The Good Old Days

A fairly fat envelope plopped onto the mat the other week.

Over the years when Mum has started reminiscing about the past I’ve tried to encourage her to write it all down and she’s always said she’ll get round to it one day.  Bless her heart she must have been scribbling away every now and then because when I opened the envelope here were about 20 handwritten A4 pages, most of it in chronological order along with the note below which made me smile.

It probably won’t make much sense if you don’t know her but the bit I chuckled at was the bottom line – the missing word before ‘TV’ is ‘Damned’ – she’s just got a new TV and it’s the absolute bane of her life!  The remote control has about 500 buttons which do everything apart from make the tea so of course it’s driving her bananas.

The problem is not really knowing how to do what, it’s remembering the next time she goes and picks it up so of course her system is just to press all the buttons one after the other hoping she’ll hit the right one eventually and causing mayhem in between!

Nikki actually came up with a good idea of remote controls for older people which had very few buttons and the basic ones could be much larger and brighter to make life easier because let’s face it all folk like mum want to do is know how to put it on, off, what’s on, subtitles, record and playback.

I just thought it was so funny she’d stuck it in the note even though she wasn’t even using it at the time!

And isn’t Google wonderful?

Although I’m extremely pleased she’s done this while she still has most of her wits about her, there are some iffy bits and missed out bits and names of things that you suspect are probably not quite right but because I know a lot of the details of her life I can fill them in if I know them and if I don’t (like initials and places used during the war for instance), instead of having to ask her and stressing her out, I can just Google them instead!

And as I was typing, I found myself walking with her in the places she was talking about because they’re all places I know myself.  She was born and brought up in Aberdeen and moved to Inverness when she married Dad.  He took over his uncle’s bakery business and they initially lived in a flat above the shop so when she talks about taking my 2 brothers through the town every afternoon to the park (a good 30 minute walk if not more each way) I found myself walking with her in my mind every step of the way.

The round window at the very top of the building above the shop called ‘Girvans’ in the photo is where they brought up the boys when they were young and she said in order to hang out their nappies she had to go up over the bakehouse roof by means of a ladder – her neighbour used to have her heart in her mouth every time she saw her do her tightrope act!  No disposables in those days of course.

This is the original shop when it belonged to my great-uncle – I think this was taken in the 1920s or thereabouts.

And I’m so glad it’s me who’s typing this up because there are so many facts and foibles which are just so ‘her’.  For instance in that bit where she writes about taking the boys to the park she says ‘where there was a lovely bit of grass and a dirty sandpit.’  Not just a sandpit.  A dirty sandpit.  I didn’t clock this at first.  Then she went on to say that she always had a wet sponge, towel and change of clothes with her as well because they had to walk through the town going and coming.

Took me a while to figure that one out until I realised from a telling sentence later on when she had been writing about ‘washday’ and how it virtually took the whole day to get the boiler going, wash the clothes, put them through the mangle, air them then iron them all and she finished with ‘washing and ironing was always very important to me’.  Then I realised what the whole thing about the sponge, towel and change of clothes was about – no way would she be caught dead being seen walking through the town with two dirty boys!  Ever.

Look at these two smarties.  I rest my case.

And that’s my sister with her nose out of joint trying to get in on the photo in the buggy behind being pushed by my auntie.

Here’s an earlier pic of Mum walking through the town with the boys on an obviously rare Scottish summer’s day!

No wonder she was thin in those days.

Her and Dad loved their kids – when I think of the hours Dad must have put in at the shops trying to run the business but as children we were blissfully unaware – when he came home he was dad first and foremost and weekends were spent playing, at the park, on the beach or off in the car somewhere.

Here’s the two of them with the boys at the beach.

Even in a black and white photo you can see the rosy cheeks!

I have a feeling I’m going to enjoy this particular project.