Last Saturday, I found myself standing in front of an inconspicuous sandstone terraced house in Glasgow, my sister Jill beside me. We stared at the little red door in silence, half-conscious of how odd we likely appeared to any of the street’s inhabitants, half-immersed in thoughts of our father, who had lived in this house as a boy. It wasn’t a grand house by any means, yet there was something quaint and pleasing about the warm sandstone, decorative stonework, and rusted iron railings. It felt both strange and familiar at the same time. I had walked these pavements countless times before; not in person, but through my father’s stories and recollections of the childhood he had spent here. Around the dinner table, my siblings and I were subjected to seemingly interminable stories of my father’s childhood in Glasgow. He would tell us of the bitter snow and sleet, how he was obliged to trudge through the snow for miles and miles to get to school each day, all the while bandaged up from head to foot like a mummy on account of his eczema. He’d tell us of the hours he spent lying on his back, tracing the intricate moulded patterns on his bedroom ceiling, the looping whirls and scrolls tiring his eyes. He’d tell us of his struggles to breath in the cold, polluted air of Glasgow, his asthma making the bitter winters all the more oppressive. He’d tell us too of the meagre dinners he was served at home — whilst glaring pointedly at our own full plates — and of the concrete quadrangles at his school, where he’d fight other little boys and come home scraped and bruised. We heard these stories so many times they became part of the family mythology. We felt as if we knew Glasgow, even though we had never been there. There will always be incongruities between reality and memories, especially when the memories one is relying on aren’t one’s own. So Jill and I found that the Glasgow we had constructed from our father’s stories was markedly different to that we encountered on a muggy summer’s day in August. The bricks weren’t quite as red as we expected; the church steeple wasn’t as tall, and the school felt sterile somehow, the idea of it being filled with small children somehow difficult to reconcile with what stood before us. Dad’s house had a satellite dish perched on the roof, and the flowerbeds had long since been surrendered to weeds. Childhood landscapes are enormous. Dad described these places as if they filled his entire world. But standing there ourselves, we discovered how small it all was. A few years ago, I took my sister Lucy to visit St David’s Church in Knightswood, the Glasgow church where our Grandpa had served as minister and where Dad had worshipped alongside his siblings as a boy. We were in search of people who might still remember them, and were delighted when we found a few elderly women who remembered our family, decades back. They remembered Grandma as being eternally plagued by anxiety and bad knees, and Grandpa, as a tall, handsome, strapping figure with a booming voice who would happily join his young congregants in games of basketball in the church hall. They also remembered Dad — a specky, knock-kneed boy with thick glasses who always seemed a little sickly. It felt strange to hear these fragments of our family history from strangers who had known Dad and his family; not as the figures in our memories, but as real, ordinary people who had once occupied these rooms, walked these corridors and been part of the daily life of this small Glasgow congregation. I think what is most poignant about visiting the city of my father’s childhood is that I cannot discuss any of it with him. I can stand outside Dad’s old house, attend a service at his church, examine the photographs he left behind. I can wonder which window was his, where on the school playground he scuffled and fought other children, which streets and roads he traversed each day. But I can no longer ask him. Dad would have made sense of these places; he might have been the narrator who could have connected the ordinary buildings in front of me to the stories I have carried all my life. But he is gone, so I am left to reconstruct his childhood from old photographs, half-remembered anecdotes and the stories he told us over and over again. Jill and I didn’t stick around outside Dad’s old house. We didn’t want to bother the neighbours, and we were hungry. As we walked away, I thought about why we had ventured to this part of the city. There is something peculiar about inheriting someone else’s nostalgia. Before visiting this quiet Glasgow suburb, I felt something like homesickness, and something like recognition when I finally arrived. This house, this church, this school, these streets helped shape my father, and in some direct way, helped shape me. Yet I will never know them as he did, and I can only imagine them through the traces he left behind. Jean Balchin, a former English student at the University of Otago, is studying at Oxford University after being awarded a Rhodes Scholarship. She writes the Koru And Thistle column for the ODT.
