Boswell’s Galloping Farmers
A six-part audio drama based on the memoir of Alexander (Sandy) Barclay, who fought in the infamous Gallipoli campaign of 1915.
THE FEAR OF FEAR
"Sixty years it’s been. I can’t quite believe it myself. You live your life; you think it’s all behind you. But it’s still there, inside you, the sights, the sounds, and the smells of it all. Aye. The smells."
OVER THE TOP
"I was stuck in my firing position with legs akimbo and I also couldn’t get to the bomb lying with its fuse fizzing about 4 feet away from me. Nobody else had seen it. I reckoned we had about ten seconds left...."
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TO KILL A LOUSE
"The Medical Officer came up with another solution – he sent out an order that every man had to shave all of the hair off his body, since the lice liked to hang on to hair."
NOBODY LOVES A GRENADIER
“If I ever hear of you or one of your men carrying those make-shift, exploding jam-pots anywhere near my trenches again I’ll have you on a charge quicker than you can get your boots on. D’you hear me? D’you understand? You bloody bombers… I said is that clear?
Dismissed!
Now, get the hell out of my sight.”
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THE GLASGOW KEELIE
“The officer I was with was a good and efficient officer and also a popular and fair man with the ranks. We were trudging round the circuit and as we rounded one of the traverses he suddenly stopped dead in the dark and I crashed into his back. I keeked over his shoulder and I could see that the sentry in the sentry bay was standing up on the firing step with his back to the corner – sound asleep.”
PROUD TROOPERS
“Three months lads. Three months we’ve watched our mates die, they’ve killed oors and we’ve killed men oan the other side, and we’ve lived in amongst all ae them – maist ae them lyin’ and rottin’ where they fell, aw the gither…”
THE GLAD GIVER
THE GLAD GIVER
“But what’s the point of an old woman’s prayers every morning at this time? When all I can think about is my sore knees and getting back to sleep. I’ve been locked in here forty years or more, and the world still suffers, and the plagues still come. So what’s the use of my prayers? And sometimes, I still feel so — lonely. And I wonder if God’s really listening at all to the likes of me.”
An Ayrshire Trilogy
HIGH SPIRITS
“I made the funeral director drive me straight to the ferry afterwards. By the time they were filling in my parents’ graves, I was on the boat. And I never came back.”
THE LADY & THE POET
“Canny Rab, to send his book to Frances Dunlop! She was weel-kent in Ayrshire society, and she it was who made sure his fame would quickly spread about the county and beyond.”
THERE GOES CRAUFURDLAND
“I hardly like to say it. I had a sense whenever I was in there reading, that someone else was there too, in the old chair beside the window.”
An Ayrshire Trilogy has been funded by Creative Scotland.
THE ESCORT
THE ESCORT
“I remember when the phone call came, you know. I was only nine. I heard Mom’s voice change and I knew something was wrong even then.”
SEA MIST SERIES
SEA CHANGE
“There's a good many stories told in these islands of ours …Our hills and lochs and shores were full of all kinds of faeries, though they didn't take kindly to folks crying them that.”
GALORE!
“When I met Cal, it was the coup de foudre – the lightning strike, the love at first sight… Such a handsome boy, he was; very tall and skinny with that hair that he hated me to call red.”
L’Histoire series
CONFESSIONAL
“We do not know what it is we fear, only that fear sits always with us. When the fire burns low, and the candle flame starts to gutter, we see his shadow on the wall, moving, always moving, and we know he is coming closer.”
COLLABORATION
“Sure, she sang for the Nazis. Everybody sang for the Nazis – what? You’d rather get shot against a doorway? My Sparrow was no heroine; she might have been named after Edith Cavell, but her middle name has always been Survival. Like me.”