Tag Archives: McKay Family

A Glasgow Boy: Part 2

2 Replies

Like most children, I believed my grandfather had been put on this earth solely for my pleasure and had arrived in the world possessing white hair, false teeth, horn-rimmed spectacles and a thickening waist. The idea that he was once a boy or a young man was impossible to countenance. Even the fact that he was my mother’s father was a struggle to imagine, although in my mind I managed this great leap by picturing him as looking and acting the same, only behaving much more strictly. I knew that he had not indulged my mother as much as he did her children because I was always being told how lucky I was that I could get up to much more nonsense yet not be scolded. However, my mother also said that in relation to my grandmother her father had always been more easy going as a parent, and so it was not so difficult for him to segue into the archetypal grandfather role. 

My Grandparents with my mother, holidaying in Dunoon, c1946

Yet now I can see from the photographs of my grandfather as my mother’s father that his physical change over the decades was actually more of a gradual one. In the above image, he is clearly at the half-way stage between the young man of his courting days and the elderly one who crawled around on all fours, imitating a bear and allowing me to ride on his back (until my mother put an end to the game for fear of Grandad ‘doing himself a mischief’). 

Although my grandfather was often in a playful mood when he assumed the role of Grandad, I was aware from an early age that he liked order too, keeping busy in the house and garden in an attempt to maintain this. Once when I was about seven I designed a series of  illustrations focusing on different facets of my grandfather’s life which I stuck to the door of the living room press (a Scottish recessed cupboard) like a prototype of a poster presentation. Only one of these pictures survived the post-childhood cull of our drawings, and was recently found among the family photographs, and an embarrassing reminder of how rudimentary my writing skills once were.

My ‘poster presentation’ on Alex McKay cleaning shoes (no. 5)

Cleaning everyone’s shoes was a job that Grandad took seriously and there was a low wooden stool in the kitchenette used for this task (which I’ve obviously illustrated in the above drawing). This little green chair was like a link to another imagined world inhabited by tiny people and was a complete contrast to the new, mid-century modern furniture in my parents’ house. Along with Grandma’s mincer and a small, blue tray, it was one of my grandparents’ household items I loved the most and sought out soon after our arrival on each holiday at their house. I wonder now if Grandad enjoyed this weekly shoe cleaning task because it was a link to his own Glasgow boyhood when his father used to line up the children on the coalbunker and polish their boots while they were wearing them.

Alexander McKay in the Boys Brigade, 1915

The McKays were a tightknit, relatively religious family and all were involved actively with the Presbyterian Church of Scotland. My father and his younger brother (who eventually became an ordained minister) were also keen members of the popular Boys Brigade, a Christian organisation based on semi-military lines whose use of dummy rifles seems rather incongruous today. However, it is telling to note that, as my Grandfather was born in May 1901, the above photograph – styled like the images of new recruits before they went to the front – must have been taken in March 1915, only a few months into the First World War.

The McKays were also part of the Scottish Temperance Movement and for that reason they rarely drank. As I child I remember being surprised that my grandfather only allowed himself a small glass of sweet sherry or an Advocaat on holidays and high days. I found this habit rather unmanly as I associated such ‘disgusting’ drinks with my elderly female relatives and considered beer and whisky to be the choice alcoholic drink for men. This was probably because my father drank both of these in moderation and scoffed at the sickly drinks my grandparents kept in their sideboard. The religious side to my grandfather also explained why swearing was not allowed in the house and why (in the manner of the UK parliament) even the word ‘liar’ was banned, as I once discovered to my chagrin.

Alexander McKay’s School Leaving Certificate, 1915

My grandfather left Oatlands Secondary School at 14, shortly after the Boys Brigade photograph was taken, and took up a five-year apprenticeship to become an electrician. This was a job  which suited his pedantic nature, even though it was not one he chose for himself, but was a position his mother saw advertised in the local newspaper which she applied for on behalf of her son. Grandad’s school leaving certificate is very vague about his academic achievements, putting more emphasis on his attendance than the subjects he studied, and has the ominous line Alec McKay has attended this school for one year and was studying in the supplementary class when he left. However, I feel sure this is more of a reflection on the public education system for working class boys than any indictment on my grandfather’s prowess. Years later he told my mother that he had not particularly excelled at school but had loved to tell and write stories and had been especially interested in history for that reason.

