Harkness – MacGillivray Stories

We’re now here at the most important part: the main character. I reach into the Magical Memory Box and take out what is seemingly an uninteresting official document, my birth certificate. However, it contains an important information: my name, Ian! And that I was born in 1950 in Cumberland, England, to Alexander Whitecross Harkness, draughtsman, and Rhoda Campbell Harkness (m.s. MacGillivray).  

At this point in time, no one would have guessed in 1950 that decades later, this same child would be writing and compiling all the stories and anecdotes that he and the people before him have collected. 

I became aware of the fact that amongst the hundreds and hundreds of members of my wider family stretching back more than three hundred years, I am the first one²³ to put pen to paper and bring to life the stories of not only my own childhood, but also some of the stories of the people in my family, and the people in the environment that I grew up in.

Although much has been “washed away,” now memories will still remain not only in my memory, but also written down, although not etched in stone. Everything may change, and many have wandered in the shadows of death, but in these lines they will live, “so long as men can breathe, or eyes can see, so long lives this, and this gives life to them.”²⁴ 

Having got that off my chest, I put my birth certificate back inside the Magical Memory Box.

²³As far as I know.
²⁴Sonnet 18, William Shakespeare