My Grandfather in Canada (it wasn't his car)
I have been keeping a diary for a long time, however, there was still history before my diaries and memories which my diary couldn't do justice to. So I decided sometime ago to jot down some of my memories. I think with all people our memories consist of the good and the hard, although I find over the years, the 'hard time' memories change slightly and before where I felt weak and things were hopeless I realise now that there was a strength there too, as in not giving up. Also on the plus side and being that much older,I see and appreciate the humour in life even during those hard times. So in a way I am reminded of the importnace of hope and of the impemanence of life, and its experiences, good, hard, bad. They all come and go and we can either rise up or get swallowed up and the choice is without doubt ours alone for we are called to dig deep or not, that is our choice. Nothing lasts for ever, good, hard or bad. other than our determination.
It was my younger sister who has on many occassions suggested I include some of those memories in my blog and share them with you. So here we'll start with my Mother......
My Mum
My Mum in her younger days when she enjoyed highland dancing.
My Mum passed away at the age of 79, one month and one day before her 80th Birthday. She was a breed all on her own. Born 1923 and raised in Dunoon, Argyllshire, she came from a family of 13, of which there were 11 children, two of whom died as babies, two girls in the family, my Mum and her sister Isabel. In the days when she was brought up, especially in such a large family, the oldest took care of the younger members of the family. They were definitely a working-class family, her Mum and Dad both Scots had married and settled in Canada for a while and some of my Mum’s older siblings were born there, then they moved back to Dunoon. There is an expression that is used to describe some people and their relationship to where they were born, in this instance and it is true even in today’s society, you can take the person out of Dunoon but you cannot take Dunoon out of the person. It was for me a magical holiday place by the seaside and as a child growing up in Central Scotland, Dunoon reached out it’s loving arms and embraced not only my heart but those of my sisters also.
My Mum confessed to starting her life as a smoker at 14 and this and politics were her lasting passions, however I’ll come back to them. As well as starting to smoke my Mum went into service, that is to say she cleaned and helped out at one of the Dunoon Manses, I think she was 14 then also, obviously an eventful year for her. The reason I mention this is to give you an understanding of my Mum, she worked extremely hard all her life and her way, her therapy of working problems out in her mind was to smoke and clean. So, if she was troubled you would find her with a duster in her hand or a cup of tea and smoking a cigarette. However, politics and the Labour party were one of her earliest passions and I believe she was a member of the party, in these days Argyll was a Tory seat but that didn’t stop her, and she was a fervent Labour supporter all her life. She would talk about the famous leaders of the time and also those who were to become famous. Always passionate about the things that were important to her.
Tragedy struck her family with the death of her mother, my grandmother, in her early fifties. My mother the oldest of the two sisters adopted the role of female head of household and all that it involved, washing, cleaning, cooking etc. This sort of sets out the type of woman that she was, she never ducked her responsibilities, real or imagined. She went to work in the local laundry and had some great friends from there that remained so throughout their lives even although they were separated by distance.
My grandfather used to drive the bakers van abley assisted by his sons who enjoyed the ‘crumbs’ that were left at the end of the day. He eventually moved in with my mum’s younger sister and her husband, my Auntie Isabel and Uncle Michael, their children and the family’s old dog Floss who managed even at the ripe old age of 18 (after being tied up) to follow the trail of our family who were on holiday staying with the same Aunt and Uncle. We must have been walking for at least 20 minutes, with my wee sister Helen who was getting pushed along in her pram, when Floss had sniffed out our trail and caught up with us.
My Grandfather liked a drink and had been known to stagger home from the pub on occasion, any occasion, I think! He was a lovely man and a great character. He came to visit us in our home in Polbeth for a holiday. Now I lived all my childhood and early adulthood there and it was not the most salubrious of places but it was a great place to be brought up, there was a large swing park, a burn (or stream) and so on but not the place you might want to go on holiday, however my grandfather made the journey, in these days it involved the ferry from Dunoon to Gourock, then the train to Glasgow Central, change, then another train to West Calder. From there it was a mile to Polbeth, and you could either get the bus or walk it for in these days there were not many cars and even less taxis. My Grandfather walked with a stick and wore a cap, great fun for a young boy. He was also deaf and had a large hearing aid which I am never sure worked as well as it should and of course he smoked too. My Mum’s youngest brother, my Uncle Kenny, married my Aunt Alice, a local girl and our next-door neighbour’s daughter. They lived in Polbeth too, in Burnside which was on the other side of the main road. The other side of the main road was roughly the other half of Polbeth, it also had two pubs which I am sure was also on my grandfather’s mind when he decided to visit his youngest son and daughter in law. However he hadn’t reckoned on the superior strategy of my Mother who had it all figured out, “John,” she said to me, “take Grandpa to Uncle Kenny’s, you’ll pass the Roadhouse, one of the pubs, make sure you take him straight to Uncle Kenny’s and when you bring him back make sure you take the shortcut missing the pub!” Now my poor unsuspecting Grandfather had no idea that he had been outflanked before he had even left the house. So off we went, he visited, and I brought him back the shortcut, we got back to my home at around five o’clock, when the dinner was due to be ready, as he arrived outside our small 1st level tenement he asked why we hadn’t passed the pub and when I told him, he was fit to burst. This was a valuable lesson in how to win the war without having to go through the battle stage.
