Harkness – MacGillivray Stories

I will continue examining ‘official’ documents such as various telegrams in my mother’s ‘Scrapbook’. I have already discussed the ‘wedding telegrams’ earlier; however, the ‘birthday’ and ‘birth of baby’ telegrams can also provide useful information. Once I establish this foundation of ‘official’ information, I will be able to analyse the pictures and oral accounts from family members in the WWII and the period after. I will also be discussing my mother’s ten commandments she loved to apply to us at our home back then.

This book is titled “No Woman No Cry”. As mentioned elsewhere here, my mother did have some haphazardly organized ‘scrapbooks’. I have attempted to organize her ‘main’ scrapbook, and also augment it with background material, photos, and interpretations. 

4 Privet Drive

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, I used to go visit my mother at her house in Merrow Park, Guildford, at 6 Fitzjohn Close. I remember visiting her once or twice a year. At that time, she was already in her eighties. She has also started to get ‘dotty’. My son Alan was just a little kid at the time. But he remembers our visits to ‘grandma’; he also recently commented that her house resembled that of Harry Potter’s in ‘4 Privet Drive’.²² 

Funnily enough, 6 Fitzjohn Close, like 4 Privet Drive, also had a cupboard under the stairs; Harry had to sleep in the cupboard under the stairs.²³ Back then, I often got bored in the evening after she and Alan had gone to bed. So, ironically, around the time when Harry would be sleeping in the cupboard, I could be found rummaging around in my mother’s ‘under-the-stairs-cupboard’.

The hundreds of ‘soft-porn’ channels that my younger brother Gavin had inadvertently installed on her SkyCable were of little interest to me. I was more interested in committing other evil deeds. One example is ingesting some of my mother’s old cognac. She bought it at Sainsbury’s in nearby Burpham. As far as I know, it had been sitting on the kitchen shelf for years, more or less untouched. I would first drink two or three glasses of the old French cognac before thinking of other illegal acts I could engage in. 

My Mother’s Ten Commandments

It’s funny that even if you’re already an adult, the warnings and admonitions of parents and teachers still lurk in the dark recesses of your subconscious. Fortunately, I did not carry the ‘baggage’ of a religious upbringing. As mentioned elsewhere, our churchgoing and religious education had always been very simple. 

My mother had her own set of  ‘Ten Commandments’. Some examples are:

‘You should not put your elbows on the dinner table.’ (“Tak’ yer elbows aff th’ table”);

‘Ye should finish your meal.’ (“Finish eating a’ yer tea”);

‘You should always say “Excuse me” before leaving the dinner table. (“Did ye say excuse me?”)

“Thou shalt not look in my ‘bureau.’” (Whit urr ye daein’ keeking in mah bureau!).

The last commandment was high up her list. The ‘bureau’ is perhaps, like the semi-detached house, another ‘symbol’ of the post-war British petty bourgeois. The story about her forbidden bureau will be discussed in more detail on the post: My Mother’s Forbidden Bureau

God knows where my mother got these middle class ideas from! It surely couldn’t have been from her working-class parents. In any case, some of these ‘commandments’ were way down the bottom of the list. Like the commandments of Moses, there was a certain element of hierarchy and importance to her various commandments.

Disobeying your parents

If we return to the law of obeying parents, husbands, teachers, and so on, how high does ‘disobeying your parents’ rank in the Christian hierarchy of ‘good behaviour’? In the Ten Commandments, disobeying your parents is actually ranked quite highly, at number five. Killing someone is less important. 

Logically, one might say it is less of a sin to murder one’s parents than to disobey them; “Thou shalt not murder” is only Number 6. It doesn’t even make the ‘Champions League’; neither does Number 5 for that matter.²⁴ “Remember to keep holy the Sabbath day” makes it to the Champions League, placed at Number Four.

When I was a kid, I always used to remind my parents of this commandment. In our house, the weekend was ‘chores-weekend’: “Dig the garden,” “Wash the car,” “Tidy up your room,” and so on. However, when I reminded them that they were inviting God’s wrath; unfortunaetly, this fell on deaf ears. 

From a logical point of view, what should you do if your parents ask you to violate one of the Ten Commandments, such as cleaning the car on Sunday? Then how does this stand in relation to ‘not obeying your parents’? Fortunately, I am no Heidegger,²⁵ that is, a Professor of Hermeneutics, so I won’t bother trying to answer this question. That is, trying to justify an interpretation or meaning. 

Alistair’s Solution

However, as an addendum, I will mention the fact that my elder brother, Alistair, found a practical solution to this problem. He knew that our father would give him some chores on Sundays as soon as he woke up and made his way to the kitchen on the ground floor of our home. So, on waking up, he would open the window halfway down the stairs that gave access to the garage roof.  Thus, he would ‘escape’ the house and visit his friend Geoff White and his parents, who were far more ‘civilized.’ They spent the weekend watching TV, dining on lavish English dinners, placing bets on horses, playing snooker and cards, and so on. 

But this is something that took place in Billericay, Essex, which will be discussed in ‘Volume II,’ which is the continuation of ‘Rhoda’s Scrapbook,’ since it took place after 1962.

²² https://harrypotter.fandom.com/wiki/Privet_Drive

²³ Rowling, J. K.  Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. 1997.

²⁴ The four top teams in the English Premier League qualify for the Champions League. 

²⁵ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Heidegger