Vulnerable in Hearts by Sandy Balfour

Author:Sandy Balfour [Balfour, Sandy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781782393733
Publisher: Atlantic Books
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

14. Remembering everything

MY UNCLE BRIAN, Dad’s youngest brother, has become the repository for the family memory. He lives near Edinburgh, not far from where they grew up. On a wet Sunday morning, he drives Cal and me north across the Forth River Bridge and on to Kirkcaldy. We’re looking for the flat where Dad was born. The town is quiet when Brian, Cal and I arrive; there are few people about, perhaps because of the weather. The wind whipping in off the Forth means the town does not smell, as it sometimes does, of its most prominent industry, the manufacture of linoleum. Brian has done this journey once before and he more or less knows the way to the High Street. Here he has to pause before deciding we need to head towards the western end of the street, which is where we find the old building that was once the bank where my grandfather worked. Although it is now a jeweller’s shop, the building appears not to have changed much. A covered arch leads through into a courtyard, from which a winding staircase leads up the back of the building to the heavy old door of the flat. The current owner is not about and we are unable to go in. It was here, in the apartment above the bank, that my father was born into bridge’s ‘newly vulnerable world’ in the autumn of 1926.

‘He was born here?’ Cal asks.

‘Aye,’ says Brian.

‘And not in a hospital?’

‘No,’ says Brian, only he draws the syllable out in a characteristic Scottish manner.

‘What, like in a bed?’ Cal asks.

Brian and I nod solemnly. Cal thinks about this for a moment. ‘It’s hard to think of him as a child,’ Cal says. ‘I think of him as an old man.’

‘Well, he was both,’ Brian indulges him, ‘sometimes simultaneously.’

But the joke is lost on Cal who concentrates on counting the stairs that wind to the door behind which his grandfather was born. Brian – for whom Kirkcaldy was never home – looks about him with an air of wonder.

‘You never lived here?’ I ask.

He shakes his head. ‘No. I was’nae born yet. But you can see why they left.’

‘It’s hard to imagine what it was like,’ I say.

‘You don’t need to,’ he replies. ‘You need only think of his parents. His mother was his world. I’m not sure the rest mattered much.’

My grandparents soon left Kirkcaldy for the bright lights of Edinburgh. My grandfather had won promotion within the bank and this required him to move. On the strength of his advancement, they bought a small bungalow on the southern edge of the city, which is where they lived for the next forty-five years. There were five children in all. First my aunt Margaret and then Dad. He was followed at regular intervals by his three younger brothers, Robin, George and Brian.

I ask him what he remembers.

‘Well, your grandmother was in charge,’ he says. ‘She ruled the roost. And as long as we remembered that – your grandfather included – we got along just fine.

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