Harkness – MacGillivray Stories

In Rhoda’s 1962 Diary, my mother talks about the Chapmans’ visit, and all the preparations she needed whenever they drop by.

February 23

February 24

My mother certainly did a lot of preparation for the Chapmans’ arrival! As mentioned elsewhere, the Chapmans were family friends, and my father worked together with Sid Chapman. The two families used to visit each other for Sunday dinners. I remember there was always a big Sunday dinner when the Chapmans came. 

I remember this ritual at 26 Hob Hey Lane, Culcheth—we had brass horseshoes on a leather strap and some small round brass containers. My mother even had us polish spoons—We used ‘Duraglit’. I can still recall the ‘metallic’ taste of the spoons after we had ‘cleaned’ them. It’s a wonder we weren’t all poisoned! In retrospect, this seems like a total waste of time!

However, our mother induced us to believe these were valuable items made from valuable metals, so we willingly participated in the ritual. In other words, she firmly confirmed the adage that brass is “poor man’s gold”, although she would never describe herself as ‘poor’. It was fun to see the corroded brass emerge in a golden hue! I remember being so inspired by this activity that I started to polish old Victorian pennies (made from copper) that were still in circulation after almost 100 years!  

In fact, as kids, we were ‘penny experts’. The various pennies had different symbols, such as lighthouses and ships, which we knew the ‘meaning’ of but which I have long since forgotten.

February 25

Gillian and Judith were both pretty girls. Although we visited each other many times we never developed a close relationship.

I also met Judith some years later in Billericay, Essex, when we were teenagers. She was a ‘serious’ young woman weighed down by her mother’s angina, and didn’t respond to my superficial flirting. 

The Chapmans’ moved to South Africa some years later, when we were living in Billericay, Essex. There was also talk that our family would move to a ‘colony’ – a job for my father in the West Indies. I remember my mother saying we would be well off with black servants! At the time, I didn’t really like all the ‘fashionable’ schoolboy jokes in provincial Billericay about Blacks and Jews (although I would willingly ‘retell’ them in the hope of gaining ‘popularity points’).

Gillian, the eldest of the two Chapman daughters, died of cancer at an early age. The younger daughter, Judith, kept up letter exchanges with my mother for quite a long time – I think I have one of the letters in my possession, which I can perhaps comment on elsewhere in my autobiographical books. 

This long introduction above provides the background for my mother’s ‘fat people jokes’, especially with regard to when the Chapmans came to visit.

My mother’s jokes

One of my mother’s favourite stories was when the Chapmans, Pat and Sid,  went hiking in the hills and mountains of North England. Sid was a well-built man, some might say ‘well-proportioned’. Sid had slid down a scree for several hundred feet, but a camping kettle hanging from the back of his trousers cushioned his fat ass. The kettle ended up flat after his hazardous journey! In other words, the kettle saved his fat ass!

Another of my mother’s ‘fat people jokes’ was about our neighbour in Mountnessing Road, Billericay, Mr. Hart, who also had a ‘fat ass’. He had a fat ‘Dudley Dursley look-alike son’, Roger, and a tall and pretty daughter, Gillian. Mr. Hart was having a bath one day. On standing up to leave the bath, he had slipped on a bar of soap, and fell out of the bath, cracking his head on the floor. His cracked head required medical attention at the hospital! My mother thought this was very funny! I suppose it was funny because he was fat! We also used to laugh at his fat son, Roger. It’s funny how such tactless stories stick in our minds. I felt the need to laugh at my mother’s story as she smiled and said, ‘the poor man’. 

But I have to ask in retrospect whether my mother lacked self-awareness; she had also become a ‘fat person’ in the 1960s, but she managed, by some trick of the mind, to differentiate herself from this laughable race of people, ’the fatties’.