From what I gather, Grandad never questioned his mother’s choice of apprenticeship and just knuckled down to doing what was expected of him for the next five years. When he finally became a journeyman in early 1921, I was heartened to note that his Apprentice Discharge Certificate (below) from Anderson and Munro described him as Thoroughly satisfactory and reliable. I would not have expected anything less!

Alex McKay’s Apprentice’s Discharge Certificate

Grandad presumably would have felt lucky to have been kept on by such a prestigious company, which by the 1920s was the oldest firm of electrical engineers and contractors in the United Kingdom. The 1921 census shows that he was still living at home and working for Anderson and Munro at a time of high unemployment. A glance through the census records shows many men out of work, including electrical engineers (electricians), although by 1922 the economy had begun to pick up, ushering in the ‘roaring twenties‘. It was around about that time that my grandfather moved to Edinburgh for work, lodging with his maternal aunt, Mary Ann Garvie in Cumberland Street, where he was to remain until he married my grandmother in 1931.

Alexander McKay c1921

The Garvies were used to having a full house: the 1921 census shows them living with four of their children, ranging from 20-30, as well as two paying boarders (apprentice horticulturalists from the nearby Royal Botanic Gardens). So the arrangement was possibly a very practical one, with both parties benefiting. This was also during the period when my grandfather’s uncle had a breakdown and had to spend time in an asylum, so having another family member in the house may have been some support during this period. My mother tells me that this sad state of affairs came about when Alexander Garvie was no longer able to carry his work out as a bookbinder satisfactorily due to an increased tremor in his hand that prevented him from applying the gold leaf accurately. 

My Grandparents’ Wedding in 1931

In 1931, at the age of thirty, my grandfather married my twenty-five year old grandmother, Catherine Neilson, after eight years of ‘courting’. He was finally able to move out of his aunt’s house – much depleted of family by then – and into a nearby rented flat with his new bride. However, he would never return to live in Glasgow again, despite having dreams of retiring to his home city.

As a child, my grandfather never let me forget that he was proud to be both Scottish and a Glaswegian, and when my grandparents visited us in Ayr, trips to the Gaiety Theatre to see the Alexander Brothers were a staple of my 1970s childhood. Yet, as much as he was happy and settled in his adopted city of Edinburgh, like me, my grandfather always harboured the belief that west is best.

Wishing everyone a very Happy New Year!

The Incidental Genealogist, January 2023

A Glasgow Boy: Part 1

2 Replies

My Scottish grandfather would have been the ideal candidate for one of those You Can Take the Boy Out of Glasgow, But You Can’t Take Glasgow out of the Boy type t-shirts, except that such things were not around in Alexander McKay’s day. And he certainly never possessed a t-shirt – which was a later American invention – but simply wore a seasonal variation on the archetypal vest (sleeveless for summer, thermal for winter). However, in retrospect my grandfather’s sartorial choices were very much in line with his age and the decades. Browsing through old photographs shows this development from his ‘bright young thing’ era in the 1920s to the maturing family man of later years. But by the time I knew Grandad, he had moved on to knitted waistcoats, tweed coats and soft hats which he still tipped when passing females in the street.

The twenties ‘look’: my Grandparents ‘courting’ on the West Coast

When this Glasgow boy was courting my grandmother in the 1920s, he was certainly making an effort to impress her. They met at ‘the dancing’ when my grandfather was working as a newly qualified electrician in Edinburgh and lodging with his maternal aunt. While Edinburgh and Glasgow are today so closely connected that commuting between the two of them is a fairly regular occurrence, moving from Scotland’s largest city to Scotland’s capital was much more of a wrench a century ago. Grandad certainly never forgot he was a Glaswegian at heart and had even hoped to return there once retired. Well, you’ll be going back on your own then! my grandmother quipped. Given the stubborn nature of my grandmother, there was certainly no imminent move planned to the friendly city on the Clyde with its proximity to the islands and lochs of the west coast, even though it would have been closer to our own family home in Ayr.

