YOUR report on the limited life experiences of pupils from deprived communities ("Headteacher: Poor pupils from Glasgow have never seen the sea", The Herald, May 3) took me back more years than I care to remember to the days when, living in 1950s Ardrossan, not far from "the shore", my mum and dad used to take in what were colloquially termed "lettin' folk". In other words, entire families from Glasgow who, during the Glesca Fair and extended summer holidays, would come "doon the watter" in their droves, spilling, garrulously out of trains at a bustling Ardrossan railway station to find their digs; rooms that were let to them for a week or so by the local denizens of the seaside town.
Being extortionately affluent ourselves, we four boys in the family were happily ensconced in the bijou east wing's single bed, or "back bedroom", as it was affectionately known, while mum and dad and young sister were equally comfortable in the west wing, or, front bedroom with "set-in" bed, as we chirpily called it. Such was our largesse, too, that we shared our one other room, the kitchen, with our new-found families week-in, week-out throughout wonderfully interminable summer weeks of sunshine, sand and swimming in the sea. We even let them share our outside toilet, the ancient, foot-worn floor of which one day gave way to reveal, some 20 feet below, an inlet from the sea flowing freely beneath us. By all accounts, in more adventurous, nay, piratical times gone by, it had been used by smugglers to off-load their ill-gotten gains.
Echoing the headteacher in your article, many and oft were the ecstatic cries I heard of men, women and children when they first espied the expanse of ocean before them. Many, too, were the buckets of whelks brought back to the house from their daily sojourns there. The all-pervading smell of them fulminating in great pans in the kitchen lives with me to this day and probably explains why I've never been keen on any seafood that comes in shells. Happy, carefree days of course.
e e cummings, the American poet, painter, essayist, author, and playwright believed that "nothing recedes like progress" and so it would appear that when contemplating Charles Lamb's "days of childhood... my joyful school days", sadly, it's more a case of "plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose".
Gerard McCulloch,
47 Moffat Wynd, Saltcoats.
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