Harkness – MacGillivray Stories

The Adults of York Avenue

The houses at York Avenue couldn’t have looked more similar, but the people – we all had our own colourful stories. I may have been young with limited memories, but those that I have during this time were among my favourites. I would say they were able to highlight various areas of life at that time. Let’s begin with the adults. After all, we expect them to be the ones who got their life together, right? They are typically the role models for the children of a home. Who best to start with but my parents, Rhoda and Alex and the early days of their marriage.

Revelations from a Photo 

This old photo of my parents with a friend during their early years of marriage. My mother seems to be about 25-28 years old, so this could have been around the late 1940s, before I was born. It was also around that time when they lived in Cumberland. Upon closer inspection, one of the paintings on the wall was executed by a Cumbrian artist, Edward Horace Thompson, a landscape painter mainly in watercolours. In other words, my father probably purchased these watercolours in the 1940s, when the family were living in Cumberland. I would have made one hell of a detective, right?

These E. H. Thompson watercolours, together with the other paintings, and various ornaments and gee gaws, became ‘iconic’ familial items, displayed in our numerous homes over a period of 60 years or more. At present, I have some of them in my apartment in Oslo, such as the E. H. Thompson watercolours and a Beswick cat figurine, which is on a shelf in the kitchen. My mother displayed these in her homes over an almost ninety year period. I also talked more in detail about this painting on this post: Romanticism in Paintings and Poetry.

There are two other important aspects I discovered in this photo; they aren’t actual items, but revelations of some sort. First, I could see that my mum seems to be tipsy! What a joy since I have never witnessed her drunk! Second, her arm was around my father’s neck, filled with affection – whether out of tipsiness or love, it didn’t matter. Who are these people, really? In other words, I can never remember any physical affection between my parents, so these photos reveal different times and different feelings.

Valentine’s Telegram

I found a ‘Valentine’s telegram’ from my father to my mother addressed to 60 Bowfell Road, Mirehouse, Whitehaven, dated February 14, 1953. This just shows that after 12-13 years of marriage, my father and mother still had a warm romantic relationship. Not bad!

My parents and our personal memories

My parents had five sons spanning roughly 16 years. Each of us would naturally have different perceptions of our parents. This would depend on when we were born, or perhaps how our parents behaved at a particular point in time. During my childhood, and up until my teenage years, my parents were in a tumultuous, yet not exactly cataclysmic, relationship. My memories of their relationship are those of coldness and quarrels. 

On the other hand, my younger brother Gavin would surely remember our parents differently. Since Gavin was the youngest, my parents took him with them to Wick, Caithness, Scotland, in the late 1960s, when my father had started working for the Atomic Energy at Douneray. They had left all of us other sons behind, as we were all ‘grown up’ then.

At that point, my father had become an older and mellowed man, especially during the latter part of his life. He died when Gavin was just eleven (1969). Undoubtedly, Gavin experienced a different father from the father that I had experienced. For example, I cannot remember my father physically abusing Gavin, or my other brothers for that matter. But he physically abused me on several occasions in several ways; but this is something I will write about later in “Recollections 2”.

“Boyhood Recollections” are mainly positive recollections. However, it would be a lie if I didn’t include those memories which you try to forget, not to mention suppressed. You can read some of those stories here: Marital Stories: Smashing & Breaking.

However, put in perspective, I don’t suppose my experiences as a child were that much different from other children. And I’m sure other children of the past and today have other stories to tell much ‘worse’ than mine.