As a child, I loved Edinburgh for all the things that I believed Glasgow did not possess: a castle, an old town, a mountain, a palace, a zoo on a hill, a beach. When I did finally get to know Glasgow on my own terms during its later renaissance, which started with the 1988 Garden Festival and culminated in the 1990 title of City of Culture, I realised it was a mistake to try to compare the two cities. Glasgow had many fascinating parts, albeit more scattered, but because my grandfather had few living relatives, there wasn’t the familial connection we had with Edinburgh. The capital also had the excitement of being farther away from our home on the west coast and thus regarded as being more exotic, although secretly I preferred the wild damp landscapes of the west. 

A rare image of my McKay Great-Grandparents c1920

Grandad was unfortunately the sole survivor of his direct family, bar one older sister, and all that was known about the McKays was that most had died relatively young. Neither of his parents was alive by the time of his marriage to my grandmother in 1931. Perhaps that was why Grandad had a thing about graveyards (see last month’s post here). In fact, he grew up on the edge of the Gorbals, just down the road from the large Victorian Southern Necropolis, so possibly the graveyard was a place he visited as a boy. Yet none of the McKay family was buried there, although an infant sister, Mary, was placed in an unmarked communal grave at the Eastern Necropolis, on the other side of the city, when she died from meningitis in 1906. This might have been because there were no communal graves in the Southern Necropolis, with families having to pay several pounds for a ‘lair’ as opposed to the several shillings for a simple burial.

However, two decades later, when the family were obviously better-off, Grandad’s parents and some of his siblings were buried in a family plot at the newer Riddrie Cemetry on the northern outskirts of the city. I discovered this fact when I came across the ownership certificate for the ‘lair’ that my great-grandfather had purchased in 1924 at the time he was burying his wife. Perhaps he’d always felt guilty that he could not afford a plot for his little daughter all those years ago. 

Riddrie Park Cemetery ‘Lair’ Certificate

Despite his love of cemeteries, Grandad was a cheery soul who did not dwell on past misfortunes and never seemed to be grumpy or angry. His placid nature sometimes irritated me, but I see now that my mother has inherited his temperament and how much easier her life is because of this tendency to focus on the positive. The few stories my mother heard about her father’s childhood paints a picture of a happy, stable and loving one, albeit in a crowded sandstone tenement flat in Rosebery Street (demolished in 1997, and one of the last in the district to remain).

Rosebery Street, Glasgow, prior to demolition in 1997

Similar to my grandmother’s tenement childhood in the Dumbiedykes area of Edinburgh, the children in my grandfather’s family mucked in together at home and spent their free time playing outdoors in the street. My grandfather was one half of the first set of twins born to his parents in May 1901. Alexander and his twin sister Margaret were exactly in the middle of the mostly female family: they had three older sisters and later two younger sisters who were also twins. This second set of twins was born two and a half years after the first and must have been quite a surprise to them all. A year after the infant twin Mary died, leaving Edith twin-less, a little brother finally arrived, and was adored by the whole family.

However, on searching through the records, I was surprised to discover that Mary’s place of death was not actually the family home, but at a nearby address that did not appear to be a hospital of any shape or form. Perhaps she had been sent away because her parents wanted to avoid the risk of the other children becoming ill. It was at least a comfort to read on the certificate that her father had been present at her death.

The First Twins: Alexander and Margaret McKay, age 16 (1917)

When we think of 19th century tenements today, it is often in conjunction with the post-war ‘slum’ clearances and associated ideas of poverty and squalor. While this is not to deny that such areas existed, many of Glasgow’s sandstone tenement flats – like their counterparts in Edinburgh – were places where ordinary working-class families lived quite happily, enjoying a community spirit which was lost in the modern high towers which replaced them.

A trip to the National Trust property The Tenement House in Glasgow certainly helps to dispel some of these myths. When I first visited the museum in the 1980s, I was fascinated in particular by the recessed bed as I remembered my mother’s stories about sleeping in one at her grandparents’ flat in Edinburgh, and her telling me how safe and comfortable it felt. So I was excited to find an extremely rare informal photograph of my grandfather and some of his family sitting at the table of their two-roomed apartment in Rosebery Street, a recessed bed behind them. No one in the family knew who took it or why – inside photographs were rare occurrences in the days before instant flash photography (which explains why all those Neilson relatives had to step out onto their Dumbiedyke’s balcony to be snapped at home).

