A year or so ago, on a busy Saturday, a pleasant lady who had travelled from Glasgow came into the Coffee Room and asked for the Curator. Her story was that when she was a little girl her father brought her and her mother down to this village by bus to visit her father’s great uncle, a man named John Muir, who made his living selling fruit and vegetables around town and lived in a cottage on the main road. It was an old house, she said and my mother wouldn’t go in or let me go in. My father told us that the old man kept it warm by having a tree on a stool with one end burning in the grate and he just pushed if forward as it burned. Mother and I stayed outside in the lovely garden at the front.
Once there was great excitement when he won an Irish sweepstake ticket…
At this point I stopped her. “He was known as Johnnie Mair, and I now own his house, and I’m still looking for the £47,000 he received when he won that sweepstake. It was never found and it just might be buried as gold coins in the front garden” Her eyes widened. “You are not going to find it,” she said. “I’m afraid you are wasting your time. He sold the ticket to a bookmaker in Kilwinning for £400 and when it won the bookie got the money.
However I do have a surprise for you,” she went on. “When he died, my father inherited the house and contents. He and a friend came down, emptied the contents into the back garden and set fire to them, but there was a pine trunk with Ayrshire blankets in it and somehow they got it onto an SMT double decker and brought it back to the city.
They got a surprise; under the blankets was this,” she said, opening the box she had brought with her, to reveal …
“What” she said, “was a seventy-eight year old bachelor doing with that?” We will never know.
