In the latter part of her life she became quite deaf. Only now does it occur to me (like a tacit gong of memory) that my great-uncle Watty’s silence might have been his modus vivendi for dealing with Cousin Nessie’s deafness. My mother in her final decade became quite deaf too. My hearing is on the decline. In my twenties and thirties I had no time for obscure cousins or great-aunts and -uncles. Let alone for their physical foibles and frailties. But the past catches and joins up. It trembles. It courses back and loops in. It calls out. It cries. It howls. It sings. It doesn’t happen when it happens. In the mind’s ear. It sears.
My mother’s father was not the first William McAdam. I remember walking with her among the graves at Drymen and finding more than one headstone bearing that name. But he is not there. His ashes are at Mortlake Cemetery in southwest London. He was born on 12 May 1891 on a sheep farm at Slachristock in the Kilsyth Hills a few miles from Drymen. (Submerged in 1939 as part of the Carron Valley Water Scheme – its watery ruins another kind of time-capsule. Dissolving in silence at the bottom of one of the largest water-supply reservoirs in the UK.) My mother’s grandfather John – he of the cascading sideburns – managed the farm until 1903 when he inherited from a second cousin the lease of the Square Inn and moved there with the family. The inn itself belonged to the Duke of Montrose.
How many William McAdams does it take to make a Kathleen Beatrice? Her great-great-grandfather William McAdam married a Mary Logan of Drymen and they had a son called William McAdam and he had a son called William McAdam as well as a son called John. And John had a son called William McAdam (my mother’s father) and all of this may sound dry as dust or as the dry men of Drymen – a mere dree tale of a string of men with the same name – but there’s liquid refreshment and even music at the end of the day. For the William McAdam who was my mother’s great-grandfather was a fine singer and a celebrated figure at the Square Inn long before his son John and later his grandson Watty became innkeeper there. This William McAdam was for many years gamekeeper to the Duke of Montrose – and later to a Glasgow stockbroker called Holmes-Kerr. He would sing at the Inn for Holmes-Kerr and the collective company at the end of a day’s shooting. His best-loved rendition was of ‘The Lea-Rig’:
When o’er the hill the eastern star
Tells bughtin time is near, my jo,
And owsen frae the furrow’d field
Return sae dowf and weary O;
Down by the burn, where birken buds
Wi’ dew are hangin clear, my jo,
I’ll meet thee on the lea-rig,
My ain kind Dearie O.
At midnight hour, in mirkest glen,
I’d rove, and ne’er be eerie, O,
If thro’ that glen I gaed to thee,
My ain kind Dearie O;
Altho’ the night were ne’er sae wild,
And I were ne’er sae weary O,
I’ll meet thee on the lea-rig,
My ain kind Dearie O.
The hunter lo’es the morning sun;
To rouse the mountain deer, my jo;
At noon the fisher seeks the glen
Adown the burn to steer, my jo:
Gie me the hour o’ gloamin’ gray,
It maks my heart sae cheery O,
To meet thee on the lea-rig,
My ain kind Dearie O.
I encountered this story about my mother’s great-grandfather many years ago in notes about the family’s history but never troubled to reflect on the singing of ‘The Lea-Rig’. The song exists in various forms. There’s a version in David Herd’s Scots Songs (1776) and another by Robert Fergusson and William Reid. But I now realise that William McAdam the gamekeeper must have sung the Robert Burns version (dating from 1792) with its concluding verse about the hunter.
I check out some details of the vocabulary. A lea-rig is the grassy ridge left at the edge of a ploughed field. Bughtin time is the hour when you bring the sheep in to be milked. Dowf is listless, lacking in spirit or energy, sad, melancholy, wanting force. Eerie here means fearful or timid. Jo (a sweetheart or darling) I already know: it’s a nifty little J-word my mother taught me when we used to while away long Devon evenings playing Scrabble. Then on the internet I click up a wonderful YouTube recording of the song. As if out of the gloaming gray of decades I am invaded by this foreign body of old Scottish music. Engulfed by the realisation that my mother also sang it:
Gie me the hour o’ gloamin’ gray,
It maks my heart sae cheery O,
To meet thee on the lea-rig,
My ain kind Dearie O.
