Harkness – MacGillivray Stories

My mother’s St Paul’s Diary 1962

In 1962, my mother wrote this diary in the last year we lived in Culcheth, Lancashire. I was about twelve or thirteen then. My mother was not the sort of person to write detailed notes in her diary. Nevertheless, it lists the names of her long-forgotten friends and acquaintances, mostly now deceased, as well as social events and family matters. Thus, I will have to risk some repetition here, as these friends, acquaintances, social events, and family matters are also mentioned in the book, No Woman No Cry, Vol. 2 (Harkness I.H. and Harkness R.C., 2023). 

You can also read the full version of the 1926 Diary here.

Narrative method

Apart from commenting on people and events, I try to put them into historical context. Of course, it is often beneficial to look at past events in relation to the time we are now living in (2023). In other words, readers should prepare themselves for a few ‘digressions.’ When teaching English literature at Western Norway University, my lectures were often spiked with what may have seemed like irrelevant comparisons and adjacent ideas. In other words, I would often go off on a tangent.

In other words, I have adopted a ‘Blind Lemon’ approach to writing. This was called as such because Blind Lemon Jefferson ignored the ‘rules of narrative’ in his songs in contrast to most blues singers and writers. I don’t always respect the rules of narrative cohesion. This style might be annoying to a reader. But I write for my own satisfaction and not for others. In other words, my writings are not for a market.

Of course, one might say this is absurd. Why write something no one is going to read? But most people‘s thoughts have not been ‘read’ by others. Who is interested in reading the dreams of other people? However, my alibi is that I am the only person who has written about the story of my wider family and their friends that stretches back over several hundred years.

In other words, this is a story that is indirectly about me, but also about thousands of others that have been ‘forgotten.’ That is, it is part of the first ever Harkness / MacGillivray / Campbell / Hume family biography. So I’m sure, at some point in time, the current or next generation will want to read this story (even if they don’t like it), and possibly others outside the wider family as well. 

The Diary inserts

I have scanned the Diary pages but haven’t included them all here. However, I have included most of the inserts in the Appendix. In addition, I have cited in the ‘story’ what I deem to be the most relevant points which were mostly from January to March.

November inserts

There are a few inserts for November. But, strictly speaking, this is about when the family moved to Billericay, Essex. So I will not comment on them here but include the inserts in the Appendix.