Harkness – MacGillivray Stories

These SWALK letter provides my father’s foretelling of how he thinks Sandy, 15 months at the time, will grow up to be a mischief-maker. Find out if it comes true at the end. To read the full version of the letters, check out SWALK (Interactive version).

This letter was written when Sandy was only 15 or 16 months old.

He talks about Sandy: “How’s that son of mine – the wee mischief-maker? I think he’s getting worse instead of better. The way he’s going on at the age of 15 months – or is it 16 – when he grows up he’ll be a regular lady killer. He has his mother wrapped round his little finger as it is. I can even hear him coming home at three in the morning. His mother gets up to let him in; she tells him to come in quietly so as not to wake up his old man and so avoid a scene which will wake up the neighbours.”

He mentions that he comes home for a couple of days every fortnight. He says, “I sometimes wonder if it is all worth it.”

My father was somewhat prescient here! About 20 years later, my mother wrote her 1962 Diary. I have written a novella based on this diary, Rhoda’s 1962 Diary: a Semi-Documentary Novella. In this Diary, my mother is doing what my father predicts. She waits up at night for her son to come home at three in the morning (because of some infatuation with a girl). However, on many occasions, my mother also had to sit up late at night waiting for my father to come home!

The last page seems to be missing.