Badminton was great but what about Dracula
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by Lily Byron
I WAS delighted to read in last week’s "Northern Times" that Ardgay Badminton Club is alive and well.
The article reminded me of our Junior Badminton Club which was run in Ardgay during the 1950s by Bunty Cameron (later Gordon) and often assisted by Pansy Ross.
Weekly badminton – and the collection of my "School Friend" magazine from Mary’s bookstall, on the station platform on Tuesdays – were the highlights of my life!
We met once a week after school in the old Balnagown Hall, which always smelt of cigarette smoke and other post-dance odours which we children knew very little about!
Usually the kindly Alec Aird, coughing and smoking at the same time, was there to let us in but if not, we collected the huge key from his house across the road.
The wide door in the gable end of the hall was always stiff and difficult to open. Alec would switch on the wall-mounted one-bar electric heaters which didn’t seem to make much difference to the temperature!
Bunty was very strict about behaviour but we enjoyed learning to play and to umpire properly.
When we played for the Junior Cup we had to turn up dressed smartly in white blouses or shirts (did we have shorts then? I don’t think so!) and there had to be complete silence during games.
It was all so exciting! I used to find it difficult to concentrate at school in those days, as my mind was on the match and whether I would have a chance of winning.
We played singles and doubles. If I remember rightly, Heckie Jack and I won the junior cup a few times.
As our junior badminton was ending, the teenagers and grown-ups turned up and occasionally they would let us stay for a wee while to watch them play.
We would then leave to "do devilment" (yes, that’s what we called it!) around the station, the post office and Fergie’s bar. The station was a busy place in those days with a stationmaster and porters. The arrival of the evening (steam) train was quite an exciting event.
The waiting room always had a blazing fire inside where we could warm ourselves on frosty nights.
Mary the bookstall, of course, kept an eye on us so that we didn’t get up to too much mischief as we knew she would tell our parents!
We loved playing in the dark and liked to frighten ourselves with ghost stories and tales of graves opening up and revealing the dead.
I think Ian Dunbar was the chief story teller.
One night, as we ran up the rickety wooden steps between the Post Office and MacAskill’s shop, we got the shock of our lives for, outside Alec Mackay’s garage, were two long black hearses, each carrying four coffins! We were paralysed with fear.
(The drivers were filling up with petrol on their way south. We heard later that they were carrying the bodies of fishermen drowned at sea.)
How was I to get home on my own, in the dark? By that time, there were street lights but only in the village. I lived up at the Old School in Church Street, and had to say goodbye to my friends at the Poplars Farm and then I was plunged into darkness. How I wished that we lived in the lovely new council houses in Manse Road, with their colourful brightly-lit windows. Dracula was hiding behind every bush, waiting to spring out on me!
So it wasn’t just badminton, it was all the fun that went with it, that made our lives so enjoyable and it’s all thanks to wonderful people like Bunty and Pansy who gave so much of their time to us when we were children.
