The ghosts of Christmas Past

It's a strange phenomenon, the power of Christmas Eve to resurrect memories so strongly and yet so randomly. As I listened to the first of the closing voluntaries from the Service of Nine Lessons and Carols from King's, there came into my mind a memory of myself, in my late teens, stricken with some inconvenient malady on Christmas Eve and spending that short afternoon in bed with the radio on, drifting in and out of sleep. I can't remember what ailed me, and cannot think it lasted, but at the time it felt unreal and solitary as the day darkened.

The small me in the photo (I think I was two) lived in blue dungarees and had to be coaxed out of them for family Christmas tea. (The yellow duck didn't join us - his red felt beak was too chewed for respectable company). We ate Christmas lunch, I remember clearly, in our top flat in Novar Drive, Hyndland, and went for tea to my grandparents' house in Hyndland Road. The whole extended family - the Stewarts, that is - would turn up there at some point in the day, though as I was the first of my generation I was the sole child for the first few post-war years. Families tended to live close, and there was public transport for those who were beyond walking distance.

I was remembering this morning how in my early married life I didn't do any Christmas food: my parents' house was ten minutes' walk from our flat (still in Hyndland) and we went there for lunch and stayed, stupefied, until it was time for bed. My first ever Christmas cake was made just before I had my first child - I'm sure I've recounted how, having slipped on ice in Clarence Drive, I had such a sore behind that I couldn't sit down, and dispelled my fears by baking. But the Glasgow Christmasses didn't end with our emigration to Dunoon; Cal Mac ferries seem to me to have run on Christmas Day and we headed back to Glasgow with our baby son. I do recall, however, that on the first year in Dunoon I iced the cake just before heading out to Midnight Mass: for the first time in my life I was attached to a church and had singing to do.

The long years of running Christmas myself occupied the greatest part of my life, having ended only five or six years ago. It still seems odd not to be making stuffing on Christmas Eve, and ramming it into a recalcitrant bird before church, odd not to waken to the smell of cooking and worry that the overnight temperature had been too high - or too low if the smell wasn't making it as far as the bedroom. There are no small children for whom stockings will have to be filled. I no longer have the restless wait for all the grown-up family to be safely here, nor the unholy rush between the end of term and the 25th. There is, theoretically, all the time in the world.

Time, in fact, to miss family; to look forward to seeing some and regret not seeing others; to have a suitcase packed and worry about taking the right things or forgetting presents or cooking brandy. Time to think about having dinner so that we can have a proper rest before our midnight sing/play/pray (have I got the intercessions? the music?) Time to wonder how we ever had the energy to drag sleeping choristers from their beds to come with us (really).

Now these choristers are cooking turkeys, looking after young children, preparing for visitors, in different parts of the country, and we are here, with the dark firth calm at last and the rain peppering the windows. Everything changes but the message of that distant birth. Even the carols - tonight our introit will be Advent Song, which is only four years old. And then Advent will be over, the waiting over.

And it will be Christmas.

The Missing Link

 Readers of this blog will know that I've been dabbling in my family tree - can one dabble in a tree?

It was this photo that clinched the knowledge that the families I'd been trying to link were indeed the one extended family. This came from a tweet from the cousin I've been pestering for the past year, intermittently, with suggestions about various relatives and dates, and when I looked carefully - i.e. not on my phone screen - I recognised faces. I hope he doesn't mind me sharing it further, with my part of the family as it were ...

The first face I recognised was that of the young man in uniform in the middle of the back row. He was my uncle, my mother's wee brother. I didn't notice right away, but I'm convinced the woman second left on the front row is his sister, my aunt. But the face I saw next was the woman standing beside my uniformed uncle - and then the man beside her. My Great-aunt Chrissie, and her English husband Jack Smith. That tilt of the head - those ears ...

And then I went burrowing and found this photo in a box, a nice, clear photo taken by my father.

Recognise the same couple? This was taken in 1958, in Arran, outside the house we rented every summer, and I remember the day they came to visit - presumably because we were there for the whole 8 weeks of the school holidays when they had paid a visit to Scotland, travelling from Letchworth where they lived. And yes, that's me in the photo, with a dire hairstyle - it took me a while to find what to do with short hair after my pigtails came off; I owed, I fear, a debt to Helen Shapiro for several years thereafter.

But how strange that it should be Aunt Chrissie, someone we rarely saw, who should be so immediately recognisable. My grandfather's sister, whose voice I remember as being wonderfully deep - a family trait. I can remember her telling her husband to go and keep my father company when he went outside on this day, worn out by hours of family gossip, seeking solitude: how we laughed! He always joked ruefully about how this same Aunt Chrissie told him that when he married my mother he became her 57th relative; for the rest of his life he referred to my mother's family as the Heinz 57 varieties.

So that's today's excitement. This genealogy malarky can become engrossing - and hugely time-consuming.

Rummaging among the ancestors

James Roger Stewart in 1937

I've been spending today, this rainy day, in the company of shadows. Piqued into action by a succession of Tweets with a second cousin I only know online, I started looking at old photos first - my grandfather in the Witwatersrand Rifles, in his adventuresome young manhood when he took off to South Africa to help run a school in Pretoria; my grandmother as the pupil teacher who set off from rural Aberdeenshire to meet and marry this man she hadn't seen for two years; the tinted photographic postcards he sent her, photos of the house, the school, the countryside, the grand buildings of Durban and Johannesburg. Eventually I shall get round to digitising some of these images, but for now I need somewhere convenient to put down some names.

