Chapter 2 - In The Beginning

The story is so fantastic that it's difficult to know where to start. It started several years before I moved back to the Stornoway, and my account is based on information from those who were there at the beginning.

It all started on a September evening in 1998. Blair's government had swept into power the year before. We had expected them to wipe away 17 years of Toryism, but by and large they just carried on with Tory policies.

I worked in local government at the time. We had laboured under something known as CCT - Compulsory Competitive Tendering, a Tory tool to effectively privatise as many local government services as possible, since 1989. We celebrated when Blair came to power, but did New Labour do anything about it? Did they hell!

It started with six guys sitting in the mezzanine area of the golf club lounge, enjoying a drink or two after an early evening round.

Donnie McLean had been known as "Pie" since 1971, when his namesake stormed the charts with American Pie. There were attempts to call him Vincent a few months later, and after that he was briefly known as Crackerjack, but Pie was the name that stuck.

Most people in Stornoway have nicknames. When two-thirds of the male population are called Donald, John, Ian, Murdo, or a combination of any two of the four (Donald John, John Ian, Murdo John, etc.) and three quarters are "Macs" (MacDonald and MacLeod being the most common), nicknames become essential. You got your nickname in school, and it stayed with you for life. And if you went back to the school as a teacher, you had the same nickname as a teacher that you had as a pupil. How did the pupils find out? From the parents, of course!

The only ones to escape nicknames were the ones with unusual names. That is, surnames that didn't begin with Mac. Like me. I was just "Flett". The only one in the school. There was one other Martin - Martin Twatt. He probably wished that he had a nickname, but he was just referred to by his surname as well.

Some nicknames were preposterous, yet they stuck. The new police inspector's son, Donald MacLeod, announced on his first day in school that he only had red pens in his pencil case. He was immediately christened "Red Pens", a nickname that stuck throughout his schooldays and was eventually shortened to "Pens". Jonathon McLean was "Geordie Aliphanti" for reasons that nobody could ever explain. He just was! I shared a classroom with Rasper, Caesar, Hen, Lanky, Niggles, Fanta, Pens, Chips, Rufus, Dokus, Dag, Titch, Hogel, Plopsy, and many, many more. We were taught by Cowboy, Barts, The Beetle, The Beetlecrusher, Habba, Johnny Rednose, Froggie, Frogey, Bulldog, Ghostie, Taz, Misery, Cicero, Harry Croup, Hoppa, Brown Owl and Boring, to name but a few.

Boring was a Primary 6 teacher and when she was giving someone the belt one day, he moved his hands at the vital moment and she whacked herself on the legs, then went behind the blackboard and sobbed uncontrollably for ten minutes as the class all giggled uncontrollably without the merest iota of sympathy for the poor woman's pain.

Chronicling Stornoway nicknames and their derivations is probably another very amusing book in it's own right. In my teenage years, the top footballers on the island were Norrie Eggs, Bobbans and Bloxy. You used to buy your paint in "Neilly Lazy's" and his daughter Christine was known to one and all as Chrissie Neilly Lazy. When I was growing up, one of my friends's father was known to one and all as "Skinny Fatty". But the best of them all was Peter Squeak. Peter Squeak's was a clothes shop next to what is now the Bank of Scotland in Cromwell Street. According to local legend, the owner had gone to London on holiday. When he got back, he regailed all and sundry with stories about his trip to the capital, and he described the view from the South Bank looking over towards the Houses of Parliament as being very picturesque. Well he tried to say picturesque, but what came out of his mouth sounded more like "Peter Squeak", and from that day on he was known as Peter Squeak.

I digress. Pie owned a local shop, what passed for a supermarket in the days before supermarkets chains found Stornoway, Sitting with him round the table were...

"You've been very quiet all day, Pie"

"It's that bloody boat. Well not the boat, but the feeling you get when it sails away and takes your kids off."

"Aye, but they'll be back in a couple of months."

"No. They'll be back sure enough, but leaving for university is the beginning of the end. Ten weeks away, four weeks at home, then ten weeks away again. That's the pattern for the next four years, and then what? The same as my other three before them.

They do really well, get a good degree, you're really proud of them, but what can they do with a bloody degree on this bloody island. Bugger all, that's what. They get a good job on the mainland and you end up seeing them for two weeks in the summer."

"It's just the way things have always been," said Billy. "I mean, I haven't got any kids myself, but it must be hard. You really want your kids to do well, and if they do really well, you sort of lose them. But if they don't do well, they end up staying here, don't they?"

"Not all of them," said Alan. "There's always a few jobs here, but there's more chance of them staying at home."

"So what do you do," said Billy. "Does there come come a point where a parent thinks, 'Do I encourage them to do well, or do I steer them towards a job that keeps them here?'"

"It's never easy," said Pie, "But you've just got this instinct to help your kid to do their best. I mean, what's the alternative? Holding them back for your own benefit. The child just turns into an adult that realises what has happened and resents the parent for doing it.

Remember when Kenny Mac got his lad into the bank a few years ago instead of sending him to university? Within two years he was transferred to Inverness and he's never been back."

Then Louis said, "Isn't it a shame that there isn't work for them here."