Old Willie Dawson, with his puckered cheeks, inch-long bristly eyebrows and his shock of grey hair topped by a battered leather trilby, was the character of the caravan park. He had lived there well before the New Age had arrived at Findhorn and had seen thousands of planetary travellers walk the sand tracks to their caravans scattered in the hollows of the dunes. What he thought of them I don’t know but he had strong views on nearly everything else. While grubbing out daisies from the lawns he strolled over and said, without any introduction: ‘When a nation’s crafts are lost man will have no soul.’ He had clear blue eyes and no teeth, so when he smiled he always appeared astonished. His Scottish accent was thick, canny and biting. I liked him. He thought most men were cowards. ‘If they canna look at you in the eye they will tell you a lie.’ I kept looking at his eyes. ‘When they see someone lying on the ground they’ll go and put the boot in. They’re savages, but now…’ he said, looking astonished again, ‘they use their tongues.’ He stuck his tongue out and pointed to it. ‘These politicians are all tongues. There’s nothing behind it.’ There was a lot behind Willie but like many men of his generation he never showed it directly. I pieced this story together from two sources.

The healer in radionics, ‘the art of the little black box’, lived in one of the wooden chalets. She was slightly crippled and used sticks to get about. Her home faced south west in the teeth of the prevailing winds. She wanted a weather vane and asked Willie, who dabbled in metalwork, to make one for her. The months went by and nothing happened. She thought Willie had forgotten. Then he appeared one day with his ladder and mounted on her rooftop a little bird with funny outstretched wings and dabbling feet, made from scraps of metal. It wasn’t a bird that she had seen before. It’s a storm petrel, he told her, a wee little thing that lives at sea, treading the mighty rollers and braving the fiercest storms. It ventures onto land only to breed, and then, said Willie, its poor legs are so feeble it can only hobble and use its wings to stay upright. (Findhorn Bay Caravan Park, September, 1976)

Peter Please