Past and present

Daughter 2 sent me this photo the other day, which made me reflect about memory and the way it retains and discards things. As you can see, this is a small plastic skeleton, and I got it in a cracker at the Royal Scots Club when I was probably about ten, so about 63 years ago. I remembered this, but not giving it to Daughter 2 (not really sure why this happened). My grandfather fought with the Royal Scots during World War 1, and used to go up to the club to play snooker with friends; and for a few years he used to take us there for Christmas dinner. All that, I remembered. But I'd forgotten until the daughters reminded me that before opening the cracker I'd said something along the lines of wondering what was in it - maybe a skeleton? And then... ta da... there it was. I have no idea why I said this - it's hardly a typical cracker gift - and also have no idea why I forgot this part of the story. It would be more interesting if I could claim psychic powers from then on, but sadly, no. 

This is not a skeleton. It's a needle, and the best thing that happened this week is that I came to the end of daily injecting myself in the stomach with blood-thinners. Hooray. Not my favourite part of getting a hip replacement. 

The house is now looking fairly festive. 

Ho ho.

I would not claim to be completely ready for Christmas, however. 

The weather in Edinburgh has been very wet recently, so it was lovely to drive to the south-west today and find sunshine. 

Sadly, we were on the way to the funeral of one Mr L's cousins, but as often happens at funerals, we had a nice time chatting to various family members at the lunch afterwards. 

Some of them were cousins on the other side - the deceased cousin was the son of Mr L's uncle, while these cousins are related to the uncle's wife. They were very pleasant and it was quite a jolly event. But one always feels slightly guilty that the main player in the occasion isn't there to enjoy it. 

Having no cousins myself, I'm always happy to meet up with other people's. Mr L had eight of them, though sadly he now has only five. But we're in contact with them all, which I like. My family was very small - parents, one brother, a granny and grandpa who lived nearby, two childless aunts who lived far away and one widowed granny who also lived far away. I would have liked (so I tell myself) to have had more siblings and a gang of congenial cousins round the corner. Not going to happen now, though. 

 

Archives

In our study is a chest of drawers, and into this chest, for the past 46 years, I've been putting any piece of paper of sentimental or archival interest, including many photos. Some of these were inherited from my parents' archives.

This week I decided that, on the grounds that I may possibly not live for ever, I should investigate these papers and sort them, hopefully thinning them out a bit.

Some of the photos were really quite old, such as this one of my paternal grandparents, who were born in the early/mid 1880s. I never knew this grandfather and, sadly, this grandmother lived in the south of England from when I was five and then she developed dementia in her seventies, when I was in my teens. But we hardly saw her anyway; the south of England was a long way away in those days before motorways.

They were quite a handsome pair, I think. I'm sorry not to have known him and hardly to have known her.

I did know my other grandparents very well. I don't think I ever realised that my grandfather's will was in that drawer, with this letter to my father (his son-in-law) on the back. How quaint that he signs himself, "I remain yours sincerely Grandpa Campbell" - a mixture of the formal and sort-of-informal. My dad would never have called Grandpa by his first name and Grandpa clearly felt he couldn't sign himself Tom while writing to Dad - even in a letter to be read after Grandpa's death. 

We never called our parents-in-law by their first names either. It was always Mr or Mrs, though it became easier by the time we could just use Granny and Grandpa.

The note on this envelope was written by my other grandfather. "Mother" is his mother. I wonder if he now occupies the "one more" space.

You know how you always think your passport photo is awful, till you have to renew it and you look ten years more awful and think the old one wasn't so bad? Here I am in my 1996 passport, aged 46. I wasn't impressed at the time, but I would settle for this now... I had eyebrows then! And much more hair. Alas.

It's all very interesting - lots of photos of our lovely offspring, cards they wrote to us, cards they made for us, their school reports, various birth, marriage and death certificates of ancestors... It does tend to make me a bit mournful, though. Tempus doesn't half fugit.

