A Story of Love

I've been asked to write a love story in honor of Valentine's Day.

Valentine's day is past. The only love story I  could write belongs to my maternal grandparents, 

I' m not even sure how much I know . It derives from snippets from my mother and the  eleven years I lived in  their home.

Bringing it together would  be a  mammoth undertaking.  The personal blog would be best place .

But I do have a story of love.

Christmas is a time for reminiscing. I opened the door a crack  to memory  when I re-called  a younger sisiter of my father who died in childbirth with her first child.

The ice storm, the winds  and the power outage nearly blew the door off its hinges.

The first person tumbling through was Aunt Peggy.

Peggy was married to Uncle Hughie,my mother's younger brother.

They lived in the tenement building next door . All rental accommodation in Scotiish towns and cities were tenement buildings. until the late twenties.

 Peggy had one room .It was larger than either of our two rooms and full of light. It had a huge window, where ours was small . It faced  out over the backyards, where ours faced buildings opposite. The  coal range was in the centre of a wall instead of in the corner of the room like ours.

Harry was  Peggy's first child. He was a bit younger tham myself. We were close companions from earliest memory. The only snap-shot I have of my childhood is of  Harry and myself  seated on a kitchen chair  in front of a  scented white rose bush with a trumpet vine twisting through its thorny branches.

It didn't belong to anyone. It just grew there in the yard with unkempt grass all around.

Harry is snuggled beside me  on the chair my arm on  his shoulder holding him close.

Twins Hugh and Maureen were born after Harry.  Three more sons after that.

I shared much of their lives. There was a birtday cake when Harry was three. Candles lit behind a curtain and cake brought out as a surprise for a much-loved child.

When  corn flakes were introduced to the market, Peggy got them  for her children .

We had porridge with never enough milk.

In summer she trundled the old pram to the shore and sat on the rocks at the bottom of the stairs  down , surrounded by her children  playing at her feet along with  myself and my sister.

On cold  wet winter days , she brought a  large can of hot soup to school at lunch time and sat in the
open  shed with her children for the hour.

The   first Christmas Eve  we were not in our own home, my sister and I stood with noses pressed  against the window of a newsagent  and tobacconist shop. .We were short a penny-halfpenny for
Grampa's gift.

Peggy stopped and asked . We were able to buy the gift.

She would be in her mid-twenties then. Life had not been  easy .

Her mother died and as often happened in those days,  she was raised in someone else's home.

After she started work , she made a home again for a while with her father until she married my Uncle Hughie.

Times were difficult. Work hard to come by. Especially for  Catholics.

Hughie knew of berry patches where he could pick all day and sell a bucket  of raspberries or brambles.

Rugs were hand-made with rags cut into strips. Hughie had a huge frame that he hooked on for hours and sold the finished product for whatever he could get.

I was  there when Harry brought home  the first  shilling he earned  caddying at Gailes Golf Course.

Golf bags were huge and heavy as were  gold clubs.  A round of golf would take several hours.
A boy would compete with men  and be paid less

Harry might have been eleven or twelve years old then.

The argument was  about which parent should have the shilling. There was never a question
that  Harry had a right to  keep his earnings.

Peggy's children were exceptionally beautiful.

 The youngest ,Campbell, most beautiful of all.

 His eyelashes must have been an inch long. They lay heavily on his round rosy cheeks curling up
at the edges while he slept. His eyes were dark violet blue.  His hair was golden and  curled softly on his head.

He was ten  months old when Peggy  died after months of illness.

In a little metal cot in the  fireplace corner of the room, where all of her children were born and lived their lives to-gether.

 After leaving school, Harry went to work helping the green-keeper at Gailes Golf Course. He won a Junior golf championship soon after. I heard about it in London.

He did his national service in the Royal Scots Fusiliers. 

He came home and through the years went on to manage  Belisle Golf Club in Ayr.

Later , he was invited to design golf courses in places as far apart  as  Europe, Gibraltar and California.

He died in his seventies .

The  Harry Diamond Golf Tournament  is an annual event held in  Ayr in his honor.

The  last time I saw him. he re-called  his mother telling him ,while she lay dying .how proud she was of  her first born son and how much that had meant to him throughout his life.