Babies Come from Glasgow (eBook)

An exploration of love and loss in my family

Carol Ann Morison (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2025 | 1. Auflage
238 Seiten
Grosvenor House Publishing (Verlag)
978-1-83615-110-4 (ISBN)

Infos

Growing up as an only child in Stornoway could have been seen as idyllic - to a child, the island was a 'safe haven' with no serious crime and many unspoiled white sandy beaches. However, I discovered at the age of eight that I had been adopted from Glasgow. Although I knew that my parents loved me, very much, only one thing was missing from my life - a sister or brother to share my childhood fun. In 2008, with my own family and a successful career behind me, I revived a latent need to find out about my birth mother. During my search I was dismayed to learn that she had emigrated to Australia in 1973 with her new family. Along the way, I discovered more about my extended family - including my long desired siblings, their own lives and stories and the circumstances of my adoption. Writing this book, the first part in my series, took me on such an emotional journey as memories of love and loss were rekindled.

Textauszug

Chapter 2

Daddy and his family

Daddy’s name was Roderick Adam Hunter Morison. His father had been called Roderick Adam, and I had gained the impression growing up that the name Hunter was after a minister at Martin’s Memorial Church. However, more recently, Ancestry.com showed that his paternal great-grandmother’s family name was Hunter, so I guess I’ll never know the actual source. All the family and his friends called him Rody but to me he was just Daddy. Mammy’s full name was Kathleen, but everyone called her Kath apart from her mother, my Grandma Trowell, who called her by her full Christian name.

I have some recollections of Mammy when I was growing up, but I have far more mental pictures and memories of Daddy. Looking back now I can see that Daddy’s life had a particular rhythm to it, comprised of a series of regular repetitive rituals. One was winding up the big wooden arched clock that sat on the sideboard at around 8:00pm every Saturday night, another was preparing the food for our Sunday dinner on Saturday afternoon. Maybe the repetition is why I can recall him so clearly or maybe it was because I felt closer to him than Mammy.

Daddy used to leave for work before I left for school, and he always smelled of shaving soap when he bent down to give me a kiss on the cheek. On Saturdays I sometimes sat on the bathroom stool watching him mix the shaving soap in a bowl and spread it over his face and neck with the brush he took from a small stand on the window ledge. I was fascinated by the way he swept the razor up in straight lines ploughing through the soap like a spade through snow. Just occasionally he would catch his skin, mutter, and stick a small piece of Izal toilet paper on the nick to stem the bleeding. Izal paper was not very absorbent, but it seemed to do the trick because he never left the house with bits of paper on his face.

On Mondays on the way home from work, he would call in at Campbell’s newsagents on Cromwell Street and collect The Sunday Post and my Diana comic. The Sunday papers always arrived on the Monday morning plane because there were no flights onto the island on Sundays or shops open. Sunday was the day of rest and anything that could distract Stornowegians from praising God and resting on the Sabbath was prohibited. Even the swings in the three play parks in the town were padlocked on Saturday evening and not released until Monday morning.

After tea on Mondays, Daddy would read The Sunday Post, and I would read my Diana comic sitting next to him on the settee. When I had finished my comic, he would pass me the centre pages of The Sunday Post containing the strip cartoons of ‘The Broons’ (The Brown family) and ‘Oor Wullie’. Poor Wullie with his spikey hair always seemed to be getting into trouble as a result of mischief or mishap. On Thursdays, Daddy would go to the newsagents again and bring home the Stornoway Gazette, our local weekly paper, along with my Judy comic and again we would sit together on the settee and read after tea.

He always made me feel special and I have lots of photos of the two of us together in various locations, on beaches on Lewis, in Edinburgh, in the garden, on the settee together, etc. There were very few photos of the three of us together. The only decent one, meaning a photo with no heads partly chopped off, that comes to mind is a black and white professionally taken photo that sat in a lime green frame on the top of the bookcase in the living room. In the photo my parents are standing on either side of me, and I must have been standing on something because our heads are at a similar level. Daddy is wearing his black suit jacket and a pale shirt with a striped tie and Mammy is in what looks like a plain black dress, but may have been any other dark colour, and a string of pearls. I am chubby with a round face and a mass of Shirley Temple curls in a halo around my head. I don’t know how old I was, but I could have been somewhere between 15 and 18 months. Daddy was about five-foot-eight, he had bright blue eyes and dark hair until it started to go grey. He always combed his hair back from his face with a wet comb and then created a slight centre parting. Sometimes when I watch films of James Stewart, particularly in later roles like Charlie Anderson in Shenadoah, the actor reminds me of him, more because of his manner than his looks.

Daddy, Mammy and me.

