To Scotland, with love

I was fifteen months old when I gave my mother a black eye. We were asleep, huddled together, in our wee hole in the wall bed, waiting for my dad to arrive home from East Africa. The knock came. I jumped up, startled, and smacked my mother hard in the eye. She hadn’t seen my dad for a year. The next day they were the talk of the close. The voices were hushed. Stilettos click click clacking on the stone stairs. (In time with their tongues) ‘He’s back a meal hour and look at the state of her face…!’  

My dad never raised his hand to a soul. Well, not till the dementia took hold and he managed quite a few scraps with That Big Bastard John (his words, not mine) He'd dared to question my dad’s rightful occupancy of the care home bedroom overlooking the Clyde. No, Wee Andy Gibb (as he was affectionately known) was not your stereotypical west of Scotland hard man but a typical west of Scotland hard-working one. 

Descriptions like hard-working are loaded, implying a superiority over those who don’t work for a living, but it’s exactly what he was. 'Salt of the earth’ is also overused but he was that too. Without him, our lives would have been devoid of all taste and flavour. My mother was in charge, there was no arguing with that, but he agreed to her having this power. Willingly, without rancour and with good grace. 

He liked to look out, my father. Beyond the river he grew up on. The first time he left Greenock it was to join the marines, to do his national service. Duty done, he came home to serve his apprenticeship as an electrician but the bug had bit hard. He was soon on his travels again, this time to Borneo. Within a year he was home, on the point of death from Dengue fever, and no clue as to who or where he was. My nana nursed him back to life, told him he was never to set foot outside Greenock again, then waved him off six months later when the memories of those far flung places had returned to invade his dreams. 

During his lifetime, he visited every continent bar South America. He plied his trade in eleven different countries, including his own. But he always seemed most proud of the jobs he’d done in Scotland. He never tired of telling us he’d rewired the big fire station in Greenock. My mother would raise one perfectly painted-on eyebrow, ‘Well. If you’re going to start a fire, I suppose a fire station’s the best place for it.’ It was water off my dad’s back, though he did have a temper when riled. Red hair, you see. But outburst over, it was soon forgotten. He never held a grudge. My mother, on the other hand, never forgot a trick. Especially if it was played on her.  

He lived the last few years of his life in the place he was born. Not far from the Greenock fire station that had miraculously survived his workmanship. He spent his time, looking out beyond the river once more, from his small care home room. The fact he thought he was in Africa comforted me. I hoped he was not truly confined by those tiny walls but still travelling in what was left of his mind. 

The truth was, wherever he lived, my dad took Scotland with him. I've lost count of the number of Caledonian societies my folks belonged to. Everywhere they went, he and my mother found their kin. They organised highland gatherings in the sweltering heat of Jakarta and celebrated St Andrew’s Day in Lagos in kilts and sashes. Some might find this expat patriotism cloying. Or worse still, insulting. My nineteen year old self was mortified by it. But, make no mistake, there’s a hierarchy among ex-pats too. It all depends on whether you’re diplomatic or managerial. Or neither. Married. Or single. Then there’s the size of company car. Or where your house is. Or how many bedrooms it has. And how many locals are employed to work in it. It’s a dislocating experience for a working class family to be transported to another world, where Nigerians or Indonesians are paid to cook your tea. My mum responded by teaching every one of the men or women who graced her kitchen, how to cook mince, stovies and a decent lentil soup. She, in her turn, learnt how to make the best West African curry I have ever tasted.  

My dad was never high up in the ex-pat hierarchy but it didn’t bother him. Because he was confident in who he was and where he came from. He worked alongside men of all nationalities and colour and was close to many of them. Once in Northern Nigeria, during the Biafran war, he was called out in the middle of the night to identify his foreman, Gabriel. Gabriel had been beheaded by Federal soldiers. He wasn’t even from Nigeria. He’d come from the Cameroons to find work to keep his family. The exact same reason my father had left his own country. All my dad could do was make sure Gabriel’s family were looked after but he never forgot his foreman or what he’d sacrificed to provide for his own. In my dad’s view, it was the mark of the man. 

The story of 'Dear Frankie' grew out of my long distance relationship with this absent father, because the first eight years of my life were spent communicating with him by letter. My mother point-blank refused to leave Scotland and my father could not stay. Who was the selfish one? Her for staying? Or him for going? Neither. It’s what suited them both. 