Alexander McKay (aged about 5) and family at home in Rosebery St. c1906 

Not only does this image show my grandfather and his twin sister Margaret, and the remaining second twin, Edith, in his mother’s lap, but behind the table set with dishes is clearly an unmade bed. My surmisal is that it was a Sunday morning breakfast and that they were eating their morning porridge as there appears to be a sugar bowl and a milk jug on the table. The children might be dressed for Church or Sunday School – the McKays were active members of The Church of Scotland – as they look relatively smartly dressed and the girls have ribbons in their hair.

It is such a remarkable image and is possibly the one I treasure most in the collection due to its window on a domestic setting from another time. I feel I can always scrutinise it anew and find something else I hadn’t noticed before. That is what I find so interesting about the research that my Scottish family albums ‘forces’ me to undertake. Only once I started searching the Glasgow burial records did I realise that this photograph must have been taken shortly after the twin Mary had died. Then I wondered why my great-grandmother was smiling so naturally, while at the same time the three children look so serious (just as the unknown photographer is presumably telling all the family to lift their spoons).

Such a rare glimpse of real family life in a working-class home from 1906 is a treat to behold but slightly unsettling, too. Perhaps this is because I already know that there are some unexpected and unpleasant events lying in wait for the McKay family over the next few years.

To be continued next month in Part 2.

Wishing everyone a very Merry Xmas!

The Incidental Genealogist, December 2022

 

 

Foxed Mirrors and Fairy Tales: Part 2

4 Replies

My Scottish grandparents had a past – I knew that – but it was not one that I could readily imagine. It was as if they had been brought into the world solely to be Grandma and Grandad, and false teeth, glasses and greying hair had been their lot since the beginning. Even if the photograph box yielded up images of them as a young ‘courting couple’ in the 1920s or as thirty-something parents in the following decade, this was not the same people I knew . Something had happened along the way to separate them from their youth – an irreversible split that I dreaded experiencing myself and which I planned to do everything in my power to prevent. Often their memories were fleeting or muddled, or were of things about which they no longer spoke, as if they had become unmoored from the people they once were before they met and married and had my mother.

My McKay grandparents as a young engaged couple

Your mother should have been called Rachael my grandfather said, a reference to the seven years they waited before their only child came along, when they had all but given up hope of starting a family. The biblical allusion passed over my head. All I could think was that my mother wouldn’t be my mother if she was called Rachael instead of Catherine – or Cathy as everyone called her. Years later I found out that, like my grandmother and great-grandmother before her, she’d also been called Kate. It was there in the teasing nickname my grandfather had given her as a child whenever she spilled food or drink on the table or on herself (a trait I unfortunately share). For years I thought that ‘Slaister Kate’ (spelled slaistercait in my mind) was a proper Scot’s word until I found out that it was a combination of slaister  (the Scots expression for making a mess) and my mother’s childhood name. Yet in that one expression was all the affection that my grandfather had for his beloved daughter.

My mother as a flower girl at her Aunt Mary’s wedding, 1946

In contrast to my English grandparents, it was my Scottish grandfather who was the soft, cuddly one and my grandmother who was the thin, nervy ‘nippy’ one. Yet my mother tells me that Grandma was so much more relaxed with her grandchildren than she was as a mother herself, even though my own mother was – to all accounts – a model child who was incapable of telling a lie or doing anything she knew to be wrong. Years later, my grandmother would tell me how my mother had been a Godsend, looking after her in her long years of widowhood and declining health: a situation which my grandmother stoically accepted in a way that almost made me think that old age was just another passing phase of life (rather than terminal) and nothing to get too concerned about. I had not realised at the time that she was most likely protecting me from things I would later discover for myself.

