Ancestors

Ah don’t know ma ancestors, man, hardly at all. It’s disgraceful. It’s like walking about no’ knowin’ yer own history; who came before ye. Yer own bloodline fer Christ’s sake. I mean racehorses know more about theirs than I do mine.

Before ma grannies and grandpas it’s jist a blur, a few reminiscences and hand-me-downs. I mean, jist the other week I’m talking to my ma on the phone (cannae visit due to 400 miles and a pandemic) and she blurts out about how her own grandfaither on her da’s side died in a down-and-out hostel in Tobago Street as his wife had flung him oot due to his drinkin’. I mean, what the fuck! That’s ma great-grandfaither. What’s the story, here?

My maws the most honest person I’ve ever known. If she tells you something you can be sure it’s true to the best of her knowledge. My da on the other hand. There would be a grain of truth and a lot of extrapolation. He’d tell you his auld Granda in Tollcross was Skipper Matthews, some auld Para Handy figure sailing oot the Clyde skippering a puffer boat doin’ trade up the Western Isles. A romantic tale which probably owed more to fiction than fact. Widnae surprise me if it turned out he worked on the Renfrew ferry.

Feel bad noo saying that. Let’s say he was actually a puffer skipper. What a fantastic life that sounds like. Floatin’ up and doon the watter for a livin’, Morag in every port and seeking the dangerous pleasures of whisky and beer at aw thae wee islands: Bute and Rhum and aw that. Seemed he only came hame to spawn a wean wi’ his poor auld wife (who the fuck was she while we’re at it?) then away he’d be again to his sailorly life on the watery substances.

My maw had these four aunties that she often talks about with no little affection: Nettie, Lettie, Jeannie and Mary. I keep getting them mixed up about who lived where and was married to who. I know that two of them were married to two brothers and that one of them was married to a good-hearted gas-lamp-lighter in the days when the world was black and white and rough and ready.

I know her Auntie Mary who was bandy leggit through rickets was married to an amputee who had a prosthetic leg that he let the weans play wi’. Gangrene done for his leg in the First World War and it did for him some twenty yeas later dying as he did in the Erskine Hospital. Wee Mary his devoted wife was by his bedside when he went and it was she who had to walk the dozen or so miles along the Clyde and back to Glasgow and her weans in the black-out. I can’t even imagine what that would have been like for her: jist losin’ yer husband, the faither of your bairns, and walking all that way in the pitch black.

It’s just one of the many family stories that I seem to huv tae learn piece-meal. But do ye no’ think they’re important? I dae!