Because that was the second thing I did, as the rain worsened and the day grew drearier: I phoned the brother-in-law whose persistent patience means that he knows more about my rellies than I do. And that way, I learned about one strand of the family tree - that of my maternal grandfather, James Roger Stewart, he who was a prize shot, who went to South Africa but returned with his wife and his two-year-old daughter Margaret, my mother, and who was heartbroken that a stomach ulcer prevented him and his skills as a marksman from being sent to the Front.

This is what I found:

Father David Stewart, born Ireland c. 1852; d. 15/11/14 in Gairbraid Road, Maryhill, Glasgow.
Mother Sarah Rogers, d. Maryhill, 1894.

James Roger Stewart (1878-1958); my grandfather.
Frederick Stewart (1879 - ?) -----------sons James Stewart, 1909 - ?; Frederick Stewart.
Margaret and William John, twins; died at 2 years.
David Stewart (1885-1916)
Mary (died in infancy)
George Thomson (1889 - ?)
Jane Cunninghame (died in infancy)
Sarah (died in infancy)
Christina (Auntie Chrissie) (1893 - 1978) Lived in Letchworth when I knew her.
Sarah Agnes (1894 - ?)
and by David Stewart's second wife, Margaret Cameron, whom my grandfather called "Steppie" -
Clara (d. infancy) and John (neonatal death)

Gosh. All those babies, and all those deaths, including the death of a wife. Apparently the advent of the second wife drove my grandfather to leave home - he'd have been in his late teens and they didn't get on. The photo I have here is of a younger man than I knew, but the hat and the pipe and the moustache are familiar accoutrements. My own father took the photo, presumably in the days when he would set up his spare room as a studio with four lightbulbs screwed into the base of a jelly pan and mounted on some contraption to produce the ideal lighting conditions. More photos will follow.

This century beckons ...

Off the hook...

Ok. I know I've been fretting about this holiday my offspring has taken his family on. But goodness, that does look like fun. And it's sunny!

Caught up in the past

I've been so taken up by the process of blogging my father's wartime letters that I find myself adopting his style of delivery on occasion, although this is not in fact something new for me. As a young teacher I was assailed by the chap who taught next door through the partition wall - he'd heard me sounding just like my father as I taught and recognised it from a time when they were colleagues. But I realise that as I knew him so well, I know when his tongue is firmly in his cheek - as when he is discussing the new family allowance scheme. His reference to the brutal and selfish father could hardly be further from himself, though he is right in describing my mother as an ardent feminist: nice to know it came from somewhere!


Another thing that struck me was the amount of the allowance: 5/-. How many of my readers say "five shillings" when they read that? It's a rare indicator of age, as is the relative value of money. Apparently the average wage for an agricultural labourer at the time was £3/7/101/2 for a 49.4 hour week, according to this site, while another fascinating site points me to a worth of £25.30 for that 5/- if calculated by reference to average earnings (though I'd be happy for someone to correct me in this if I've made my usual hash of reading statistics). It certainly gives a dimension to the other letters concerning money, and to my father's reckoning that he had far too much cash accumulating in his current account because of the lack of opportunity to spend any of his RAF pay.


I've been stymied in my attempts to find any really detailed history of Redlands private hospital for women in which I was born and where my own first son was born four years before it closed, though by that time it was run by the NHS in Glasgow. But it's a fascinating exercise, this digging in the past; my main regret is the unasked questions of my own youth. We don't tend to become interested in our parents till they're history? 


Probably not.


I haven't a clue why the font of this - and the size - are so odd. Blogger is not always instinctive!

Family and poetry and dark afternoons

There must be something about this time of year - the dark afternoons, the urge to cook in the warm kitchen, to store food like a squirrel - which, more than any other time, arouses memories. Or maybe it's simply that after a very family-orientated weekend and the thought of those dysfunctional families where the result of parental instability is a tortured, dead child I can think of little else but the contrast between my own experience and the bleak awfulness that is the life of far too many people.

Whatever the stimulus, I've written another new poem. The child concerned has no recollection of the moment evoked, which presumably meant far more to me than to him. But isn't that par for the course?

Skype family McIntosh

Skype family
Originally uploaded by goforchris.

You've read about the family that blogs together? Well now you have the family that Skypes together. Thanks to the generous loan of an iSight from Mr Heathbank I was at last able to appear as more than an old photo for Catriona on Skype.

When I was small I was obsessed with the notion of travelling in Space - and the capital S is intentional. And I'm talking pretty small here - seven or so, if memory serves. But later came the kind of communications they had in the first series of Star Trek: I dreamed of face-to-face chats at the touch of a button. And here it is. Allowing for the slight time-lag when we waved to each other - as you can see, I'm doing just that - it was pretty impressive.

By the end of the call Catriona seemed to have become used to the idea that her grandparents were in the laptop. I can remember when I was convinced an entire symphony orchestra - complete with white ties and tails - fitted inside my parents' black bakelite radio. Some things don't change - they simply become more fun.