Gugga
My mother’s father William McAdam served in the Great War as a veterinary surgeon (or ‘horse doctor’). He met Emily Gibbs – his future wife – when his Scottish regiment was billeted at Chelmsford in 1916. Prior to going off to the continent. After the war they spent time in Canada and Scotland before setting up home in London.
William and Emily had four daughters – the youngest (Marion and my mother) both born in the house they rented on Hotham Road in Putney. [Left to right: Peggy, Marion, Nettie and my mother, February 1930.] His eldest brother John inherited and sold property in Scotland and bought two houses on Ongar Road in Fulham. He gave one of these (no. 24) to his little brother William and lived next door. John McAdam was an air mechanic with the RAF during the war. In later decades he established himself as a draper and William joined the trade. They later sold carpet and linoleum. One of my earliest memories is of my right big toe getting broken by a roll of lino in the basement at Ongar Road.
My mother and father lived with her father for several years. This was my first home. And here too my own brother Simon was born on 10 February 1960. I remember nothing about my great-uncle John who died in May 1965 at the age of 83. I only know that – while my grandfather was always partial to whisky – John was teetotal. Even when they were adults living in Fulham little brother William had to be surreptitious. He used to conceal his whisky bottle in the old Drymen family grandfather clock.
The day my mother’s father died still clangs and clamours. We called him Gugga. I loved him very much. Many of my earliest memories had to do with him. The two of us together at the house in Fulham. My parents out at work. He would be in his Parker Knoll chair beside the bubbling coal-fire. I would be on the rug. We would play with coloured wooden building bricks together. He would prepare an apple with his penknife in a single snaking curl of peel then slice it up for me. He had what seemed an endless supply of bars of Fry’s Chocolate Cream. He would break off a single piece. My relished quota for the day. Then he lived with us in a three-bedroom semi-detached house in Cheam. He was the first person I ever saw dead. He was seventy-four. I was seven. 6 September 1965. The previous evening he had taken his customary fifteen-minute walk down to The Harrow for a couple of pints of Guinness. Everyone else must already have been in bed when he came home. He had fallen asleep in his Parker Knoll in the sitting room. I was the first up in the morning. He was asleep. I was going to school. I tried to wake him. I touched his right hand as he sat there. I went to school. Only later did I remember how cold his hand had been. How still his face.
My mother put on an incredible show. She picked us up from school in his 1964 purple and black Ford Anglia and drove us to a toy shop. You can choose anything you want. She had never said such a thing before. I suppose I could have opted for some large and expensive item. An Action Man. A space-station. But I was troubled by the unprecedented offer. Anything you want. I chose a miniature plastic Dalek that moved about on a ball-bearing. The silver-painted body had a stripe of blue around it. My brother chose the Dalek with the red stripe. My Dalek soon enough split in two and the pieces were thrown away. But I still have the ball-bearing. A marble of sorts.
My aunt Marion was back at the house with my uncle John and my cousin Michael. Now my mother was at the kitchen sink washing up and crying. She began to make noise I’d never heard before. She wouldn’t stop. My uncle took me and my brother and cousin out. He led
us with his walking stick up a familiar alley to Seears Park. I don’t remember us ever reaching the park itself that afternoon. Just the alley. (And only now – more than fifty years later – I reflect on the resonance of this strange French-English word alley as ‘going’.) He told us that our grandfather had died. He made it sound simple and natural. Our grandfather was old and in due course this happens to old people. I was struck by the contrast. My uncle gentle and matter-of-fact walking along but at the same time probing and studious as if in consultation with his walking stick. My mother transformed into an inconsolable unrecognisable howling creature too scary to be in the house with.
About a dozen years later we were living in a somewhat larger house in the same Surrey village. I was in the garden when my mother came out of the house to Auntie Marion and burst into tears as she told her their eldest sister Peggy had breast cancer and would be having a mastectomy. These were horrified uncontrollable tears shared by the two sisters as they clung together in the middle of the lawn in the hot summer afternoon sunshine. But nothing like the engorged wailing of my mother at the death of her father. With my cousin Mike and other school friends I collected and swopped cards about the American Civil War. They came with bubble gum. Pink and sugary all too soon gray and tasteless. Our excitement was for the cards not the gum. They showed soldiers maimed and killed in a wide range of poses and situations. They were gory and macabre. Oozing with death. But their effect bore no comparison to my mother’s crying at the kitchen sink.
