Harkness – MacGillivray Stories

My mother used her diaries to note down everyone’s birthdays. She never missed my birthdays, even when she was in her eighties, and would always send me a birthday card and a present, often a Levis’ shirt with pearl buttons; I think she also sent Levis shirts to my eldest brother Sandy, who had moved to the US! When she got older, I think my sister-in-law Sue used to help her on such shopping trips; she liked to shop at the Army and Navy store in Guildford. 

My father had successfully taken a number of exams after attending evening classes. See ‘My father’s certification’ in Volumes I and II of No Woman, No Cry, 2023. So he naturally thought he deserved a better, well-paid job, as job opportunities were perhaps limited in Lancashire. So it was natural to look for work in the south of England, where there were more jobs with better pay. But I don’t think my father considered the higher costs of housing and commuting, and the more stressful work conditions in the South. 

But it should perhaps be added here that my father would never shy away from hard work! In fact, if he wasn’t working, he was sleeping! Exhausted from a day’s work, when we were living in Billericay, he would often fall asleep in front of the television in the evenings. In his ‘freetime’ at the weekends, he would be fixing things around the house. His life consisted of working and looking after his family. It’s perhaps not surprising that he would sometimes ‘go off the rails’, and go on a drinking spree. 

I insert here one of his certificates from 1963, awarded by the Institution of Electronics (which my brother Gavin sent me). 

In 1962, he was 46 years old, but looked older because he had caught rheumatic fever as a boy, which had weakened his heart. So the new job in the South must have been an extra strain. Moreover, working for the state (the Atomic Energy Authority at Risley, Lancashire) was a secure job. I don’t think he considered this when looking for work (with James Scott, a private company in London). In retrospect, he might have been better off staying put in Culcheth. On the other hand, perhaps there was a scaling down of work activities at Risley, so he had no choice but to seek work elsewhere.  

My problems moving to the ‘South’

The move to the South wasn’t easy for me either. I can remember boys bullying me because of my northern accent. In the private school, ‘The Isis’, in Bolton, Lancashire, my teachers mollycoddled me, and I had many friends. Attending a state school in the South (Essex), Barstable Grammar and Technical School, I became a statistic—a ‘problem’ the teachers had to deal with. And I had few friends. 

My father also became more stressed in his new job, and his relationship with my mother soured. This also affected me negatively as a teenager at a vulnerable age. Thus, my teenage ‘problems’ that had started in Culcheth at the age of eleven or twelve when I had run away from home, just got worse when we moved south. I became the ‘whipping boy’ for the family’s problems!

Of course, I am exaggerating the family problems here. Our family were by no means dysfunctional in the worst sense, as described in the tabloids, resulting in all types of abominations. On the other hand, neither were we a harmonious family for the period discussed here.