Lockdown Day 13: Saturday 4th April, 2020

A palpable tension stalks the room as it fills with saints and sinners slipping on different rungs of Jacob’s ladder.

Auntie Vivien had not lived a conventional life, at least as far as some of her more traditional relatives were concerned. The Western Isles of Scotland, remnant havens in the North Atlantic wastes, were still a law unto themselves fifty years earlier, still dreaming of Dalriada, of the Lord of the Isles and mending that which was broken. Revenant memories stalked the long stormy winter nights when the fishwives and gossips ruled, when grievances were nurtured and tittle-tattle and rumour elevated to truth and certainty.

  Rather than obedient marriage and a life fulfilled by rearing God’s children, Vivien had made clear her desire to attend the University in Glasgow, despite the open hostility of Church and community. None in the family had ever dared to such a thing and if her parents had dreamt of it, they would have looked to their first-born, Ruaraidh, to make the break, to leave the familiarity of croft and fishing for the exhilaration of the sinful second city of empire.

But Vivien dreamed a different world from those beside her, far from the barren beauty, saw a new day dawning for this world of women and ached to be a distant part of it, holding close her precious hopes, awakening her dreams and breathing life into her aspirations. None of her brothers had broken from the old ways and there was little hope she would sway her parents’ opinion. But she did. Just enough and no more. Then there was little hope that it could be afforded. But with a scholarship won and help from an enlightened few in the wider community, Vivien went to University. Dentistry was her chosen course, perhaps pragmatism winning out over the purity of more esoteric dreams. Long and arduous but promising almost certain return on graduation. She met Uncle Jack, my mother’s eldest brother at a faculty dance and they were married shortly before he shipped out for the Normandy landings and the hell of another world war.

  When she qualified there were very few female dentists in Scotland, yet fewer still opportunities. With little chance of a partnership or visiting practice at one of the large factories that powered the east end of Glasgow, she converted the maid’s room of their large southside flat into a surgery. Uncle Jack survived the war almost intact and though her practice thrived over the years she never moved it from that original small room in the apartment, even through the years she raised my cousins almost alone as Uncle Jack roamed the world from one heavy engineering gig to another.

  But still today, even here at this celebration of a life well lived there are those who would carp and criticise given the chance. Small people, disrespecters, distant relatives mainly, attitudes encased in amber, fossils who refuse to accept that not moving forward means stagnancy and death, that the status quo is never an option for the long term and change is the only constant. Mostly those who never knew her well, never felt the full warmth of her smile, the generosity of heart and overwhelming appetite for life. Uncle Dhomhnaill in particular springs to mind as he carps on in a corner. Her own younger brother and to this day a wild island man. He blamed his sister for the moral corruption of his daughter Morag as Vivien let her stay with them when she too, many years later, wanted to go through University.
No good deed goes unpunished they say.

  But Viv had always been my favourite Aunt. So full of life you had to love her, she gave you no choice. Only those who favoured the eternal promise to the utter exclusion of the beauty of life, those guilty of the wasting of the dawn chose to dispute and dismiss her.