Daddy wore shirts with separate collars attached to the shirts by tiny brass studs that he kept in a round shiny brown box that sat on top of the tallboy in their bedroom. The box had a section in the centre for the studs and the collars were placed around it. He wore cufflinks, a tie clip, braces on his trousers and sports jackets with leather patches on the elbows for work, topped off with his grey gaberdine coat and grey felt trilby in cold weather. His out of work clothing was similar but the shirts were collarless, and he wore plain-coloured woolly jumpers. In my mind’s eye I picture him in a grey one. Sometimes on holiday he wore a green flannel shirt with short sleeves. He only had one suit, a black one, which served a dual purpose as he wore it to formal dinners and funerals.

One photo of me as a two-year-old that I always liked shows me sitting on a doorstep with Daddy’s pipe in my mouth, unfortunately it was taken with an old folding Brownie camera and the top of the picture has a broad white band across it where the negative had been exposed to light. I remember watching him over the years preparing his pipe, one of his evening rituals. He would sit in his usual seat after tea and use a pipe cleaner to gather the remnants of the burnt tobacco out of the pipe. He would lean over and tap the pipe on the inside of the fireplace twice to empty it and then carefully fill the bowl of the pipe with fresh tobacco taken from a brown leather pouch and tamp it down with his forefinger. Lighting it with his silver petrol lighter always seemed a challenge as he would puff and suck on it for several minutes until the tobacco finally caught fire and sweet-smelling smoke would fill my nostrils.

In the living room we had a three-piece suite, in brown fabric with a randomly scattered faint pink flower pattern. The settee was positioned up against the wall separating the living room from our small kitchenette and was at a right angle to the fireplace. Daddy always sat in the right-hand corner of settee and there was a small narrow table beside his left arm where he kept his pipe and tobacco. One chair was positioned to the right-hand side of the fireplace facing the settee and that was Mammy’s chair, and the second chair faced the fireplace. I would often sit on the settee leaning against Daddy in the evenings, feeling the heat from the coal fire and watching black and white programmes on the small television standing on spindly legs in the opposite corner. Pipes went out of fashion so as an adult I rarely came across someone smoking a pipe but when I occasionally did, the smell immediately took me back there to evenings sitting beside Daddy in our living room.

One Saturday morning after Daddy and I had been to Charley Barley’s butcher shop on Manor Park to buy the meat for Sunday dinner, another weekly ritual, we walked into town to Woolworths, the biggest shop in the town, and he bought me a small pink plastic clock with a knob on the top that you twisted to move the hands round. When we got home, he taught me to tell the time. It was also Daddy who taught me how to tie the laces on my shiny black school shoes.

***

One of Daddy’s daily routines before breakfast was cleaning cinders and ash out of the nondescript 1950s-style beige tiled fireplace in our living room. He put two sheets of newspaper onto the hearth, lifted the larger cinders out of the fire grate with a shovel repeatedly until there was a little mound on the newspaper and then he scraped out the smaller cinder bits and ash that had fallen below the grate tray with a poker. The final stage was to brush out the residual dust, fold the newspaper and carry it carefully through the kitchenette, before depositing it in the dustbin outside. Then he rolled up more newspaper sheets into long tubes and folded them over his hand several times to make spills, placed them in the grate and liberally loaded pieces of coal on top of them. The fire was then ready to be lit later in the day during weekdays. Sometimes it was lit earlier at weekends, particularly in winter.

Every Tuesday the noisy coal lorry would pull up outside our house and the coalman came down our path with a dirty hessian sack full of coal on his back that he dumped noisily in the metal coal bunker in the back garden. He was covered in coal dust; it was on his clothes, his face, and hands. I remember he always wore a black beret, but it may not have started off life that colour.

I suppose I grew up in a smoky atmosphere, but I wasn’t aware of it at the time. The living room was not big, and the air must have been heavy with the fused emissions from Daddy’s pipe, the Capstan cigarettes he occasionally smoked, Mammy’s Embassy tipped cigarettes, and the coal fire. There was no central heating in Stornoway in those days and an island off the north-west coast of Scotland is closer to Iceland than Spain, so I felt cold for most of the year apart from the odd day in summer. This was not helped by Mammy’s insistence on opening the sash windows in every room each day, leaving a gap of four inches ‘to let some fresh air in’, even in winter – and it was certainly fresh. I loved to sit in front of the fire, absorbing the heat and watching the flames flick up towards the chimney and...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 1.5.2025
• Verlagsort: London
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Biografien / Erfahrungsberichte
• Themenwelt: Sozialwissenschaften ► Pädagogik ► Sozialpädagogik
• Themenwelt: Sozialwissenschaften ► Soziologie
• Schlagworte: Adoption • Adoptive parents • birth mother • Death & Grief • Emigration • Full Sister • Glasgow • Half Sister and Brothers • Hull • Melbourne • Memoir • Stornoway • Ten Pound Poms
• ISBN-10: 1-83615-110-1 / 1836151101
• ISBN-13: 978-1-83615-110-4 / 9781836151104