In those days everything seemed so vibrant, rich and filled with life, now I realise that it was I who was rich with life, I guess I still am, however it doesn’t have the newness it did then.
The years passed, I married Pat and we had 3 great boys, Christopher, Alastair and Colin. My Mum became a young widow at 57 going on 58 and as far as I am aware never shed a tear in front of anyone. The furniture, right down to the cans of food in her cupboard never showed any anything less than a well polished sheen. Neither did she show interest in anyone else for the rest of her life. She had her bifocal glasses and eventually a hearing aid which thankfully was much more modern than her father’s. I used to laugh and say to her that her kitchen table had superb hearing for that is where her hearing aid spent most of its time. In these days my Mum and Dad had lived in a terraced council house with a very large garden and after my father’s death my Mother took over most of the gardening which to her was always a chore but in its way it was another form of cleaning therapy because the garden was always immaculate, so much so that I was sure the weeds were scared to show themselves.
My Mum surprised us all by saying that she might go to Australia on holiday, this from a retired lady who never really travelled very far after the death of my Father. She had decided to visit my Aunt Minnie; my dad’s only surviving sister, the youngest of his siblings, who lived in one part of Australia, then she was going to fly to another part to visit friends of her deceased brother Donald who had also settled in Australia. My twin sister Isabel managed to get an extended holiday from her work and off they went. They had to fly to London first then catch their connecting flight for Singapore, have a couple of days there before flying onto Oz. Now I would like you to visualize my Mum, big glasses which made her eyes look like saucers; she was a bit deaf and very easily confused when in unfamiliar surroundings. They were in the Airport in London sitting beside their luggage; the terminal was very busy when Isabel got up for a wander. In these days it was possible to smoke anywhere in Airport terminals. Isabel heard the announcement over the loudspeaker; “would everyone please clear the area immediately” there had been a bomb warning. Isabel rushed back to find my Mum sitting blissfully smoking on her own for everyone else had cleared away, “Mum!” she said, “You’ll have to move there has been a bomb warning.” My mum said “Okay!” and continued her smoke blissfully unconcerned and unaware of the potential danger. By this time the police were getting a wee bit agitated and came over and with a joint effort between them and Isabel they managed to get my Mum to move. It transpired if my Mum had been any closer, she would have been sitting on top of the potential bomb. Fortunately, it was a false alarm. My Mum and Isabel went on to have a great holiday which they went on to repeat several years later this time without the bomb scare.
It was some years later that my Mum’s own health suffered and as it is with such things it caught everyone on the hop. In these days I was a member of Rotary and I had been to our lunch time meeting. Immediately afterwards I went or my weekly visit to see a lady who had been very depressed and suicidal. I gave her healing once a week. On entry I always switched my mobile telephone off. We finished our session, I left to go into my car and as usual I switched my mobile on and to my surprise there was a missed call from my Mum. I tried to call her all afternoon and got no answer. After dinner that night I was heading out to a business appointment with a client and the route I was taking would pass my Mum’s home, now in a two-bedroom apartment in West Calder. Without going into too much detail, her apartment was like the Marie Celeste, her handbag was lying beside her chair and even more concerning was the fact that her cigarettes were there too. After some investigation I discovered that she, if you believed her who never had any visitors, had a neighbour friend who called in for a cup of tea and during the visit my mother collapsed with a leaking aneurism. Providence had provided help when it was needed otherwise, she would have lain alone and died. She had 3 months in hospital, a major part of which she was unconscious after her emergency surgery, so much so that it was considered switching the life support off. But the whole point of telling you about my Mum and her character happened here. She was lying unconscious in bed with a tracheotomy, a breathing tube directly into her throat; she had gone in her unconscious state through any withdrawal symptoms to do with smoking. My sisters and I and our spouses visited every day, our adult children most days, Aunts and Uncles from far and wide came to visit her in hospital too. It was heart breaking watching her lying there, this proud woman who had been such a major influence in all our lives lying helpless, her face lined and wrinkled, her hair still with lots of red in it not getting the attention it normally received. She was sprouting tubes from her nose, throat and arms. Eventually she started to come around, her eyes opening gradually. I was sitting with her when all her tubes had been removed. She still had an oxygen mask beside her as she lay there finding it hard to speak because of her sore throat from tubes that had been inserted. She still wasn’t fully conscious when she tried to speak to me. “Cigarette!” she whispered in a rasping voice, “Get me a packet of cigarettes!”
“Mum,” I said, “you cannot smoke here, you are in hospital and you are surrounded by oxygen containers.’
“Okay,” she said, “ten will do!”
I loved her to bits, and I thought well she is back! She made a good recovery and eventually went home. She died a couple of years later with breathing and heart difficulties. I am not and have never been a smoker however she smoked for approximately 65 years of her life and for the most of that she had remarkable good health. As I write I am sure I can hear her voice saying to me that it brought her comfort over the years especially when she lived on her own…
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