BE GUDE -WILLIE

“There was a naughty boy, / And a naughty boy was he;/
He ran away to Scotland / The people there to see. /
Then he found / That the ground/
Was as hard /
That a yard / Was as long / That a song / Was as merry”

And so it goes on to mention a cherry, lead, fourscore and a door - everything is, as it was in England. The last stanza reads, “So he stood in his shoes / And he wondered, / He wondered; / He stood in his shoes / And he wondered.” Unforgettable words from the pen of John Keats who was described as ‘wild’ in his youth. He was probably writing about himself. In Standard One, I used to study that drawing of the dark-skinned naughty boy with his back to the reader, skull cap on his head, wearing long sleeves, a dhoti and clogs, standing there looking at the closed wooden door of a stone building. And I too, wondered about Scotland. Several years later, during winter, I was among other British Council Scholars in County Ayrshire in Scotland. “Auld Lang Syne” — which is sung by millions every Old Year’s night, was written by Robert Burns — the Scot’s national poet, who lived in Ayrshire.

In County Kirkcudbright, after a lecture on coalmines, the guides provided us with the necessary gear and we climbed into little trolleys running on rails speeding into the dark bowels of the earth. We walked and crawled on all fours but the digging of coals with pickaxes was strictly forbidden. When we came out from the coalmine, it was snowing heavily. Some of the European students started building a snowman and a Jamaican guy and I joined them. The next thing I knew, a free-for-all snowball battle broke out. It did not take long to realise that a blow to the head from a well-packed snowball could make you see stars. In the evening, we were entertained by the coalminers. It was wonderful hearing songs like “Loch Lomond”, “O Danny Boy” and many more being sung with the Scottish accent. But the star of the night was a young coalminer who imitated Elvis Presley to the hilt, strumming his guitar and belting out “You ain’t nutten but a hound dog.”

In Dumfries, the British Council Officer felt that the students should present a concert and asked me to organise the show for her. It was a tough job because most of them were scared to perform on stage. We entered the hall with yours truly blowing the bagpipe because no one else would do it. That gimmick won the hearts of the Scots and our international concert was enthusiastically applauded. It is said that you can’t visit Scotland and not eat “haggis.” I wondered what it was but only a few of the students knew and they would not tell the others. They simply said, “Just wait and see. You will know tonight.” At the banquet on Old year’s night, the haggis was brought out and the Mayor read in Scottish dialect the poem — “Address to a Haggis” by Robert Burns. He then cut the haggis and it was served to as many students as possible. Several more haggis were served. At the end, the bailiff in his address advised us among other things to “Be-gude-willie which means “Be full of good-will.”

Haggis is defined as — “Noun. (Pl.-same)-a Scottish dish of seasoned sheep’s or calf’s offal mixed with suet and oatmeal, boiled in a bag traditionally made from the animal’s stomach. By the way, a coalminer told us that the English make the world believe that the Scots are stingy but the English are really the stingy heartless one. He said, “There was this Englishman who said to his wife on her death bed, ‘My dearest, we need the money. I must leave for work now. I want to tell you, dearie, with your dying breath, please remember to blow out the candle.”