Simon
That kind of howling returned only once. It came when my brother Simon died downstairs in the cottage in Devon. My mother couldn’t have been expected to be aware that he was dead because – unlike me – she wasn’t in the room. It was around 10.45 in the evening. Sunday 28 September 1986. She didn’t have to be present. She couldn’t but didn’t need to be. She knew. She locked herself in the bathroom upstairs and howled and howled and howled. For hours she refused to come out or let anyone in. From that death none of us recovered. But my mother it did for. She it by degrees sent mad. My father and I understood this without ever speaking of it. Grief at her son gone in his mid-twenties drove her into any and every bush and ambush in mental and physical flames drowning buried for miles in every direction.
Permissive
In memory of my brother every word would be in grief. Without relief. To the end. After his death my mother never spoke of it. Every word in tears. Torn to pieces. Everything broken down the middle: before his death – after his death. Take the word ‘permissive’. It’s about permitting or sending through. Letting loose. Letting go. Before Simon’s death it was easy to connect my mother with such a word. She permitted us everything. But after? How could a mother let her son – who was gone – go?
What incredible freedom she gave us. Of course she must have found us challenging and even plain impossible. Simon and I were not good boys. But why were we so bad? My mother and father and Gugga seemed kindness and indulgence personified. I got expelled from my first primary school. I used to be convinced this was because I refused to pray in assembly (which is true). But I also still remember the filthy white taste of the sudsy soap a teacher made me put in my mouth. Which suggests bad language rather than no language at all. When we were about six and eight – and my seniority must have led the way in this – Simon and I were for some reason alone in the house. Our father was at work and our mother had had to go out for some brief period. I suppose it must have been in the months after Gugga’s death. In our mother’s absence we investigated the bathroom. In particular the mirror-fronted cabinet above the washbasin where she kept her cosmetics. There were various shades of lipsticks. At first we had fun pouting and putting it on our lips. But then we started drawing or painting or writing on the mirror. And after that we began to graffiti the walls of the bathroom. Our mother was livid. How could she not be? What did we think we were doing?
I became less insubordinate during my school years. Or insubordinate in different ways. By the end of his life my brother was as gentle as a saint. But in earlier years he was quite wild. He got expelled from his secondary school for a plethora of reasons – some more plausible than others. My parents had an interview with the head teacher who presented them with an inventory. A list of fifteen or more cases of unacceptable behaviour. I only remember two: ‘throwing smaller boys over fences’ and ‘thinking that he is an eagle’. The first of these indeed sounded and still sounds bad. In fact I suspect it was only one boy on one occasion and more an easing over than a catapulting. But still. Not commendable. But ‘thinking that he is an eagle’ seemed bizarre. Would you seek to expel someone from school for thinking they were a llama? At least llamas can’t fly. (In later years I came to feel that there were preternatural affinities between my brother and J.A. Baker. He read T.H. White’s The Goshawk but – so far as I know – never encountered Baker’s Peregrine.) My parents fought against the school’s decision and lost. As it happened I was at a different school and my own relative anonymity as a pupil helped persuade my headmaster to take my brother in as well.
My mother had no limits. If my brother wanted to train a kestrel (like the boy in the Ken Loach film Kes) he could. If he wanted a gyrfalcon she would help him acquire one. If he was interested in collecting owl pellets. If he wanted to collect skulls (a vole or a crow or even a hippopotamus). If this involved cooking the head of a small mammal found dead in the Cornfields. When he was fifteen the local paper ran a story about his naturalist passions. It features a photograph of Simon with a barn owl on his gauntleted fist and another in which he appears to be conversing with a jackdaw. The jackdaw is perched on a sheep’s skull in my brother’s hand. Even the journalist baulked at some of the things on which he was reporting. ‘Dead cat? No problem’ ran the strapline for the article. But my mother didn’t mind.