I revelled in having a father who lived abroad. Our tenement flat was full of exotic treasures. We had a huge tiger skin rug in front of our fire, head and teeth included. (I'm ashamed when I think about it now.) But then I used to lie on it, pretend it could fly and go on adventures as far away as my dad’s were. I always had the best birthday cakes, because they were delivered in a box, sent by him. My Deputy Dawg cake was the talk of Primary Two. I told everyone it had come all the way from Pakistan even though, in all probability, it had been knocked up in Aulds the bakers, just down the road. 

Then one day, out of the blue, my mother decided it was time we went with him and we were all shipped to the west coast of Africa. The first time I saw a black person was when the deck passengers alighted at Sierra Leone. My brother and I stood on deck, shoulders all pink and blistered, fascinated by the women with their babies on their backs. I was still feeling the wrench of  being separated from my silver cross doll's pram and it confused me. Where were all the prams? My dad explained they didn’t use prams because babies preferred to be carried close to their mums. I never put a doll in a pram again. 

My dad was a Labour man but he was not a radical thinker. Far from it. He and I agreed to disagree on many political issues but we almost had a catastrophic falling out in the 80’s because my folks were thinking of emigrating to South Africa. I was beside myself. How could he even consider it. His answer was simple, he needed to work. In the end, they didn’t go and our relationship remained intact. 

I’ve been thinking about him a lot recently. It’s been prompted by many things, including the Clutha tragedy. Partly because he worked on the oil rigs in Indonesia for a few years, and travelled to and fro by helicopter. (Our hearts were always in our mouths when he took off for his fortnightly shifts.) And because the emotional coming together of the Scottish diaspora, in response to what happened in Glasgow, reminded me of how viscerally he reacted to any tragedy back home. 

Perhaps it's easy to feel sentimental about a country when you're miles away, but why do men and women like my father remain so connected to a place they've chosen not to live in? Why do they cling to their national identity with such ferocity? Because it is who they are. It is them. My dad didn't travel half way round the world in search of somewhere to belong. He was striking out, in the sure and certain knowledge, that he'd already found it. And he always respected other people and their culture because his culture, his ‘Scottishness’ was everything to him. 

The last six dementia years aside, Wee Andy had a great life. Rich in experience, full of adventure. For a man of his class and generation, he was extraordinarily lucky to have lived it. And I was equally lucky to have lived some of it with him. 

Ritual

Today was my mother’s birthday. She would have been 82.

It’s hard to know how to mark it when someone is no longer here. When she was alive I would go over, armed with cards and flowers and some new clothes from the Classics range at Marks and Spencers. Clothes she would always say she loved then always take back.

That was our ritual.

My mum loved rituals. They were the repeating pegs she hooked her life on. Once she was diagnosed with lung cancer her dependence on ritual, habit and routine intensified. As if she knew the pegs were working loose so she needed to bang them in tighter.

Not surprisingly, food became an obsession. Eat to live became her motto. My sister put on two stone, my mother continued to fade away. When she got undressed I had to look away. Not out of modesty. But because I couldn’t bear to look at her thin and withered frame.

I was entrusted with her shopping. I am not a good shopper. I know this because she told me. Constantly. But I was all she had, so she had to make the best of it. She gave me strict instructions; brands, cuts, prices. I can never open a tin of rice pudding again. The smell is enough to engulf me in a wave of grief.

Then there were the cigarettes. The punctuation marks on each and every day. In spite of inoperable tumours in both lungs, cigarettes were life and death to her. She never gave them up. She pretended she did. I refused to buy them so she got other people to bring them in and told me they were for my dad. That was supposed to make me feel better. Given he had vascular dementia and cigarettes were starving his brain, I don’t think she’d thought that one through. In the end I gave up fighting her on it. ‘What’s for you won’t go by you.’ It’s just a case of when.

One of my most vivid memories is in the hospice, three days before she died. She kept checking the clock, asking me when I was going, telling me I needed to get back up that road before it got too late. Nice to see you come, hen. Nice to see you go! Eventually, I took the hint. As I was leaving I looked back to see her pushing her dying mate in a wheelchair down the corridor. Her mate was carrying her oxygen on her knee. My mother was actually running. They were trying to get to the smoking room before it closed for tea.

