Lockdown Day 2: Tuesday 24th March, 2020

Grandad died.”

 I stopped.

And waited.

Then waited some more.

  Terry chuckled, “Trick, your ignorance is encyclopaedic. Even on my death bed you won’t cut me some slack. Come on. Give up the good stuff. All the juicy bits. The secrets go to the grave with me. I won’t blab.   

  That is not much of a tale. Really not what I was looking for. We won’t fill the time the way I was hoping to if that’s all you’re up to. What happened to that old celtic gift o’ the gab? Warrior-poets in the service of freedom and all that. Do you want to paint your face blue or listen to some bagpipes first? Maybe put some Proclaimers on the deck.”

  “Fuck that.
Short and sweet, but that’s the way it was.
The first entry in my Book of the Dead has to be my granddad. Literally the first death I remember.

  Throat cancer when I was five. I don’t remember much about him now, except he was a dark, god-fearing giant with a gnarly pipe, constantly wreathed in sweet-smelling smoke like a burning bramble bush. I can’t recall the losing, just the loss, the absence, the not-being-there-ness. Suddenly he just wasn’t anymore. I couldn’t climb on his lap and play with the tarnished silver pocket watch in his waistcoat pocket; couldn’t pinch a sliver of sugary tablet from his beaten old Golden Syrup tin on the mantelpiece; couldn’t pester him to show me the jagged shrapnel scar in his pale, hairless calf that commemorated his lucky escape from the battles of the Somme that ended two of his brothers; couldn’t help him clean off his precious tools in the immaculate garage smelling of linseed oil and cold steel, wood and wax and hot grease.

He spent so much time in that garage, planning every job immaculately, every one a real labour of love with full attention to even the smallest of details, then afterwards spending as long again making sure his war-weary tools were spotless, ready for their next battle. He was a real six Ps man – proper preparation prevents piss poor performance. He never started a job until he knew how – barring acts of God or Grandma – it would finish.

You know, I can still see him there, in that red wooden garage that never held a car in its life, at home in his den, happy, smiling, contented, waving through the smoke-stained glass to me as I ran madly around the sentinel clothes-poles marshalling their small patch of grass. But then, suddenly he turns, stoops to walk through the door and disappears like some will-o-the-wisp in the gloaming and all that is left to cold-comfort Grandma for the next thirty years is the fading briar reek of his familiar pipe.

  Her sadness marked me. For all of my antics and adventures, I have always known I’ve been blessed. I have loved and been loved my entire life but I picked up even as a kid that love can be a curse as well as a blessing. Helping Grandma out round the house as I grew up, I’d glimpse her hidden pain in a fleeting thought or happy memory she failed to keep at bay. Each day she felt the loss, eternally the reverberating heartbreak. She never talked about Grandad, but decades later, as she faded away in that spartan home that had barely changed since he died, she cried his name for hours as she hung on to mum’s hand.

I hate the sound of people dying.

  When Grandad died, I recall glimpses of stifled grief around me – my mother sobbing, uncles clamming up in that dour Scots fashion we don’t know exists, nodding knowingly to each other, gaining clichéd comfort – ‘Wha’s like us? Damn few and they’re aw’ deid’, ‘Wha daurs meddle’, ‘A man’s a man for a’ that’, ‘We’re aw Jock Tamson’s bairns’. Tearful aunts skittled out rooms when I entered, a world of encumbered silence.
And I remember feeling guilty. First time I ever felt that way. I had no idea what the emotion was. But even though I knew I had done nothing wrong, I felt guilty. Nobody would talk to me to tell me what was wrong, what was different. I was still too wee. But I knew something was very, very different. So of course, I thought it had to be me, I had to have done something bad. I didn’t know any better. Like I say, I was five. And that has stuck with me my entire life. I’ve never blamed anyone else for anything that happened to me. It’s always been my fault.”

Terry piped up, “That’s because it usually is your fault soft lad. You can start a riot in an empty room.”   

  “Do you want me to carry on with this or not?

  OK.

  I don’t blame people, I just get on with it, fixing whatever’s broken, making things happen, getting the job done no matter what it takes, making things better. But sometimes things are beyond your control and you just can’t do that. Sometimes the world does what the world is going to do and you have to sink or swim as you can’t stand against the onrushing tide.

  So, suddenly there were people all around me in my wee grandma’s wee living room that I’d never seen before. And I was related to all of them. A scattered clan suddenly appearing out the chill morning mist of a pibroch march to Kirk and grave. Strange accents heard and stranger tales retold around the glowing embers of the ashen hearth. Stories from books I would read later as I grew. Scenes from films I would see in technicolour. And as the bottles emptied, the whisky-loosened tongues recalled gruesome pains buried deeper and deeper, brothers lost and bonds broken through three world wars and many, many more conflicts.

So many tales, so much horror and loss. These were people I could never aspire to be. Simple people made hero by horrific circumstance. A tapestry of pain and loss and hunger and horror. But tragedy? No, none. This was not war. This was the fabric of life. Victory is to live to see another day. Success is to see your children excel you. Jefferson ‘studied war so that his children could study mathematics’ as he put it.

My Grandma, the eldest of thirteen children from a Brigton single end, Granddad somewhere in the middle of an unknowable number, a hell of a lot of living and dying. Pride and sorrow embalmed each name, these manly tombs of family history – Ypres, Vitoria, Paschendale, Lucknow, El Alamein, Arras, Montevideo, Waterloo, Normandy. Even my own dad with his tales of Malaya and the primeval jungles of the east. A world I never yet dreamt existed! A world I had to see. The names tumbled through my spinning head, the hidden glory of forgetful heroes, the Highland Light Infantry, the Seaforths, Gordons, Argylls and Black Watch, kilts swirling, pipes skirling, flags unfurling far from home, fighting for a pal and a promise and a pound. Then ultimately the hushed awe as they recalled how Granddad knew a man who knew a man whose father had charged as a boy with Bonnie Prince Charlie over 200 years before across the futile moor of Culloden then wept in despair and fury as the last battle on British soil swept away the bitter fruit of celtic millennia in a storm of blood. The story to end all Scottish stories.

  I was five. It marked me for life.

We were warriors.