Robert Graham says

I found yer shoes Sadie and sold them tae a wee wummin at the gates of St. Palladius school.  She said that they would dae her wee boy and being guid quality wid be passed doon through her 11 weans.....................................................................................

Only kiddin' of course. it's yer big cousin here Robert Graham.  Hope all is well with you and yours in Canada.

I dae min' ye rinnin' aboot wi' yer bare feet. Hee Hee. x

Sheena Woodside says

Hello Sadie. How are you?

Nice to hear from you.I remember very well the good old days at Dalry Primary & Dalry High. Your old pal Sheena x

Nancy Briggs says

Hi Sadie nice to see you on the Dalry site  Nancy Briggs (Prasher)

Geoffrey Graham says

Jimmy’s father was known as ‘Auld Jock’. When I first met him he was close to retirement so he was probably born around the late 1880’s. He told me about ‘The Good Old Days’, days that according to him were never good except in the mind of some senile idiots.

He told me that when he was a small child he didn’t have any shoes and walked the street barefoot. He claimed that there was no stigma attached to being a barefoot gossoon because all the kids that he played out with were also shoeless. He reckoned that because children’s feet grew so rapidly parents could not keep up to with the cost of constantly having to buy new pairs of shoes.

He said that having no shoes seemed perfectly natural to him and that he only had problems with it when it was really cold and then he had to find a horse and cart and wait for the horse to make a deposit on the road so that he could then go and stand in it because it was always warm and would restore some life back into his frozen feet.

When he first went to school he had to have some shoes because all schoolchildren had shoes and to be barefoot at that age was a sign of real poverty. Although the truth was that the vast majority living in Dalry were extremely poor when compared to to-days inhabitants parents were far too proud and God fearing to admit it. His parents did not want adults looking at their son and thinking that he was a poor deprived child with idle non-caring parents.

His new shoes were at least two sizes too big because they had to last so they had to be ‘adjusted’. First some insoles were made out of cardboard and then the toes were stuffed with newspapers until the shoes were a more or less a decent fit. All that Auld Jock could remember about his first shoes was that they squeaked and that was a sure sign that the shoes had not been paid for! Later in life his mother told him that at first he refused to wear shoes and that as soon as he got home from school he would kick them off and run around barefoot. When winter brought icy pavements he discovered that shoes slid far better than bare feet so he stopped protesting about having to wear them and they became a part of standard dress and great fun to wear when there was a bit of ice around.

SADIE MARR (MALLOCH) says

It's been a while since I was last on the site.  Robert if you still have my shoes I need them for the grandkids.  Just send them over.  I just got a call today to say my uncle Billy(Prasher) died today. 

It was great to see your face.  I had a wee visit with Jessie & Johnny when I was over 2009 for my dad's 80th they both looked well.

Feel free to e-mail me at smarr@nemhc.on.ca

The same goes for anyone else who wants to catch up.  Hope to hear from you.