A Life-Shaped Memory

I haven’t written anything in ages, mainly because I’ve been working shifts for a while and we haven’t been doing half as much as usual but, at least partly, because I just haven’t felt like it.  So, apologies to Jo Caulfield (the Cellar at the LBT last Christmas) and Sarah Millican (the Town Hall) – fantastic shows both, but the words just weren’t there.

It has been far from an uneventful year though and, finally getting back to some sort of normality and lying under my favourite Canary Island sun, some thoughts began to take shape.

The shape of a life.  Because it’s not just the famous who deserve an obituary.

 The tiny village of Manish stands by peaceful blue waters.

Economic migration is nothing new; the inter-war years saw an exodus of young people from the Outer Hebrides to begin new lives on the mainland or beyond.

At the beginning of the 1930s, Malcolm Mackinnon took his fledgling family from their blackhouse in the tiny coastal village of Mànais (Manish) on the Isle of Harris and settled in Scotland’s industrial heartland amid the coalmines and blast furnaces of the “Iron Burgh”, Coatbridge.

When war broke out in 1939, Margaret, the second of four daughters and a couple of sons, was 10 years old.  Consequently, while Malcolm worked in reserved occupation on the railways, she and her sisters spent a significant proportion of their adolescence in Anderson shelters.  However, although nearby Clydebank was blitzed, the Coatbridge ironworks which supplied the shipbuilders never came under direct attack.  

Wedding Day, 21 October 1949

By the end of hostilities, she had left school and was doing her bit for the family by working in a series of shop and office jobs.  A natural flair for numbers meant she always seemed to find herself in the cash office; so began a lifetime, as she joked herself, of counting other people’s money.

They may have been austere and trying times, but young love and hormones tend to find a way.  Margaret married Matt in 1949 and they began their own family with the arrival of Malcolm in the new decade.  Matt (Jnr) and Tina were to follow before the dawn of the 60s.

The new decade brought new attitudes and new possibilities.  The family were moved to a new, modern maisonette on the other side of town and the site of their original house was cleared to make way for tower blocks.  The biggest surprise of the decade, though, was the arrival of Tommy on a bitterly cold January morning just around the time the Beatles were discovering hallucinogens.

Her own mother died after an extended, painful illness and Margaret lost her faith in any higher power.  Where her other children had Presbyterian upbringings, Tommy would be guided but allowed to find his own way. 

Never having had the opportunity when she was younger, Margaret enrolled at night school and passed (comfortably) her Higher English exam.

By the time her youngest was going to school, her eldest was eyeing his own path, but it was around now that husband Matt began to suffer health problems with the first of a number of small heart attacks.  The optimism of the sixties seemed to crumble and, in sympathy, the masonry of the maisonettes, as collapsing mineworks caused subsidence and forced another house move.  

Silver Wedding

Margaret – increasingly “Maggie” – was undaunted; approaching every setback as a challenge.  By the time Tommy reached high school, she was grandmother to three and was helping Tina put the finishing touches to her wedding plans.

The 80s recession (which, her family never tired of telling her, she helped bring about by voting for her namesake in 1979) hit Scotland’s steel industry hard and husband Matt – whose company had found a suitable role for him as his health deteriorated – lost his job.  A latter day cottage industry soon sprang to life with Matt operating the knitting machine and Maggie sewing up customised items for, it seemed, every kid in Lanarkshire.  Tebbit, Thatcher and Heseltine would have been appalled at such black market activities, but fuck ‘em; Matt and Maggie knitted scarves and cardigans for a few pence over the cost of the wool, they didn’t order the sinking of  the Belgrano, the assault of striking workers at Orgreave or the Hillsborough whitewash.

Tommy left home at 21 and parted from his parents on Glasgow Central Station’s platform three with the words, you can have your lives back, now.  They’d invested 38 years in raising their family and deserved some belated quality time together.  When they got home, Maggie made dinner.  Matt scraped the cabbage into the bin saying I’ve set a good example for forty years, but I hate this stuff.  Never again, you hear me?!

Maggie retired from her final job (at Asda, in the cash office, inevitably) and they took their first foreign holiday (Matt had done his national service on the continent but neither of them had travelled overseas otherwise).  Then, finally, (in the 1990s!) they upgraded to a colour television.

Ruby Wedding

They “downsized” to one of the flats built on the site of the original family home, but then Matt’s health began to deteriorate rapidly.  He succumbed to cancer in 1994.

Living alone for the first time in her 65 years, Maggie did what she always had and drew strength from family.  Three of her four children and their children lived within ten miles; her branch of the family tree now spanned four generations. 

Not only that, but her siblings still all lived within the town and, once the initial grief was overcome, the four Mackinnon sisters became travelling partners, holidaying together around Europe.

Shortly after the turn of the millennium, Maggie saw her final child married, but her own health had begun to deteriorate.  Stroke did not debilitate her, but unforgiving, undiscriminating Alzheimer’s gradually robbed her of the faculty to look after herself, even with the help of her nearest and dearest.  Eventually, regrettably but unavoidably, she needed more specialised assistance than any or all of the family could provide; she saw out her final years in nursing homes.

It’s polite to gloss over the worst details of an illness which, by its very nature, is debasing of its victims, but Maggie’s latter days weren’t regrettable.  As her memories – all eight decades of them – collapsed into the present and she lost perception of time and history, as her always-fertile imagination embellished half-memories with impossible details, there were many moments of happiness; both for her and for those with whom she shared her stories.

When the end came it was quick and peaceful.  Maggie died on 22 March 2012.

She’d have been 83 today.   Happy birthday, mum.  Sweet dreams.

I wandered today to the hill, Maggie,
To watch the scene below.
The creek and the creaking old mill, Maggie,
As we used to, long ago.
The green grove is gone from the hill, Maggie,
Where first the daisies sprung;
The creaking old mill is still, Maggie,
Since you and I were young. 

They say that I'm feeble with age, Maggie,
My steps are less lively now than then,
My face is a well-written page, Maggie,
And time all alone was the pen.
They say we have outlived our time, Maggie,
As dated as songs that we’ve sung,
But to me you're as fair as you were, Maggie,
When you and I were young.