Anyway, today Mr L helped Big Grandson to make up the Lego bus he got for Christmas. It took hours. Good old Grandpa. Not quite sure how his knees were afterwards.

So far, the bed in the opposite room has six separate piles on it: photos, general family archives, my own personal archives and three piles of the children's stuff. All of these need to be further sorted and annotated and then archived in some more sensible way. Some things - but sadly not many - are in the waste paper basket. I suppose it's not surprising that 46 years of treasures take more than a weekend to sift through. And there are other more minor repositories elsewhere in the house.

Back I go to the chest of drawers.

Yellow skirt

I often wonder what the grandchildren will remember of their childhoods. Particularly, in my solipsistic way, I wonder what they'll remember of their time with us. Grandson and Biggest Granddaughter spend a lot of time in our house so I would hope they'd remember quite a bit - they're now 6 and nearly 8. But one of my grandmothers left Edinburgh when I was 5 (I think) and I remember nothing at all of her living here except being at the foot of her stairs, which were quite interesting. (Our house didn't have stairs.) Do I really remember this or am I imagining it?

Memory is so odd. We all remember lots of things that we wouldn't think worth putting in a memoir - I remember getting a new school uniform cardigan and quite looking forward to going to school, wearing it. Why do I remember that? It doesn't seem very interesting. I also remember sitting on the top of a bus at Jock's Lodge and looking across at the people on the top of a bus waiting at the traffic lights beside us and thinking: I must remember this when I'm older. I wish I'd made more effort to fix in my mind more significant moments.

The other day, Biggest Granddaughter and I were discussing scissors with zig-zaggy edges. I told her that they were called pinking shears, and also that the flowers called pinks were called that because of their zig-zaggy petals, not because they were pink. (Always the teacher...) And then suddenly, from the very depths of my memory, I thought about a play - a musical play, I think - that my elder brother was in at school when he was a small boy. I remember going to it. I think it was just in a classroom rather than a big hall - but I might be wrong. Perhaps we were just in the classroom to get him dressed for the show. Anyway, it was a boys' school so my brother - who must have been about 7 or 8 - was in the chorus as a girl. He wore a yellow skirt - and here's the relevant bit - with a pinked, rather than sewn, hem. He also had a yellow mob cap, also with a pinked edge, and I think there was an actual pink-coloured bow on it. Was there also a pink bow on the skirt? I think some of the other boys had pink skirts with yellow decoration. Seems like cruelty to small boys but I don't remember my brother complaining.

I believe my mother had to make this costume, with material supplied by the school. I don't know whether the pinking was just her short-cut or part of the brief. Anyway, I think it may have ended up in my dressing-up box, where I wore it for a few years.

I hadn't thought of this for ... half a century? What else is lurking there in the recesses of my mind, ready to pop up? And in yours?

Just another day

I'm still slowly sorting through my mother's things and came across this photo of me aged about 5. Most unusually that day I was playing with a little girl from up the street - she was slightly older and we didn't often play together. We were in her garden and her father, who was a press photographer, came out and took pictures of us. In those days (1955) we didn't have many clothes - it was still post-war austerity. So when we went out to play, we tended to wear things that didn't matter - in this case, a brown, hand-knitted jumper of rather rough wool that was slightly too small for me and had one broken button, and that blouse, which was striped - I think it was yellow and white. And I think my bow was yellow to match. It's funny how I remember these things, while I have difficulty remembering what I wore yesterday. The photographer gave my parents a print of this photo, and my mum - who was a smart person - was sorry that I'd been dressed in those rather scruffy clothes, with my hair uncombed. And now that I look at it, I do look rather urchin-like.

I always hated those bows. I thought I looked silly. I was a very shy child.

Today we went to Stockbridge to give things to a charity shop. On the way, the mist suddenly came down.

This is Stewart's Melville School, which looks very ethereal here, though the traffic lights rather spoil the effect. 

Then we walked through the Dean Village for a bit

and along the river.

These high buildings high up at the back are part of the New Town. Edinburgh is a hilly city.

