| The Truth Tells Twice: The Life Of A North-East Farm. - Charlie Allan. |
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It's not a big farm by the standards of today, but Little Ardo, looking across the River Ythan from its hill on Buchan's southern boundary, was a fine size when William Yull took the tenancy way back in 1837. And 170 years on it's still a fine size and still run by the same family.
Time, of course, has wrought a change or two to this holding on the south-facing slopes of Ythanvale near Methlick in Aberdeenshire. There's not a horseman or a cattleman or an orraman about the place now. And the seventh generation farmer is his own grieve. Such are the benefits of today's agricultural technology, the only way to turn a profit from the land.
However, I detected more than a trickle of nostalgia flickering its way through Charlie Allan's latest hardback. By no means a regret for the days of "stupid labour" as he rightly calls the hard graft of yesteryear's farming, more a realisation that when your farmhands are no longer occupying your cottar hooses the spirit of yesteryear has flown. The work ethic is still there, but farming is a very different way of life now.
Charlie, author, newspaper columnist, farmer, broadcaster, radio producer and bothy balladeer calls his latest work The Truth Tells Twice, a granny phrase meaning that lies, unlike the truth, have a habit of changing with every telling and can get you into trouble.
The author paints a broader picture than just the life and work of one farm. He recalls with infinite pleasure his early upbringing in the rambling farmhouse of North Ythsie (pronounced "I see"), the 400-acre holding of his maternal grandparents, to which he was sent from the family home.
Why North Ythsie? That was a simple, safe solution to a wee boy's accommodation problem during the war years when his father, John, was in the Army and his mother, Jean, was involved in war work. Captain John Allan was eventually demobbed in 1945 before taking over as the farmer at Little Ardo.
Reading a Charlie Allan book is akin to sitting back in a quiet corner of the lounge bar and listening to a first-class raconteur, which is exactly what he is. We hear of his (mostly!) idyllic childhood: he passes on tales - mainly amusing - of his forebears.
More seriously, he talks of driven men who drained the peat-sodden moor with little more than a spade and a strong back to create fine farms where nothing would grow before: and he talks (a lot) about the farm workers - the ill-paid fee'd men - whose skill and native work ethic kept those farms going.
Hard work? Here's an example. To hand load a box cart with turnips for the cattle the model was to pick up two at a time and keep six neeps moving all day long - two in your hands, two in the air and two in the cart. About as cold a job as you could get in winter!
Charlie has raided the family album(s) to give faces to the characters in his anecdotes and, in addition, he thanks Rhoda Howie for her imaginative map of Little Ardo.
Oh, aye - most important - there's a grand glossary of old North-East farming terms. You'll need it. If only to discover whit the haflin was getting up tae wi' the bone davey.
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