Harkness – MacGillivray Stories

Perhaps one tends to repress unpleasant memories and rather remember the good ones. As mentioned elsewhere here, my parents had anything but a smooth and happy relationship. Although, my parents had their happy moments together (you can read them in this post). However, there is no hiding the fact that they also had thunderous arguments as part of their marital stories.

As a note to this story, it contradicts some of the early photos, especially those from ‘Affection and early days of marriage’. It seems that the marital bliss didn’t last all that long. Another ‘affectionate’ photo is a holiday photo (West Ferry) when they had been married about 13 years – so I suppose that’s not as bad compared to most marriages. 

How the Marital Stories Changed

By the time I was nine or ten years old, it seems they were always at each other’s throats. My father also often went ‘absent’; he perhaps preferred the company of his work buddies to a boring ‘housewife’ who didn’t have much to say except when she contradicted you. 

In addition, my mother ‘forced’ him to start smoking cigarettes. He used to smoke a pipe, but she didn’t like the smell. She said pipes were “nasty, smelly things”. He kept all his pipes in a pipe rack on the mantelpiece and would clean them with white woolly pipe cleaners. These were soon covered in the brown sticky tobacco waste once they had been pulled through the pipes. It was a pretty messy thing compared to cigarette smoking.

However, cigarettes are perhaps more hazardous to your health. Cigarette smoke is inhaled into the lungs; whereas smoking a pipe means inhaling through the mouth, not into the lungs. But perhaps that is also a myth. Cynically, one might say that my mother contributed to my father’s premature death by forcing him to smoke cigarettes!    

Sons’ Memory of their Dad

Of course, for us children (brothers), we have different memories of how our parents were. I think my younger brother, Gavin, has better memories of my father. My father aged quickly, so by the time he was about 50 years old there wasn’t much ‘fight’ left in him. One could say that he mellowed early. He died ‘young’ – at the age of 53. He had rheumatic fever when he was a teenager which weakened his heart. 

However, he was anything but a ‘weak’ man. He was always full of strength and vitality. But I guess a life of hard work, too much whisky on occasions, too much smoking, and high blood pressure finally took its toll.  

In fact, my father was ‘strong’ to the end. I can remember my mother telling me at his wake, in their house in the north of Scotland, that some time before his heart attack, he had been boasting of his physique in her bedroom (as he was. broad chested).  

The Big Fight

On the other hand, I had my own memorable experiences of their relationship dynamics. When I was about five or six years old, I had a plastic pop-gun that I had got for my birthday. In a loud argument between my mother and father, my father took a break from shouting and picked up my pop gun. He smashed it to pieces! I thought that was rather unfair as the argument had nothing to do with me. My mother, on the other hand, threw her teacup at the living room wall making a stain on the wallpaper. That stain remained there for a long time as a reminder of her anger.

Things had calmed down the next day. When my father returned from work, he arrived with a new pop gun, in metal and wood, much better than the one he had broken. He may have felt guilty about his ‘heinous act’ of bringing my toy into their argument; maybe, my mother may have told him to buy me a new one as an apology to both her and me.

The Shiny Pop Gun

It was a much improved shiny metal and wood single-barrel pop gun that actually fired corks!  It was a break barrel rifle, with a spring inside the rifle that tensioned. In some way, the tensioned spring enabled the firing of the cork. In other words, it resembled the ‘break barrel’ rifles of western TV series at the time.

Guns were very important to us boys, because of all the American cowboy TV series in the late 1950s and early 1960s. In other words, we needed a six-gun or rifle to shoot the ‘evil’ Indians and ‘bad guys’.  

It was as if it was my birthday all over again! The pop gun had a varnished brown wooden butt and a black shiny metal barrel and made a “POP!” sound when you fired it. I remember thinking that their row was not so important and that it didn’t matter that he had smashed my plastic pop gun. Finally, I had a pop gun that looked like the real deal. Something good had come out of the argument, at least for me!