Coke the ladies left?’”

  KEITH COUPLE Kathleen and Eddie Robertson agreed to look after their eight-year-old grandson from Australia, Kyle, while Kyle’s mum and dad went visiting relatives in other parts of the UK.

  Kyle was a little upset at having left all his wee pals in Melbourne, so Kathleen and Eddie decided they would pull out all the stops and impress him with the best of northern Scotland.

  They took him to Loch Ness and Applecross, nearly every castle in Aberdeenshire, the Cairngorms, fishing, harbours, dolphin-watching and everything else they could think of. By the end of the fortnight, the Robertsons were tired out.

  When Kyle said he wanted to phone home and tell his best friend about his visit, Kathleen was secretly very proud. She dialled the number for him and left him in private, but just as she was closing the door and the call went through, she heard Kyle say: “Jamie? Guess what? My grandad can take out his teeth!”

  HELEN MENNIE has a rich archive of tales from her days as a primary-school teacher. One of her favourites concerns wee Iain, aged eight, who came from a farm somewhere near King Edward. Helen noticed one day that he was not his usual self. When the other children went into the playground, Iain stayed behind at his desk, biting his lip.

  Helen was cleaning the blackboard before she realised that he was still there.

  “Not going outside to play, Iain?” she said.

  “No.”

  “Is there something worrying you?”

  “Aye.”

  “What would that be?”

  “Ma faither. I gied him that bit o paper ye sent hame wi me last wikk.”

  “The results of your tests?”

  “Aye.”

  “Was he not pleased?”

  “I’m nae needin tae worry ye, Miss, bit he says if I dinna improve, somebody’s gettin a skelpin.”

  ANOTHER OF Helen’s tales concerns a note that one of her former colleagues received one morning. It was typed neatly and read: “Please excuse Ian from PE today and tomorrow. He hasn’t been feeling very well lately and is under the doctor’s car.”

  HELEN WAS concerned one year when it became apparent that, somehow, her Primary Four class had discovered the date of her birthday. It was clear something was up because of all the whispering and excitement just before playtime on the day in question. When the bell rang, four of them raced out and returned with an obviously homemade cake.

  “I was genuinely touched that they should have gone to all that trouble,” Helen wrote, “so naturally I thanked them and did all the usual bit about blowing out the candles and making a wish.”

  Helen was just at the point of cutting the cake when one voice piped up at her side. “Miss, foo aul are ye onywye?”

  “Oh,” Helen said with a wee laugh, “I’m not far off 100.”

  The boy turned to his pal and said: “See? Telt ye.”

  YOUNG STEWART was a pupil at Cruden Bay Primary School and lost his gymshoes – a major trauma for a six-year-old. Despite the best efforts of his teacher, and with a great deal of angst on S
tewart’s part, the errant gimmies were nowhere to be found.

  Ultimately facing a large pile of assorted footwear, teacher asked: “Stewart, what size were your gymshoes?”

  Stewart looked at her, mystified, and replied: “The same size as ma feet.”

  YOUNG MUM Deirdre Black, of Banchory, was watching her six-year-old, Emily, drawing at the kitchen table, and was soon presented with a picture of an extremely large cat.

  “That’s an affa big cat, Emily,” Deirdre said. “It’s affa fat.”

  “It’s nae fat, mam,” Emily said. “It’s gaun tae hae kittens. Look, I’ll show ye.” Emily began adding the kittens inside the cat’s body.

  Deirdre thought this would be an appropriate moment to prompt questions about nature’s way. “And div ye ken foo the kittens got there?”

  “Of course,” Emily said. “I drew them.”

  Sweet Bird of Doric Wit

  No teenage cynicism here. This chapter demonstrates that those awkward years still keep hold on the quirky sense of humour that the North-east bestows.

  ONE TEACHER wrote to us reminiscing about her days in front of a classroom at Banff. In the days of school class photographs, not everyone was willing to have their picture taken, and it was the teacher’s job to persuade shy pupils to do up their ties and sit down with their fellows and wring out a smile for the camera.

  Sometimes, the persuasion demanded superhuman patience, and one stubborn 13-year-old simply refused to have anything to do with the picture.

  “Just think how good it will be when you’re a big boy and you have a photograph of yourself and everybody else in the class,” the teacher said.

  “You’ll be able to show your own children and say: ‘Look, there’s Andrew; he’s a doctor. Look, there’s Eilidh; she’s a dentist. Look, there’s Ian; he’s a farmer.’”

  At which a voice piped up at her back: “Look, there’s the teacher. She’s deid.”

  WHEN COMPUTERS and the Internet were just becoming widespread in the mid-1990s, Ewen Paterson, of Bridge of Don, went home excitedly one day to explain that he had been pulling facts, figures and research from around the world, all from a desk at the local academy.