I only ever saw my two big cousins when their holidays at our grandfather's farm overlapped with mine. Colin and Drew lived in Somerset, and my home was just outside Glasgow - places impossibly far apart to a 1950s child.

Aunt Nell, the boys' mother, was the glamorous one in our family.  She wore make-up, and jewels, and swirling Dior skirts with sling-backed sandals; quite unlike the dowdy church people and plain farmers of my acquaintance.  Her boys, with their school blazers and strange accents, were alien beings indeed to a lad from the Lanarkshire coalfield.

My grandfather farmed in the south of Scotland, which is sheep country. When dipping time came, my cousins and I begged to help. The cousins treated me with lofty, shoving disdain, as being far beneath their eleven and ten years’ notice. I didn’t mind. Every child knows that privilege goes with size, and in time I too would be a ‘big boy’ and be allowed things ‘wee boys’ were not.

My task was to work the gate admitting each sheep to the dipping bath, a narrow concrete pit filled with lurid orange chemical.  As fifty-or-so incontinent Cheviots wallowed their reluctant way through, this colour became increasingly murky.

‘Sheep,' my grandfather drily observed, 'dinnae wipe their bottoms.'

When the grown-ups had gone to fetch the next batch of animals, Colin sauntered over.  'I bet you can't jump across the dipper,' he said, his Wessex burr accenting the sneer in his voice.

‘I bet I can,' I retorted, and leapt easily across the pit. It was only two feet wide, well within the jumping range of a seven-year-old.

'Bet you can't step over it then,' Drew joined in. But I perched one foot on the rim and stepped securely over.

The cousins retreated for thought. From the corner of my eye I could see my grandfather and his dog returning with a small flock.  Soon adult control would end our games.

'Bet you can't hop across,' Colin cried.

'Bet I CAN,' I shouted, and promptly hopped. But haste had blurred judgment, and the next instant, I I was up to my neck in dung- and grease-laden orange sheep-dip.

Howling and humiliated, I was taken in hand and delivered to my mother and grandmother, both laughing too much to scold. An explanation was extracted. They put me to soak, clothes and all, in a cold bath to loosen the dye, then scrubbed me in a hot one and, despite tearful protests, dispatched me to bed. Later, though, I could hear, two rooms away, the pleasing thwack of Aunt Nell's hand falling in judgment on the delinquent duo, accompanied by loud and gratifying sounds of distress. Through tears, I managed a grin.

But next day they got me behind the garage.  'Our mum walloped us because of you,' said Colin as the blows fell. 'And if you tell on us for this, we'll hit you more,'  Drew added menacingly.

At seven, you sometimes just can't win.
 

[Jim Scott] [A Boy A Book A Story] [Darkness] [Pat from Lancashire] [The Quaker Oats Man] [A Matter of Conscience] [Picnic] [Incident at a Railway Station] [Cauld Comfort Kail] [Moral Uplift] [The Soldier] [Madonna] [Hero of the Revolution] [The Messenger] [Tramlines] [Innocents] [Unlucky Dip]