After a stroke in her seventies, my grandmother moved into a local sheltered housing scheme, where she was happily ensconced in a bright and compact ground floor flat overlooking the shared gardens. Once when I was visiting her at New Year and went to have a nap on her bed, I came across a slightly creepy-looking object in the drawer of her bedside table. It was a tiny, squashed doll she kept in an old matchbox, and was one of the few objects (along the with the boxes of photographs) that she’d brought with her to the new flat. I vaguely remembered playing with the little plastic figure as a child and finding it deliciously strange and spooky – as I did with many things in her old house, including the heavy mirrors which hung from chains high up on the walls, and whose foxing seemed to be hinting at secrets hidden in the glass.

Although the mirrors stayed put until the move in 1989, at some point the little doll disappeared (possibly to avoid being lost or broken by curious fingers) only to resurface when my grandmother was in her last decade. It was almost as if it were some sort of talisman, the symbolic embodiment of my mother who had done so much to ease her into the latter part of her life. This queer disjointed baby doll was not actually a plaything at all (as I had once supposed) but had been centre piece of my mother’s christening cake in 1938. For over sixty years my grandmother had kept it, and when the sealing wax, lavender bags and milk tokens which had clogged up the drawers in the old house for years were all gleefully disposed of by my mother, the little doll moved house too, protected by its outdated matchbox.

The Christening Doll from 1938

I cringe now to think of some of the things I initially asked my grandmother about aging and loss in those early years of her widowhood. Do you miss Grandad? Have you seen his ghost? What does a stroke feel like? Are you afraid of death? Will you come and haunt me when you die? Grandma answered as best she could – but always from the heart – and I realise now how lucky I was to have her in my life for so long because as I matured (up to a point – it’s an ongoing process with me!) our conversations changed, too.

After she left us, the baton was passed on to her youngest sister, Mary (my mother’s favourite aunty), who became like a surrogate grandmother to me for another decade and told us stories of her own youth. As Aunty Mary – or Manty as we called her – was not as prudish as my grandmother, we were often freer with her and discussed different topics. Having served in the woman’s forces in WW2, Manty was a whisky-drinking, chain-smoking kind of women who worked fulltime after the untimely death of her husband and was thus wise to the ways of the world: she could certainly cackle over a double-entendre or an ‘actress-bishop’ joke in a way that my grandmother never could.

Aunt Mary (far left) with my Mother (as a baby) and Grandmother (far right) c1940

Now I realise that Grandma and Grandad were perhaps better suited than it would seem as my grandfather came from a religious Glaswegian family who were all good church-attending protestants and eschewed drink and any form of swearing. The only alcohol I remember touching my grandparents’ lips was the odd sherry or egg liqueur on special occasions and even the word ‘liar’ was deemed to be an unsuitable expression for young ladies; and so, just like politicians in parliament, we had to come up with more palatable ways to hint at this character defect. Unfortunately, my father had inherited a colourful list of swearwords from his own WW1 veteran father – many of which sound outdated today and conjure up images of Pathé newsreels of blitzed London. Thus it was with a certain dismay that my grandparents heard me hunting for ‘my bloody shoes’ at two years old! (How my father managed to keep the f-word from us for the first twelve years of my life, I’ll never know. He certainly made up for it in the years that followed).

Do I look like a child who would swear?

Perhaps that was one reason why my father never accompanied us on visits to our Scottish grandparents. He drove us from coast to coast, came in for a cup of tea, paced around the flat, then headed back west again. Sometimes he came to pick us up at the end of our stay and the process was reversed. Other times we went back by various complicated ways of public transport via Glasgow which always made my mother extremely stressed and prone to telling us and anyone who’d listen that she hated making the trip. If we did go back by rail from Haymarket in Edinburgh, rather than take the bus (Beeching had axed the local branch line into town several years earlier), then Grandad would stand in the garden in Carrick Knowe waving his outsize handkerchief at the Glasgow train as it thundered past the bottom of the garden through the tall stands of purple lupins, which a neighbour had planted at the side of the tracks

Sometimes other people in the carriage would wave back to Grandad either thinking that they knew him or that he was simply a lonely pensioner with an addled mind, trying to get the attention of passing trains. Often I’d miss seeing him: we flew by so fast and all the houses looked the same from the back. Just sometimes the train would slow down as it neared the signal box and we tried to catch a glimpse of Grandma at the kitchenette window, where she would most likely be rolling dough or making mince in the silver contraption bolted onto the fold-up Formica table, her fingers as red and shiny and cold as a scullery maid, like mine always are.

