Jackdaw 2

In 1991 Clare and I, with Nikki and James moved into our new house at Kilduncan. As we were running an egg business our address has mostly been Kilduncan Poultry Farm, but we chose to call our house Albacore House, this may sound a bit nouveau toff but the name was quite carefully chosen to reflect two aspects of our little holding's future and past.
Albacore is first of all a species of tuna. When we chose the name Clare was early in her career as a diver so calling our residence after a species of tuna seemed sensible.
But there was a second more historical factor in choosing the name Albacore.

Fifty years before we moved to Albacore House, as world war two gathered pace a naval air station was built on the farms of Kilduncan, Upper Kenly, and North Quarter of Kippo, I think it was originally an emergency landing strip for the much larger Naval Air Station just east of Crail, called HMS Jackdaw.
Keeping things simple 'our' little airfield was named Jackdaw 2 and when we did a bit of research into which planes might have used Jackdaw 2. There, among names like Fairey Swordfish, Supermarine Walrus and Fairey Barracuda, as well as the better known Westland Lysander and the slightly less expected North American Mustang we found the Fairey Albacore, and in a moment a house was named.

It isn't really my purpose here to describe the physical environment of Jackdaw 2 but my verbosity demands I do a quick description.
The actual airstrip was on the highest part of the site. It was a grass strip but there was a 3 mile concrete road running right round it. The control tower still exists up on Upper Kenly, and I believe it has, or at least had and interesting aerial.

When I was a toddler dad bought Kilduncan Farm from a battle of Britain Spitfire pilot who had tried, and failed to build his post-war future on pig farming on Kilduncan.
We sold the farm again in 1968 but dad had just started to use some of the redundant military buildings to keep hens in to produce eggs to sell locally, mostly alongside the bottles of milk we retailed from Coal Farm for many years, so he kept the 6 acres we now live on

A couple of family stories do linger. There is a field about 30 metres to my right which isn't much more than 10 acres, but dad claimed that he had cleared 23 WW2 Nissen huts from this field, to make what wasn't,  and still isn't a fully arable field, but which has grown a lot of good grass in the past 50 years. No details of how he did it, or where the building materials ended up remain.
My respect for this achievement is enormous. In 1990 when we were building our house we had to remove one similar base and had the option to clear a couple more. The best the man with the big digger could offer was to drag the intact base 30m and bury it. The other 2 are still there, and likely to stay for a while.
The other, better, but possibly more likely to be apocryphal story comes from Grampa Peddie, who with gran lived in the original Kilduncan Farmhouse for the 11 years dad and he owned the whole 180 acres.
His story was that several packing cases containing Spitfire engines, presumably Rolls Royce Merlin were buried somewhere on site. No evidence has ever been produced to support this tale so I include it only as a piece of family folklore.

And eventually I come to the reason for this post.

In the years after we moved here we had a surprising number of visitors who had wartime connections with Jackdaw 2. 
At first they were almost exclusively elderly couples or ladies who had met their husbands or wives while serving at Jackdaw 2. If I had been more aware I would have brought each of them into the house  and got their stories down on paper. Sadly I was almost often busy so all I have left are inadequate fragments of 30 year old conversations.
My memory is that there were more ladies and couples than men. While they were obviously a self selecting sample they came seeking happy memories. Mostly these were of young lives and partnerships begun, but I do remember a couple of fragments of life on the camp.
One was of a Chief Petty Officer who was always happy to offer any of the WRENs stationed here a lift on his bike handlebars down to Kingsbarns,  home of both the Cambo Arms, still surviving as our local pub, although now called the Inn @ Kingsbarns, and perhaps more importantly the bus to St Andrews.

There was also a story that in early 1944 there was a mysterious collection of tents discretely pitched on one of the quieter corners of the airfield and lived in by Royal Marines. The suggestion I picked up was that these men were involved either on D-Day or perhaps just before. Certainly European travel was involved.

There were two other later visitors who I remember rather better.
One day in the early 2000s I came home in a van and passed a camper van with a German number plate parked at the Wrennery, as we call the collection of buildings,  now on North Quarter, and half way in our road. I drove past but fortunately the camper van shortly followed me in and we chatted.
The driver was a German in his 70s. In 1945, as a 16 or17 year old, he was conscripted into the German army and given the task of stopping the allied armies from crossing the Rhine. He was one of the lucky ones who were taken prisoner and he was removed from what must have been a hellish existence in Germany to what he clearly thought was a charmed live in Fife.
And what little I heard makes it hard to disagree.
The wrennery had found a new identity as a POW camp. But this was a camp without armed guards and where the prisoners were told to go out to local farms where they could work for food and keep. I assume Boghall would be high on the list of possibilities, but I have never asked the Turnbull family, owners then as now.
Certainly my German acquaintance looked back on a life saved and was grateful for a place of safety which allowed him to go back to a decent life in post war Germany.