Throughout her illness, habit set in. Like a security blanket. After every oncology appointment she liked to go to her favourite cafe. And sit in the window. And look out at the Clyde. She liked to do this with my husband. She peferred his company because he listened to her. I was too frightened to listen because I didn’t want to hear what she might say. They always sat at the same table and she always had a moan about the smoking ban and the fact she couldn’t have a cigarette with her scone.

She never spoke about her funeral. Apart from to tell me that she didn’t want my sister there. She’d been raised a Catholic but had ‘turned’ when she met my dad. I was brought up with one foot in both camps. Left and right. I rejected them both. But when she went into the hospice I asked her if she wanted a priest. She said, no. She didn’t want to upset my dad. But I knew she’d already seen one.

After she died we tried to embrace the ritual of her death with her in mind. What would she want? No fuss. No tears. Nobody making a show of themselves. Or, more importantly, making a show of her. So we tried. We went against her wishes in one crucial way. We let my sister come. She did her mother proud. She held on to her grief until we got out of the crematorium and then it was like a well had burst.

There was a moment at the funeral I know my mother would have relished. My brother’s employers are Arabs and he's been embraced by them as family. They take this connection so seriously they flew to Greenock for his mother's funeral. They drove up to the crematorium in a chauffeur driven Jaguar and formally paid their respects. My mother was a terrible snob and a Jag at her funeral would have been a very big peg in her wall.

Her remains came in a discreet cardboard box. I kept it in my car. For weeks. A fact that made me secure but bothered my sister. In the end she said to me, ‘ mum just wouldn’t like it’. She was right. So I agreed to scatter them.

Now, I know this is a big health and safety issue and there are probably strict guidelines to where you scatter human remains - if not actual laws - but my sister’s need was too great. So we gathered at my mother’s favourite cafe and wandered down onto the pebble beach.

It was damp and dreich. My lovely sister-in-law had picked the wrong shoes for mud flats. My dad lit up immediately. And kept trying to wander off. My poor distressed brother had to grip him by the arm and drag him to keep him with us. I was carrying my mum in a box under my arm and my sister had filled a little wicker basket with things from their house that reminded her. It included six large Bingo pens.

We huddled at my mother’s place of rest, as far out of sight and away from other people as we could manage, and my sister took the Bingo pens and placed them in a line. Like a Bingo Pen Army. A fluorescent guard of honour. And I duly scattered my mother into a sort of rivulet. (I hope it was a rivulet. I suspect it was a drain.) There was a dog sniffing around and my dad was trying to make friends with it so I panicked. She’d sort of clumped a bit so I had to give her a helping hand with a stick. My sister said something deeply inappropriate and very moving and that, as they say, was that.

One thing's for sure, my mother would not have liked it. But then it wasn't her ritual any more.

So, how am I going to mark her birthday? I am going to take my beloved but demented dad to her favourite cafe for a scone. Then we’re going to walk on the stones. And he’s going to have a fly wee smoke.

In her memory.

Book Worm

I grew up in a house with no books.

It seems completely alien to me now. I trip over piles of books on the way to the bathroom. My son has lived his childhood in a house crammed with books. Though, ironically, I haven’t seen him read. Not for pleasure. Not since he was 12. (Secondary school knocked that right out of him.) But I take some comfort in the fact that until he was 12 he was a bookworm too. We read to him every single night. Book after book. He would beg us not to stop. My husband says those were the best years of his life.

My mother, Becky, didn’t read to me. It wasn’t what she did. She was too busy mothering me. It was her mother who taught me to read. I was three and she taught me through the medium of the obituary column. Old Nell’s eyes weren’t great and she needed to know who was dead and who wasn’t. I was her conduit.

Becky didn’t have a hand in it but she liked the fact that I was a ‘good reader’. I was more than that actually. I was the best reader in the whole class. Though that wasn’t necessarily where glory lay. Not when you always had to be the Narrator in the nativity play. Not when you wanted to be the Angel. Or Mary. Not when you had to stand behind a screen and NOT BE SEEN.

I remember running home, snot tripping, to tell my mother about this terrible injustice. She marched straight up to the school. (She was allowed to disappoint her own but woebetide anyone else who tried it) The teacher was cut from the same granite stone. She wouldn’t back down. There was no room on the assembly room stage. Not among the shepherds and the wise men and the donkeys and the baby jesus in his crib. Besides there was no one else in the class who could read it.