My grandparents in their garden beside the railway signal box c1961

Grandma used those bony hands to scrub and clean the house and the outside stairs and to tickle us until we thought we could no longer breath and my mother had to intervene. She always had a dark side to her ‘fun’, although it was not intentional, and my mother recalls her using this to cajole her into good behaviour. Born with a vivid imagination, my mother grew up believing that orange trees would grow from pips in her stomach and people would come along to pick them, or that she’d be dumped at the door of the children’s home if she did not behave (sometimes my grandmother would even pretend that was why they were taking the bus into town). Luckily, the next generation were spared all this, yet there were other horrors which lurked unchecked.

For some reason, my grandmother – who like me had a fear of hospitals – often watched a daytime medical television programme that involved a lot of blood and gore. That and Crown Court, and later televised snooker, appealed to her in a way none of us quite understood. And so, as a young child, I inadvertently witnessed a live hospital birth (thankfully only in black and white) which gave me an absolute fear of childbirth. When I asked Grandma why the woman was screaming so much, I was told in no uncertain terms why. She made it clear that not only had she been very ill herself after giving birth, but my own mother had nearly died in hospital with me and was forced to endure 48 hours of agony before an emergency caesarean was performed (considered a last resort in those days). I’m not quite sure how much that contributed to my decision not to go through the process myself, but for years after I was haunted by the images of that film and the things my grandmother told me.

Like most couples, my grandparents had their daily and weekly rituals. Tea and biscuits round the fire before bedtime; Grandad doing his football pools on Saturday afternoons when Grandma and Mum came back from shopping in town, complaining about their feet killing them; ‘mince and tatties’ on Fridays – and always with dessert and custard. When we were very young, Grandad read us nightly stories from my mother’s big red fairy tale book or made up tales about two naughty little girls who only years later I discovered actually existed (they were his great-nieces). He had a range of Grandad-jokes that were brought out with the digestive biscuits, often involving cultural references that passed us by – his Harry Lauder impression was one of these. However, the thing that drove us most crazy was his sayings. A place for everything and everything in its place, and You’re going to the right place for tired girls were particularly subject to our groans. I sometimes wonder how he could have been related to my mother, who has never followed those maxims herself.

And so it was that I found myself discussing this topic with my mother a few days ago. What have we inherited from our ancestors and what did they in turn inherit from those who went before them? Grandad loved making up stories (which is why he ditched that fairy tale book), as well as looking after his plants (I remember him showing me how snapdragons got their name), and unbeknownst to me was fascinated by Japan. So is it more than a coincidence that storytelling and gardening are two of my passions and that I used to live and work in Japan? And is my mother’s work as a textile artist due to the fact that my grandmother was a qualified seamstress who was able to do the most beautiful detailed work, skills which she also imparted to the next generations? 

My Mother with one of her creations

Yet my mother also loves history and storytelling – although gardening is just ‘outdoor housework’ to her! So next month I will be publishing a potted history of the life of my maternal great-grandmother, which my mother researched and wrote after I’d returned from London in the mid-eighties, full of my discoveries as a genealogist working for a firm of heir hunters (see The Incidental Genealogist is Born).

I look forward to sharing it with you!

The Incidental Genealogist, November 2021

 

 

 

 

Foxed Mirrors and Fairy Tales: Part 1

2 Replies

My Scottish Grandparents, 1920s

Grandma and Grandad were plastic milk tokens and sealing wax, Valentino and Houdini, foxed mirrors and fairy tales. Their interwar four-in-a-block house in Edinburgh had things we did not possess in our modern sixties’ bungalow – a wireless and a kitchenette, a lobby and a press – and every drawer and cupboard and bookcase held remnants of the last fifty years. I was fascinated by the scraps of rich velvet containing rustling dry lavender, the ornate hat pins in the button tin, the old books with their in-plates commemorating regular attendance of school and Sunday school in the earlier part of the old century. And if those dark and sombre books were opened, the strange and alluring perfume of the past slipped out like a genie from a bottle. Then it was possible to imagine the house spinning back through time until the garish red and yellow carpets were replaced with rugs and linoleum and the ugly electric bar fires spirited away to allow the empty fireplaces to return to the more glamorous task (to my mind) of burning coals.

