1968: Willie Goodge: Letter to Aitkenhead
Probably a Kilquanity Pupil
Willie must have been a pupil at Kilquhanity in the late 1940s. If the letter is anything to go by, he approved of both the school and its headmaster.
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After fifteen years of forgetting, there it was, right in front of my eyes. The same house somehow so much smaller now, the bushes so overgrown and the football pitch, all tufts and bumps in the shadow of the copper beech, the rope still hanging from the sycamore tree above the drive by the kitchen garden, even the pond was still there with a little less rubbish in than I remember and you John looking not one day older than when I left.
How it all came back, like the winter of 1948 or was it '49 when the snow was six feet deep and some of the boys had to go to Castle Douglas for the rations with a sledge wearing home-made snow shoos (sic) of old tennis racquets; and of how we used to go in great yelling mobs over the fields to the Deer Forest on nice summer mornings and after having climbed the Big Rock and every tree in sight would return by way of the school water tank so that we could clean the rose and look for newts or frogs in the trapped water.
I had been in another room when the programme came on (BBC Documentary) I would have recognised your voice, and looking back on it all I find it hard to believe that fifteen years have gone past.
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John on Television
I don't know why I am smiling like this, perhaps it is because I want you to know that I remember.
I feel a tiny thread between that house and me and I somehow don't want it broken like so many other threads are snapped by the passage of time for even if I never become wealthy through academic success I have a lot to thank you for. The memories of a childhood life in a true child's world with adult help but no adult domination which has left me with the ability to go through life with an open mind thus forming my own opinions and not having to live by the opinions of others.
I think that your idea is right; what a pity it is that the rest of the establishment don't agree.
I wish you all the best of luck.
