For the cramped and weary passengers disembarking from the LMS train from Inverness at Thurso station, after an odyssey of at least 30 stops, the sense of having arrived somewhere really special was enhanced by the vast and welcoming presence of Alfie Cormack.

Alfie was over six feet tall and ginger haired and attired in the green livery of the Pentland Hotel. He drove the Pentland Hotel bus from the station - ten minutes walk at most even in the teeth of a Caithness gale. But the bus was essential if you were bound for the Pentland Hotel with luggage.

There was I think only one taxi operating in the town in 1946 and for that you had to call Gunn’s garage from the public telephone box. It would take at least an hour for the vehicle to be prepared for service and then there was the tricky question of petrol. There wasn’t much of it in Caithness in 1946 and what there was was rationed. Everything was rationed. Better by far to go with Alfie, who functioned as a kind of unofficial one-man welcoming committee to the town.

I remember being enormously impressed with the Pentland Hotel bus. It was my first great impression of Thurso when, at the tender age of five years, myself and my mother stepped off the train on a bright summer evening.

The Pentland Hotel bus belonged to that class of vehicle from the 1920s called a charabang. (I hope I have spelled that correctly. Certainly there was many a bang from the engine as it started up for its epic journey down Princes Street.)

But we would not be going on the bus. Instead my father was there to greet us. My father had a car of his own. This was a 1930s vintage Morris Minor in which he had driven to Thurso the week before, braving the vertiginous thrills of the unreconstructed Berriedale brae and avoiding colliding with any of the wandering sheep subject to so many warning signs along the causie mire.

My father was the new doctor in town - Dr. W. R. N. Sutherland. Our family had no real connection with the town in spite of our surname. Whatever inspired him to set up his plate in the northermost town on the British mainland with a population of 3,000 and two doctors already hard pressed to make a living in those pre-NHS days? (Dr. MacGregor in Janet Street and Dr. Fell in Sir George’s Street).

My father enjoyed fishing and he enjoyed obstetrics. Delivering trout from the loch on a Friday afternoon and weekends and delivering babies the rest of the week must have appealed to him.

Also he had been through the war and I imagine he wanted to be as far away as he could manage from the bombed -out, exhausted, south with its queues and its regulations and its drab, smoke-polluted cities. He had learned Swahili in the course of serving as a medical officer with the Royal African Rifles. Swahili was scant help in interpreting the Caithness accent - which given the relative isolation of the county in 1946 was much more pronounced than it is today!

This was Thurso when Thurso Castle was still inhabited (by Sir Archibald Sinclair who had been Ministry of Air during the war) although its foundations had been severely damaged by a land mine explosion.

This was Thurso before Houngry Hill was houngry. This was Thurso where the Glebe was the only public housing. (Churlish middle class critics insisted that the Glebers farmed mussels in their baths - a Caithness variant on the coal in the bathtub urban legend from Glasgow)

This was Thurso of the Transit Camp - a collection of corrugated iron Nissan huts that occupied today’s caravan site between Ormlie Street and the Victoria Walk. If you were homeless in Thurso, the town council would put you up in the Transit Camp. The post war baby boom must already have been under way because they were packed in like sardines in the Transit Camp. The Transit Campers were moved en masse to Springpark and the new council houses that were beginning to creep up Houngry Hill.

No Transit Camp for the new doctor and his family however hard up we were!

My parents rented one half of a wonderful house, Quiet Court, which fronts on Paterson’s Lane and runs from Barrock Street to Princes Street.

It is a house I remember well because it was there that I was sick with tuberculosis. Great wars always produce great waves of diseases. 1918 produced a global influenza pandemic that killed more people than the generals. In 1946, tuberculosis and polio were the legacy diseases of the war that had just ended. When we Thurso schoolchildren were eventually tested to see if we should receive the BCG tuberculosis vaccination many of us produced magnificent scabs on our arms at the test site - sure evidence of prior infection.

My father’s surgery was established temporarily in the Macfarlane house at the corner of Paterson’s Lane and Princes Street.