I do not possess any specific memory of my grandparents and their house until sometime in the late sixties, when I was around three or four and they were knocking on the door of early old age. The first concrete image I have is of sitting on the sofa with my grandmother’s mother and using a long-handled brush as an oar in a pretend boat in which we were sailing away. I remember, too, that I had no idea of the purpose of this brush which lived in the bathroom and was presumably a back scrubber; but I loved its transparent turquoise colour, and this was what had possibly put me in mind of boats and the sea.

Four Female Generations in my Grandparents’ Garden, 1964

Perhaps more interesting now is the memory of Great Grandma, who was born in 1874, and who I remember vaguely as small and stout, and often dressed in dark shapeless clothes, her grey hair in a bun. By the 1960s she’d already had numerous grandchildren and great-grandchildren, so I was possibly nothing to get excited about, although I still retain a feeling of love and safety emanating from her solid frame and the knowledge that she was enjoying being part of my boat fantasy that day.

Although I loved the watery look of the turquoise brush, which looked like something Neptune might possess, I hated the rest of my grandparents’ spartan bathroom with the tiny, frosted glass window set up high in the outside wall, and the cold enamel bath which dominated the narrow space. But to be fair, as an indoor bathroom had been luxurious in 1935, they had possibly not wanted to tempt fate by making it any more appealing than it had to be. This might explain why they both still washed daily in the kitchen, scrubbing their armpits with flannels over the large Belfast sink, bathing only weekly, as if they were still in the wartime business of conserving water.

As a relatively spoilt child of parents who’d benefited from the post-war economic boom, I also could not understand how my grandparents were able to happily share their garden with the family upstairs, and never felt truly comfortable playing outside in this space, watched by the elderly couple from their back windows. However, I did love the fact that I could just jump over the low fence and play with the children next door – and jump over their fence to reach the next set of children, as well as the fact that we could then all play out together in the quiet streets. This was mainly because at that time so few of the neighbours owned cars, but also that there was a large cul-de-sac at the top of the road where we could set up elaborate skipping games. In the quiet neighbourhood in Ayr where I grew up, everyone lived more sedately behind their hedges and fences and there was not the shared feeling of community that I sensed in the suburb of West Edinburgh where my grandparents lived.

My McKay Grandparents in early old age

Today my mother lives a ten-minute walk away from her childhood home in a  ‘posher’ suburb. Yet when I visit her we rarely walk to the house where my grandparents lived for half a century and where my mother grew up and spent all her pre-married life. When we occasionally do go, we always end up noticing what has remained and what has changed in the neighbourhood. Front gardens have been swept away and superseded by utilitarian car parks; the original thirties doors and windows have been replaced with a hotchpotch of modern equivalents ; the shared gardens are now divided into distinct halves by boundary markers.

Whenever I happen to pass my grandparent’s old house, I look for the botch-job tarmacked stones on the front path which used to fascinate me as a child. Just one strange ugly section of lumpen molten tar over rocks, but to me it is a link with the days when I used to strut from the house to the street in my grandmother’s old-fashioned court shoes, or when I used to drag out the old turkey rugs from the lobby press to play on. Laying them over the misshapen path I used to pretend they were magical flying carpets, transporting me back through the years rather than to distant lands, and I could almost see my mother sitting on the outside coal bunker (which by then held only bits of unused wood) on the day she tore her dress jumping off for a dare.

I knew this story because I’d been told it many times whenever I asked about the naughty things my mother had done as a child. I felt sure there must have been something much worse, perhaps kept hidden from me, and one day I would find out what it was. But it seems in the naughtiness stakes, my sister and I were the outright winners, not having endured the same kind of strict 1940s upbringing of my mother (despite her being a long-waited for, only child).

To be continued next month in Part 2.

The Incidental Genealogist, September 2021