SCOTLAND ZEN and the art of SOCIAL WORK

by J.A. Skinner

Chapter 15

  Tuesday 20th may

  The age that a person starts to be affected by Huntington's disease is linked to the length of the faulty gene that causes it. The longer the gene, the earlier the symptoms will start and the younger the onset, the more rapid the progression. It is thought the disease can be wiped out with genetic counselling.

  The woman I call Aunty Vera is in fact my mother's aunt, my Grandmother’s young sister. She is seventy-eight and lives alone now in a delightful little house in Station Row in Cleland. Taking Tommy no name’s advice I decide to visit her this bright Tuesday afternoon and possibly interrogate her about our family history.

  Cleland is a large village with about two thousand inhabitants. It is about six miles from Carfin with a mixed crowd of residents. There are the ‘originals’ who are mostly Lanarkshire families and their descendants and there are the ‘incomers’ who are new younger families whose breadwinners commute to Glasgow or Motherwell. They are attracted to Cleland by the country village atmosphere, and the cheaper than Glasgow or Edinburgh property prices.

  Aunty Vera was born in Carfin. She married a Cleland man and moved there fifty-seven years ago. She of course is still an ‘incomer’. She is known by the locals as Vera from Carfin, as it takes a while to integrate in Lanarkshire villages. Her husband, Jamie died two years ago, they had been married over fifty years, quite an achievement to my way of thinking, I didn’t even make ten.

  The kids bang on her door, and she takes a while to answer. This is not because she’s not mobile, but she likes to check out all her rooms to make sure that they are tidy before she opens the door. She is a completely different breed of woman to me and most of my generation. In her young days she could make a pot of soup, clean her house, bath her children and still make the nine o’clock morning Mass.

  I’m more a Blue Peter kind of Mum. I can’t make soup but I can make nuclear rockets out of cornflake packets, paper clips and sticky-back tape.

  ‘Hello Aunty Vera,’ the children chorus. She beams at us, with bleached white false teeth, reminiscent of piano keys, and says,

  ‘Come away in, what a nice surprise.’

  ‘I hope this is okay, not disturbing you or anything,’ I say apologetically, ‘but if you had the phone put in, like we all try to persuade you all the time, I would have phoned first.’

  Vera hates phones and loves visitors, so we don’t have to worry.

  ‘Dinnae fash yirself hen, come away ben,’ Vera is bi-lingual, ‘I thrive on clapping my eyes on these weans.’

  She makes a fuss of the children and puts out cold drinks and chocolate biscuits. The three of them fall on the biscuits like famine victims and silence reigns. I ask after Vera’s health as she usually has a few surgery visits to take me through, thankfully, so far, nothing has been serious.

  This time she whispers ‘IBS, just a touch of it.’

  I am totally confused for a moment, VDU, IVF, IUD, surely not, then I catch on that it’s a bowel thing.

  As if to demonstrate her ‘touch of’ discomfort Vera lets rip with a very loud fart, Richter scale of about four point five.

  My children are frozen with astonishment, biscuits halfway to their mouths. They look as if they’ve never heard this sound before. Then they start to giggle, quietly at first, moving quickly to hysteria. The girls have both their hands clapped over their mouths and their eyes are popping wide. John laughs as only little boys can, until his bones seem to dissolve and he slithers off the couch onto the floor, completely helpless.

  I am paralysed with embarrassment at their behaviour until I look at Vera, she is laughing so hard she has tears in her eyes, and her dentures are dancing.

  We all try to calm down when wee Rosie pipes up,

  ‘That’s the loudest fart I’ve heard in my whole life,’ and that starts us all off again.

  Eventually I take the dishes into the kitchen and ask Vera to put the telly on for the kids so that we can talk. She shouts for John to switch on the television then settles herself at the kitchen table.

  ‘I know it’s a long time since you lived in Carfin Vera,’ I start, ‘but I bet you still know all the families there, don’t you?’

  ‘Well the older generation, certainly,’ she replies, ‘whits this aboot, hen you seem up to high doh,’ more bi-lingual skills.

  I tell Vera what the Priest said at Uncle John’s funeral. She didn’t go to the funeral; she finds them too depressing at her stage of life, how wise. I say that I suspect there may be a family illness that my mother is being cagey about. I also tell her that I don’t really want to believe there’s some hereditary problem, but with Dad and John dying so young, it was a bit of a worry.

  ‘I’m not sure I ken whit you’re on aboot, but your Granny on your father’s side, auld Ina, had a real bad time with her man. He was in and out of hospital a few times, but he had that old timers disease,’ she says.

  ‘You mean Alzheimers,’

  ‘I suppose so, all I know is he was quite disturbed at the end and eventually died at home. Ina and Theresa nursed him and John and Peter got the brunt of his temper,’ she said with a sigh.

  This wasn’t sounding too good. One of the symptoms of Huntington’s Chorea is a deterioration of memory, very like and often confused with Alzheimers.

  ‘Your mother was courting Peter at the time, maybe she knows more.’