And we walked back into Stockbridge and came home.

I've just calculated that my latest quilt, which I'm just cutting out, has 1280 corners to match, plus stars to add on, plus borders (which I'm considering making strippy). This is madness. But fun.

And it don't seem a day too much...

Fifty years ago today - 18 December, 1967 - when I was 17 and the future Mr Life was 19 - we went to my school dance. I was at a girls' school, so we had to ask boys as partners who (obviously) didn't go to the school. I knew and rather liked Mr L - but didn't at that point have it in mind to marry him. You don't think that far ahead when you're 17. Or at least, I didn't. However, he then asked me out and... fifty years later, here we are. I can't believe it's been that long. I don't feel nearly old enough.

So today we went out for lunch in South Queensferry. That black house is for some reason known as Black Castle and was built in 1626. Oh, I've just looked it up and it has horrible associations with witchcraft - the sister-in-law of the owner of it confessed to being a witch and was burned at the stake in 1643. How dreadful. And her husband had to pay for her burning and that of her supposed accomplice, which made him bankrupt. The owner's sister suffered the same fate. Goodness me. Anyway, this may be why it's black. Also it was once owned by a coal merchant - a rather more ordinary possible explanation.

South Queensferry is a pretty little town, as I've mentioned before.

It's built beside the famous (in Britain, anyway) Forth Rail Bridge (above)

and the road bridge (above) and more or less brand new other road bridge, which you can vaguely see behind it.

We sat looking out at these (from inside; this is December) as we had our lunch and compared our memories of that significant (as it turned out) evening in 1967.

Then we came home to find a beautiful bouquet and chocolates from our children. Indeed, if I hadn't asked him to my school dance... who knows? - they might never have been born.

Our kind-of-anniversary

What were you doing precisely 42 years ago tonight? Well, nothing in the case of my bloggy friends who hadn't got around to being born yet; and I doubt if many of the rest of you can remember.

I was at a dance. It was my sixth year (ie final year at school) dinner dance - the one and only social occasion organised by the school. I went to an all-girls' establishment so of course we had to invite boys as our partners to this dance. It was the greatest topic of conversation for months among all the girls: whom we'd ask, what we'd wear, what table we'd sit at for dinner and with whom.

Fashion was much more standard then. We almost all bought long, Empire line sleeveless dresses and low heeled shoes, usually silver or gold. Considering that we had to wear uniform to school, it seems strange now that most of us wore such similar styles to the dance; but we were fairly conformist young ladies. My dress was turquoise and my shoes silver with rosettes on the front.

I asked a young man whom I'd had my eye on for more than a year. At nineteen, he was a couple of years older than me. He was tall, quiet and good-looking, with beautiful thick black shiny hair. I knew him through the church; he was one of the young group who met at church activities and also did some things together in the evenings: played rounders in the local park and so on. I was kind of on the fringes of this group, being slightly younger than most of them, going to a different school and being very shy. However, I had to ask someone to this dance and so, too shy ask him directly, I wrote him a letter. And he accepted.

Had I known that, one evening 42 years later, he'd be sitting at his desk alongside mine in our study, I would have been extremely surprised. Yes, it was young Mr Life himself. He then asked me to his work dance a couple of weeks later; and we've been together ever since.

It astonishes me that this was 42 years ago. 42!

I'd also have been surprised to know that I'd be sitting here sadly missing three young people (though they'd have seemed pretty ancient to me at the time) - a thirty-year-old, a twenty-eight-year-old and a twenty-five-year old whom I'd never (at the time of the dance) met or even really imagined meeting. One of them, Daughter 1, is with her husband about a couple of miles from where I lived then; the two others are currently in Glasgow where Daughter 2 is visiting Son for the night.

I wouldn't have been so surprised to know that we now have cats. It's a chilly night. You can tell from Cassie's body language, can't you?

Well, well. All very astonishing. But it's worked out surprisingly well. I clearly had good taste when I was seventeen.

I love you, Mr Life.