Mr. MacFarlane had deceased years before and his wife, alone, raised a family of extraordinary talent and ambition. Cathy who never married and who for many years was Thurso town clerk, Jack a banker in Edinburgh, Billie who went to Canada with the Hudson Bay Company, and Daisy who married a solicitor in Edinburgh. All, except Cathy and her mother were long gone by 1946.

There was very little that happened in Thurso that Cathy MacFarlane did not know about and she was quite simply indispensable to the establishment of our family in Thurso. Someone to guide the newcomer through the intricacies of life in Thurso was essential.

Let me rephrase that: Thurso had seceded from the Atlee government’s version of Britain.

In our family it was my mother who first encountered the Thurso difference.

On her first day in town she went shopping - a procedure that in 1946 still involved the ration books and coupons of wartime. Eggs, butter, and meat were doled out in miniature portions to the British population. In this aspect at least the country was still at war.

One tried and true way of getting a few extra scraps of meat was by flirting with the butcher. I believe my mother to have developed this skill to the level of a minor art-form.

The nearest butcher’s was Jack Shearer’s shop at the junction of Sinclair Street and Sir John’s Square.

The Thurso bush telegraph was working as well in 1946 as it does today, for when my mother entered the store, Jack Shearer himself was there to greet her.

“Good morning, “ he said, “Mrs. Doctor Sutherland.”

That was a good beginning, my mother thought as she presented her ration book

“I’d like a little mince, “ she began tentatively.

“Oh, certainly!”

Getting up her courage she said, “You wouldn’t have a little butter…?”

“Butter! Of course,” Jack Shearer replied.

“Eggs?”

“Oh, we could maybe manage an egg or two,” said Jack.

Then he leaned over the counter, confidentially and said, “Maybe you’d like a little something for a Sunday….”

Visions of a roast swam up in my mother’s imagination but clearly that was ridiculous. Nobody in Britain had had a roast since the evacuation at Dunkirk.

“I’ll just slip a little something in with the order,” said Jack Shearer.

Later that morning a boy on a bicycle delivered the order. It contained two pounds of fresh butter, two dozen eggs, two pounds of minced steak and a leg of lamb for that Sunday roast.

My mother thought she had received the wrong order.

She called the shop. She was assured that everything in the order was for herself and her family.

Food rationing ended at the Ord of Caithness. The entire county had opted out of the government austerity programme. Most of the butter and eggs and meat that were supposed to be shipped down south to Edinburgh and London never left Caithness.

Many Thurso families had had paying guests from the Royal Navy. They may have been gone in reality but their Thurso addresses and their ration books went on forever.

The ministry of agriculture and fisheries (ag. and fish) must have been bemused by the compete inability of Caithness farmers to fulfill their quota of produce. But there again, what could you expect from this inbred lot of bogtrotters eking out a living on their northern plain, hundreds of miles from civilization?

At regular intervals, the government did send an inspector to review the apparently endlessly deteriorating agricultural situation in the far North.

He was an example of that stiff-necked moral uprightness cultivated in the Scottish Lowlands to the despair of Highlanders everywhere. So upright was this civil servant that, in the interest of national economy, he did not use the petrol ration (to which he was undoubtedly entitled) to make the trip North.

Instead he took the train.

And that was his undoing.

By the time he got on the train at Inverness the word was passing along the telephone line: “The mannie from the ministry is on the way.”

And at the 30 odd (some very odd) stations along the way - Tain, Rogart, The Mound, Golspie, Helsmdale, Forsinard, Altnabreck - the lines hummed, local scofflaws were alerted, sides of beef and lamb were concealed under beds, butter hidden in the river, eggs slipped into coat pockets in wardrobes. This was the North of Scotland’s equivalent of Paul Revere’s famous ride - “the mannie is coming, the mannie is coming….”

At the Pentland Hotel the wartime menu replaced the regular one - a few mackerel from Scrabster harbour, cormorant fritters, meager portions of scrambled eggs made with powdered eggs and powdered milk, nasty margarine…..

When the train pulled in at Thurso, and disgorged the mannie from the ministry there was Alfie Cormack to greet him - six feet of of cherubic innocence in a green uniform.

And just a bus ride away was a meal that only a socialist in 1946 could stomach.