When I was 12 or 13 we had this new teacher who suggested we went on a nature walk. ‘Certainly, Sir!’ So we’d go up Cademuir and the Manor, and when we were up Manor we were away killing salmon! That was the last nature walk we ever got.
I left school on the Friday and was working on the Monday. I was a plasterer with Grandison’s. I was all over the country, all over the place. It was quite a good experience. One day I wasn’t working so I went up Manor with the post office van. That day we killed two or three salmon, and coming back down the road there were the police and the water bailiff.
‘Oh, what can we do here?’ I say. ‘No problem,’ the postman says. ‘You just go in with the mail bags.’
He flapped the window shut and drove right through the road block – you can’t stop the Royal Mail! – and there I was, lying in the back under the mail bags with the salmon.
Duncan Taylor shared memories of Peebles in the 1930s, which were recorded in the early 2000s and are reproduced here by kind permission of The Tweeddale Society from their 2005 publication ‘Peebles Remembered’. Whitie’s Books and Crafts in Peebles have copies.
Image: Old Manor Brig, which dates from 1702 © Jim Smillie (cc-by-sa/2.0) geograph.org.uk/p/8292187.