It was that simple. Welcome to show business.

So Becky spent the bulk of that week’s housekeeping on a brand new red velvet frock and I wore it. Behind the screen. No one else saw it but it had a huge bearing on the quality of my performance. Then she bundled it back in the bag and returned it to the shop.

My mother’s ambitions for me were never academic. She changed my school just as my Headmaster decided I should try for Oxbridge. He thought she was insane but I was unhappy and she knew it. I was fat and depressed and she wasn't having that. Besides she put more store in a different kind of intelligence. If I’d had the nouse to travel the world as an air hostess, find my meal ticket in the business class lounge and live a life of leisure by some tropical pool she would have slept easier. I didn’t. And her uneasy relationship with my contrary choices lasted the whole of her life.

She wasn’t surprised when I announced I was going to be an actress. (In her mind I’d always been a drama queen.) I couldn't say she jumped from the rooftops singing but she never stood in my way. She wasn’t impressed by fame, she was more impressed by money and I clearly wasn’t making any. Every time I got an acting job she’d sigh, ‘Oh, well. It’s a start’ She was still saying that 15 years later. I have no doubt she felt my constant rejection as keenly as I did and her tone always brightened whenever I phoned and said I was supply teaching again. She could never resist a quick, ‘You stick in there, hen. They might want you full time.’

Her reaction when I started writing was Becky all over. I used a story she'd told me about her and her six sisters as the basis for that first script. When it was finished I asked her if she’d like to see it. She hesitated. Then nodded. I watched her read it, slowly, page by page, face set. When she was done she looked me straight in the eye and said, ‘That’s fantastic’. There was a pause. Her sharp blue eyes glinted. ‘I didn’t know you could type!’

My mother is in everything I write. She didn’t read to me but she made me, in her words, ‘all the woman I’d ever be’. I think about my relationship with my own son and wonder if all those hours spent reading to him will have had as profound an effect. A few months ago he decided to purge his childhood and clean out his room. There were 5 huge boxes of books. I rescued the ones I couldn’t bear to lose sight of and labelled the rest ‘Calum’s Favourites’. One day he might open them again and share them with his kids. But if he doesn’t, I will. And I’ve left strict instructions that those are the books that go with me to the Care Home.

My sister, my mate.

The day my sister was born was the day I grew up. 

Not physically. I was still in buckskin shoes and ankle socks. But it was the day my brother and I passed into my mother’s out-tray. The day my mother cut our invisible chord and wrapped it tight round my sister’s pale sick heart. 

My sister had arrived as the ambulancemen were carrying my mum out of the high rise and into the forecourt. My cousin was there when it happened. We were upstairs - 6 floors up - watching my aunt’s black and white television. (I have no memory of what was on.) My cousin said my sister’s tiny body was the same colour as her best lilac blouse. 

The day we found out my sister was Downs was the same day Neil Armstrong lifted off for the moon. My brother and I sat in the car outside the hospital eating opal fruits. (None of your Starbursts then!) I watched my parents go in as one thing and come out, one lifetime later, as another. It was their body language. My father was more hunched. And my mother’s eyes were red. 

She would tell me later that the hospital offered to take my sister ‘away.’ (Who knows where ‘away’ was. It was the 60’s.) But that was never on the cards. One of my mum’s repeated litanies was ‘What’s for you, won’t go by you!’ She lived by it. And so did we. 

They got back in our wine red Ford Anglia and we drove to Stevenston. To my Aunt Mamie and Uncle Davie’s caravan. They weren’t real relatives but they were my parent’s best friends. Chosen relatives. They had experience of disability. They had Anna. Not their own child but their niece. We’d grown up with her too. Anna was blind, couldn’t walk and had the learning age of a 5 year old. She was 25. And we loved her. 

It was summer. We played football, ran on the stones, ate ice cream cones and fell out with my ‘cousins’ while inside the caravan my mum wept. On the journey home it was pitch black and my brother and I sat in the back, noses pressed to glass, watching the moon. “Are they there yet?" "Bet I see them walking on it before you do!" "How much?” In the front my mum and dad sat silent. They must have felt their future as black as the sky. 