  ‘I really don’t want to upset my mother in any way, but you’re right, she knows something,’

  Alzheimers didn’t seem enough of an explanation for me when granddad was only fifty-five when he died.

  Aunty Vera went on to reassure me that miners had never been long lived people, they had to work too hard but things were different now, times had changed, my mother had no reason to lie to me, dinnae fash yirself, get yirself a new man, that wid brighten you up hen, dye your hair, that works for me, blah de blah, words of comfort well meant, and sweet as chocolate gateaux.

  Tommy no name springs to mind again at the mention of a new man, maybe I’m becoming obsessed.

  Tuesday evening 20th May

  At home later that evening, the girls ask if they can play with the dolls house. Their dolls house is a family inheritance. It belonged to me and Kate when we were little and is a really precious toy. It was made by my Father, and is a masterpiece of miniature carpentry and imagination. Over the years, things have been added, new furniture, store bought, which sadly, does not have the same charm as the homemade stuff, various dolls, bedclothes and curtains. The rooms have been painted a few times and a garage has been added. I always encourage John to join in the games of make believe, but he struggles with things he thinks are sissy.

  ‘Pals will call me a Jessie,’ he moans, ‘if I spend all the time with the girls.’ He hasn’t learned yet that a Jessie in Scotland doesn’t just mean cissy, it’s the word that also denotes homosexuality.

  This brings back memories in a rush, Mickey used to say exactly the same kind of thing. Kate and I always wanted him to play the part of the baby boy in the dolls house, so that we could fuss over him and feed him and dress him up. He hated it, having two elder sisters was sometimes a burden for him. The house is still beautiful with wallpaper on the little room walls and tiny drawings hung as paintings.

  Rosie and Theresa have a great time. They manipulate little people all over the house and Theresa weaves a complicated story as usual, about preparing the family for an exotic holiday, packing clothes and making tiny passports from scraps of paper. I’m convinced she must have been a jet set traveller in a former life.

  There are no arguments in the dolls house, no drunks, no divorces, no naughty children, not even any dirty washing to be done. If only I could crawl in there for a while, where nothing breaks, nobody falls out with their mother, and nobody cries.

  Theresa keeps nagging John to get his passport ready or he will not be able to join in the holiday. He is trying to read a comic and completely loses the head with her and pulls her hair fiercely. She screams
and cries with slightly more drama than seems necessary, and Rosie joins in for no real reason.

  It’s getting dark now, they really should be asleep, with these lighter nights it’s easy to lose track of bedtime but I have control in this house so I take John out into the back garden to speak to him. We sit on the back step and I repeat what I’ve said numerous times before that he is so lucky to have two beautiful sisters, although he certainly doesn’t realise this at the moment. I also give a well-worn dissertation on violence never ever to be used as a problem solving tool.

  Being John, he starts to bargain,

  ‘If I say I’m sorry can I stay out to see the stars for a while?’

  ‘If you say you’re sorry, and play with Rosie and Theresa for half an hour, it’s a deal,’ no point in making it too easy for him.

  He runs back inside, says he’s sorry to Theresa and gives her a big hug and a kiss. She beams at him, and all is forgiven. He is indeed his Father’s son at times like this. We have perfect peace until the girls go to bed.

  It’s a clear cool night with maybe a hint of frost for later, and John and I sit on the back step in our pyjamas with a quilt wrapped around both our shoulders. This is one of John’s favourite pastimes. He sees faces and patterns in the stars and spots UFOs by the dozen. We gaze for a long time in silence, then,

  ‘Why do I always have to be patient with my wee sisters?’ He asks.

  ‘I only ask you as the big brother to love them, be nice to them, and of course, no violence. Patience is a whole different thing.’ I reply.

  ‘Like what?’ He asks.

  ‘Like coal changing into diamonds, you would need patience for that.’

  He giggles softly,

  ‘That’s thousands of years of patience.’

  ‘Yes,’ I say, ‘or the stars shining on us right now, that takes a long time to organise.’

  ‘Yes, I know, trillions of years of patience, what about rocks being made into sand?’

  ‘That’s a good one’ I say, he sighs and is quiet for a while.

  ‘D’you think I’ll ever have a Dad at home?’ he says.

  ‘You have a Dad John, a lovely Dad, you know that but you know he won’t live with us again,’ I reply. I’ve covered this ground many times before, making comparisons with families whose fathers have to work away from home, and how the important thing is the feelings, not the daily routine.

  ‘Yea yea, I know that but Jamie and Andrew said they have a new Dad at home and he buys them toys and gives them money.’

  Never forget how mercenary children can be.

  ‘I think that might be none of your business son, and sadly it’s time for bed before we turn into icicles.’

  I do worry about my mate Betty she is soft enough to be taking a man to her heart and her bed too quickly if he is generous to her kids, but who am I to find fault, I don’t have a perfect track record. I don’t know how I would react if a man tried to buy my children’s affection. Step families are a complicated business, full of misplaced loyalties, jealousy and compromises. Maybe that also sounds like normal families.

  What do I know?