Transcript:
The laird and his wife
A story by Edith Petrie and Pat Dunn about the Laird of Clova and his wife
They used to come up in the morning and Douglas, my son, was just sitting in his pram and he used to go
about the pram – they’d no family of their own – and he had one red sock on and one black one. That’s just
what he put on in the morning. Sometimes they would match but next thing they weren’t.
And his wife was Catholic, she was a staunch Catholic and there is a wee chapel just down from the big
house and he went down there in a rage one day and broke a lot of the …
Funny, I was just reading about that last night in an old diary. 1952 the Laird died and he broke a lot of the
precious ladies. I don’t know if he buried them. She collected a lot of stuff out of that hall for the chapel.
I remember she came into the bakery one day and she used to get her milk there – there was a wee place
just inside the door and they would lay the milk on there. And this morning she came in and said “Do you
have my milk” and I said “Yes, it’s there” and she just picked it up and it broke on the floor.
I was serving anyway so I went and got the brush and a shovel and gave it to her and my goodness – the
boss came through and what a heap of trouble I got into.
“Because you were suppose to clean it up, not her?”
It was’nae me that broke it – I was just young then. But anyway – I had to wash the floor, because milk’s
sticky.
“So did she pick it up?”
Oh she did put it in the brush but then I picked it up and put it away in the bucket.
Mind the old Laird, he shot at somebody. There was poachers in the back somewhere. Oh aye – he’d fired
it up in the air like. He didn’t shoot anybody but he fired his gun to scare them. The humour he was in
sometimes – ooh.
My father used to load there all his days. He used to go away in his plus-fours and his jacket and he loaded
for him.
So you wouldn’t cross the Laird then?
Well – you weren’t supposed to but nowadays things are not so staunch as long ago.