My parents were told she wouldn’t last the year. My dad was working in Nigeria at the time. An electrician by trade he’d decided there was no future in Greenock so he’d gone abroad to carve a living. By the time my sister was born he’d worked and lived rough in Pakistan, East Africa and Nigeria. It was another one of my mum’s litanies. ‘I’ll say this for your dad, he’s a good provider’. She meant it as a compliment. 

Now we had a crisis. Did my dad go back and leave us all here? To wait for my sister to die. As always my mother took control. She swept us all up and off we went. To Nigeria. My brother went to a local school. I taught myself by correspondance course. My tutor was in Australia. I did the work, put it in the post and he marked it. It took three weeks for a composition to come back. I was my own mistress. I loved every single minute of it. 

Just as well, because my mum had other things on her plate. Her mission, which she embraced with a passion, was to prove the doctors wrong. By the time we went back to Scotland, on leave, my sister was walking, talking, even swimming and the murmur in her heart had gone. 

My sister was my mum’s life and her achievement. I wrote a film about the intensity of their relationship. I was with them when they both watched it for the first time. When it was over she turned to my sister and said, "That’s not you, you know. You’ve got better manners". 

But it was my sister on the screen. And my mum. And ‘Kenny’ was me. I was working through my anger and my love. Selfish, I know. Just like the characters in my story, my mother had kept my sister close and safe. She was bright, artistic, talented, kind, polite, funny and happy. But she’d never been left alone for as much as five minutes. She’d never been out of my mother’s sight. She’d never been to a Centre, never mixed with other Downs people, had never made her own dinner, picked her own clothes or crossed the road by herself. And all those chickens came home to roost when the fictional events of my story became the facts of our lives. 

The week the film premiered in Glasgow my mum was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer. Her response was characteristic. "We need to talk". She didn’t cry that day. Well, not in front of me. She died two and a half years later. She’d been given six months. But she held on, determined not to leave my sister. I lied to my mother more in that time than at any other in my lifetime. (And I’d lied to her a lot.) I promised her I would keep things exactly as they had always been. I would keep my sister close and safe. I needed my mum to die in peace. 

My sister and my dad lived with us for two months after she’d gone. Two months. That’s all. But we were all on top of one another. No one could breathe. My husband and I couldn’t work. My excuses choked me. So they went back to their own flat and I drove the thirty miles to see them every day. My mother’s ashes were in the boot of my car. To chide and comfort me. 

I got social workers involved. They provided carers. Sometimes three different ones in the same week. My cousin rallied round. Without her we could not have managed. My sister learnt to use the microwave and clean the toilet. She made sure my dad didn’t fall over or set the house on fire. She hid his cigarettes and dished them out one by one. She’s my mother to the root. She discovered a love of baking. Though we had to draw the line after she baked four huge banana cakes in one week and polished them off by herself. 

I gave her money but she bought all their food and choose her own clothes. I arrived one day to find her feeding our demented dad a sandwich of avocado, chicken, tinned salmon AND beetroot. Another day she went out wearing pink velour joggers with a swingy leopardskin jacket. She’s four foot eight and weighs twelve stone. I could feel my mother’s disapproval in the bite of the air. We had what we euphemistically call ‘blips’. We had tears and tantrums. Both of us. In spades. She was living a late onset adolescence. My dad had early onset dementia. It was an interesting time. 

Then I committed the most cardinal of sins and enrolled her in college. She was 38. The ghost of my mother was two steps behind her the first time we walked down the corridor. The room at the end was full of other adults with a variety of learning difficulties. Some were Downs. The first thing my sister learnt was that she was part of another family and that we were not all there was. 

Now she’s about to go into her third year. This year will prepare her for work. She’s just been nominated as a finalist in Scotland’s Adult Learning Awards. My knee jerk reaction, apart from pride, was to tell her not to be disappointed if she didn’t win. I followed that up with a quick ‘what’s for you, wont go by you!‘ Her response was swift. "Who do you think you are? My mother?" 

If I think back to that night in the car, the night the astronauts were on their way to the moon, I remember exactly how I felt about having a sister with Downs. I’m ashamed to say my major disappointment was based on the fact I might not be able to dress her up in pretty clothes. Last week she tried on my favourite little black Ghost dress and looked fantastic in it. She’s wearing it to her award dinner next Tuesday.