The last visitor was perhaps the most interesting, and he came with a photograph.
The photo showed him standing on the steps, which still exist, and which are less than 30m from our back door, and lead up to a now decrepit building, but which must have been the last building on the farm to be occupied on WW2 business.

This man was not a serviceman but an employee of the naval dockyard at Rosyth.
We have to imagine a situation that on VE day British shipyards were building and equipping Naval and other ships as quickly as was humanly possible.
When Germany surrendered suddenly these ships were surplus to requirements. I have no idea what happened to the ships, but by 1948 my last visitor and his colleagues were busy putting some of the equipment into storage in the maintenance hangers which still exist on Kilduncan.

5 days of treatment

Possibly the easiest thing I have ever done.
My role in the procedure was to lie on my back for about 5 minutes, wearing a neon yellow face mask, while a linear accelerator did something clever with xrays aimed at the more tumour rich parts of my brain.  Those of you who know me will acknowledge that this is well within my skillset.

Easy though lying there was the treatment was not quite side effect free. I suspect x-rays are not terribly good for brain cells, so now it is Sunday and I am feeling quite a lot better than I have for a couple of days.

Of course on Thursday I felt great. Got up early (well, before 8, dad would have called it a long lie) and buzzing. Had treatment then came home to pass on my knowledge of cutting the grass and operating our slightly dilapidated John Deere lawnmower to Dr Peddie. She of course was an ideal pupil, a hot hatch prodean perhaps.
The grass in the paddock was a little long and there was a minor choking incident, this did involve my spending quite and extended period lying under the mower as I pulled handfuls of compressed grass from under the cutters.

This may help to explain why I felt shit on Friday morning. However a wee rest and some outstanding Scottish 7s rugby on TV has brought me round. After 18 months of  astonishingly robust health, I have to accept that there will be more bad days, the trick, I suspect, is to grab the good days with both hands, even at risk of tiring myself out.

So, who believes in karma?

Probably not me to be honest, although I have a wee Rebus story which might wobble my rationalism.

I dad's last couple of weeks fighting his prostate he was struggling to read even a paperback book. I had just been given an ebook, primitive in the early 2000s, but we tried.

It didn't work too well, but eventually it dawned on me that the Ian Rankin novel I had chosen for Dad to read, probably as his last book was Exit Music. Hardly apt.

So cut to this week and the latest book to step up on my trusty kindle is another Rebus Rankin novel. 
This one is called Rather be the Devil.
It features a retired John Rebus, who interestingly has a large shadow on his lung. Lung cancer? He certainly has spent quite a bit of time coughing his guts up.
I am only 62% of my way through the book so i won't be able to plot spoil completely.
Good book though, you should read it.

Karma? Nah.

A man with a plan

Well, strictly speaking the plan comes from our NHS.

Yesterday Clare and I made another, and entirely trauma free visit to Ninewells. This time we were preparing for a plan which starts next week.

I was first fitted with a warm moulded face mask. It was lime green with perforations. Its function is to keep my head still next week.
Not, you understand, for the whole of next week but for the 10 to 15 minutes each day next week when Ninewells finest radiographers will be using their CT scanning machine to send X-rays into the Peddie brain area.
With a fair wind this will stop or even shrink tumour growth up there.
Final effects are not certain so I won't tempt fate by listing the possibilities.

I will almost certainly lose my hair, and be much more tired than I have been.

But neither hair loss nor tiredness seem like to much of a price to pay.

There is another matter.

One of Elton John's better songs is Sorry Seems to be the Hardest Word. Good song, but sadly at present in my situation not quite accurate.  
Turns out goodbye is the hardest word.

Now I have a long and proud history of weeping uncontrollably when saying goodbye.
The first time I remember performing this trick was nearly 50 years ago when dad and I took a 90 year old Ontario retired farmer to Prestwick airport at the end of his stay of two or three weeks.
When it came to saying goodbye I welled up pretty much uncontrollably.

Not just goodbye of course. Although I call Sunshine on Leith my happy place this doesn't mean that I don't regularly watch it with tears running down my face. Also, as I type this, slowly, The West Wing is unfolding in front of me. Odds are I will shed a tear or two before it is finished.

It is niceness and decency that hits me here, I think.

Now in my present situation most people I meet are decent and nice and are keen to say goodbye. I love you all but I warn you tears may result. Preserving the illusion that I will be here for years may be the best way ahead. Hugging is always acceptable.

There is another small issue.
This is shit. I think so. I am pretty sure we pretty much all concur. For simplicity I will end with a facebook message from a surprisingly eloquent butcher.  A friend, a decent man and a pretty damn good butcher.

'Awww egg man. That's just a complete bastard,
The somewhat less than eloquent fat butcher'

More all less says it all. Nuffsaid.