A Trip Across the Water.

To Dunfermline this morning, just over the river,  in the Kingdom of Fife.

I realised I'd only been there once before - on a Sunday School picnic, in the days before there was a road bridge over the Forth.  The ferry and the  bag of buns must have been more exciting than the town, because I had only a hazy memory of the Abbey tower and a park.

Today I discovered that there's an awful lot more to it than that. Charles the First was born here. 

So was Andrew Carnegie. What did I know about him? That he was a poor boy who went to America, made an enormous fortune in steel and gave it all away for the building of public libraries, and for other enterprises for the public good.

Well, I discovered some of the back story. He had a formidable mother who kept the family going by mending shoes and opening a grocery shop when the father's trade of hand-loom weaving went into decline. They emigrated to the US and again she had to be the breadwinner when her husband died.  She managed to scrape up the money for Andrew to make his first investment, which came good and launched him on the way to wealth.

 But ... she made him break off his engagement to his future wife twice - and they didn't marry till he was 51 and the old lady dead. Her daughter-in-law said she was the most horrible person she'd ever met!

He funded more than 2,500 public libraries in the USA, the UK and many other countries. He was offered an honour by King Edward the Seventh and turned it down. He said he'd rather have a letter of thanks - and there it is, hand-written by the monarch and in a glass case for all to see. 

It occurred to me that I should be thanking him too. I've been a library user all my life. We had few books at home, but my weekly visits to the Children's Library in Edinburgh kept me in reading material till I was fourteen and old enough to have a ticket for the Central Library - a Carnegie Library.

Outside, walking on our way to visit his statue in the park, the above caught my eye. Very Fife!