Newarthill 1950/60s Tosh And I

A Memory of Newarthill.

Every now and then I reminisce and take a trip down memory lane, of my childhood days growing up in Newarthill on Burnside Rd. I remember Tosh McGarry and I going to Father Gillan's jumble sale and buying an old fox fur stole. We slit it down the middle with our penknives and had a length each that we tied around our head and became the Davy Crocket twins. Penknife in hands and our fathers wood axes slipped into our snake belts, but they were Apache tomahawks to us. We would charge over the edge of the glen and into what we called our happy hunting ground. Both of us felt that we were the two kings of our wild frontier. Having walked up the glen towards Buchanan’s yard we came to a wee thicket and hacked away at it with our tomahawks making our den. We would line it with straw from the field above and camouflage it with leaved branches. Then we would cut birch branches and make our own bow and arrows and cut long branches and use them to vault over the burn, it was fun building wee dams with sods and swim in the deeper water.
We loved our adventures; it is funny how we knew the song of most of the birds, but nobody taught us. We would enjoy listening to them sing. I remember looking out our den and seeing water voles playing in the burn, but we called them water rats. There were rabbits and hares running about the glen. Sparrowhawks roamed the sky above looking for its prey, baggie minnows shoaled up and down the burn and the kingfisher would follow the shoal. I have only ever gasped in astonishment a handful of times and down the burn with Tosh fishing for red male sticklebacks was one of them times. Laying still with our nets outstretched a small iridescent blue kingfisher landed on my cane, its beauty took my breath away it certainly was something to behold. Building our den, the Hawthorne thorns dug into both our hands, and they bled. Looking at each other we placed our cut palm over each other's and swore each other in as we declared that we were now blood brothers.
Tosh and I would hack away at the shale on side of the glen and dig out fossilised leaves with so much detail on them that it just fascinated us. Every day was an adventure for us, and I was happy doing that, sometimes getting engrossed in our adventure we would forget to go home for something to eat. we would eat the tiny wild Strawberries that grew in the woods and the hard part of the thistles flower and now having tasted artichoke, that is what the thistle tasted a bit like.
At times we would use our mothers washing line and do our mountaineering up the side of the glen and pinch tatties, rhubarb, peapods, gooseberries, and anything else that was edible. Swag stuffed up our jumpers we abseiled back down to the bottom and made our way to our den and built a campfire that was surrounded by stones out the burn, once alight we would throw in the clay covered tatties and wait until they turned black, scoffing them as quickly as we could and at times even eating the burnt skin and all washed down with water from the burn. If we were lucky, we might have been able to grab a pint of milk off someone's step. Tosh and I spent fabulous times down the glen, The young ones today I believe don't know what they are missing, though it is their choice to fritter their lives away with their face stuck in front of a screen. if you have read all the way to the bottom, thank you for roaming the glen with Tosh and I.

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