She seemed to understand ‘permissive’ society in ways no one else did. It is true that she had no apparent problem in later years with her sons sleeping with young women. But she herself had a sort of horror of sex. My mother would often refer to something ‘rearing its ugly head’: by far the worst and most recurrent offender was sex. But ‘permissive’ for her was not about sexual antics. Rather it had to do with a more general and more radical conception of freedom and possibility.
Not long after the newspaper article was published disaster struck. In those days a paper didn’t scruple at providing the more or less precise address of someone featured. In any case the story must have got around because some nefarious person or persons came into our back garden at night and made off with the gyrfalcon and the barn owl. My brother was devastated. As was my mother. The aviaries were in the back garden but the crime seemed as intimate and violating as a domestic burglary.
A key to the wildlife world of our years in Cheam was to be found in the Cotswolds. This is where my father’s brother Pete lived with Kathy and our four cousins: Heather David Vincent and Caroline. Having served some years as a one-man petrol station Pete turned to selling advertising for a newspaper in Evesham. Then he and Kathy started up an estate agency in Winchcombe. In the early years the family lived in a rambling eighteenth-century house in the heart of the town. Here we would go for weekends or longer stays several times a year. My mother got on well with Kathy and liked Pete too. I remember the house as a wonderful space of laughter and music and song. But I know my mother also found the chaos of their domestic scene extraordinary. She couldn’t believe the state of the place. She had a low tolerance for untidiness in her own home. She would often voice her disdain for how in need of a good spring clean a place was by exclaiming (in the voice of Bette Davis from Beyond the Forest): What a dump! ‘Permissive’ in my mother’s sense did not apply to domestic hygiene. Our cousins’ house was a spectacular dump by my mother’s standards. There was a playroom that you had to take a step down to enter. But it was so full of discarded toys that it was more or less impossible to access. It resembled (as I now think of it) a microcosm of the South Pacific
Garbage Patch. Somewhere off an upstairs corridor there was a mysterious high-ceilinged room creaking with old furniture and other objects: a combination of pickings from my uncle’s estate agency work and stuff from Perivale. The curtains were always drawn. Which doubtless gave further force to the leopard. There was a real leopard – its skin and glassy-eyed stuffed head – waiting on the floor in the dark. When we were back in Cheam my mother used to refer to the state of the house in Winchcombe from time to time. Always with a visible shudder.
But outstripping everything was the sheer range of animals living in the house. The kitchen at Winchcombe as an idea must have driven my mother potty. For this was the room in her own house in which order and cleanliness were paramount. The Cotswold kitchen was more like a zoo without keeper. Amid all the other clutter of unwashed dishes and laundry there were budgerigars and chameleons and terrapins and cats and dogs and stick insects and lots of white mice as well as a bushbaby that was released from its cage every night after supper and leapt about for an extended period. So the pets and other creatures my brother and I kept (and often left to our mother to look and clean up after) followed in this Cotswold tradition.
Around 1968 Pete and Kathy moved out of the town into a beautiful house on a nearby hill: St Kenelm’s. It was a former eleventh-century chapel surrounded by fields and woods. There’s a charming photo of my mother and Kathy (whom my mother always thought very glamorous) posing either side of the back-garden gate. Another shows all the members of this Cotswold idyll. (Excepting the photographer: my Uncle Pete.) [Left to right: my father, David, Vincent, me, Caroline, my mother, Heather, my aunt Kathy, Simon.] My brother and David would wander in the fields and woods for hours birdwatching or looking for owl-pellets and dead animals. Simon and I loved visiting our Cotswold cousins. We were like the bees in Keats’ ‘Ode to Autumn’. As if warm days would never cease. Our parents left us all to our own devices – in the days before there were devices – while my father and his brother Pete smoked and reveried by the fireside in the drawing room and my mother and my aunt would sit in the kitchen by an Aga that never seemed to go out. Like having a double: two Kathleen Royles. (Both married to men whose mother had also had this name.) Yakking. That was my mother’s word. Sharing girlish laughter and regaling one another with stories. Yakking and laughing away into the night.
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