Swept Away Like a Dream

What is life all about and who cares? Maybe it’s a dream, maybe it’s a penance. Lots of people have many different ideas. Who can say there is no God yet, equally, who can say there is? It’s all opinion. Maybe Brian Clough was God and we didn’t notice (winning two European Cups with Nottingham Forest was certainly the stuff of miracles). 

Everything ends and most folk are forgotten until some nosy bugger resurrects them. There they are dead thinking they’ve escaped with all their little secrets intact and someone like me digs it all up again. Uncle so-and-so was a uniped and the other yin wasn’t really his child at all. All my dead relatives hate me for this.

Just wee things like having a great aunt with the name Letitia known as ‘Lettie’. The quartet of sisters – Lettie, Nettie (Janet), Mary and Jeannie. Married to Jim, Jim, Willie and Sam (Sam and the first Jim being the brothers Bryden). Actually it was a quintet of sisters, the youngest being my mum’s mum, Maggie (Peggy), who was married to the handsome Robert. There were brothers too. Rob who was at the liberation at Belsen where he may have contracted the disease that killed him. “I’d eat shite if it would make me better” were the words he left behind. There was Joe who died by falling into an empty gas tank. And there was Tom of whom I know little.

 The mother of this tribe was Jeannie Weir who died only weeks before my mother was born in Airthrey Castle, Bridge of Allan, a maternity hospital for evacuees only days after the start of World War Two. The father was James Hamilton who died in the mid-1920s.

 A good Protestant family and me now a Tim. My ancestors will be on the red, white and blue side of heaven black-affronted by my apostasy.

Actually, that’s not entirely the case. My great-aunt Nettie committed the unthinkable long before me by marrying the Roman Catholic Jim McGuire who lived up to every stereotype by often lying drunk in his bed with his bunnet on. ‘The lost weekend’ Nettie cried him. They took on the parenthood of a Catholic mother’s illegitimate son (another Jim) and sent him to a Catholic school though he was moved to a Protestant one as he held the juvenile notion that the statue of The Virgin Mary was going to fall on him. 

The Tim, Jim, was a gas-lighter. No doubt often lit-up himself with his favoured cider as he strolled his patch applying illumination.

Mary’s husband Willie (Wullie) only had one leg. He’d lost one in the First World War and finally succumbed to gangrene during the Second. Mary was with her good-natured and beloved husband as he died and faced the twelve mile hike back from Erskine Hospital to Bridgeton Cross during the black-out. I imagine this the loneliest walk imaginable, her heart breaking and her little legs ever-wearier as she went back to tell her children and face the rest of her life alone.

Pulvis et umbra sumus.

We are dust and shadows.