Memory, family, responsibility, truth

A perfect afternoon out (2016) on the island of Inchmahome burial place of "Don Roberto"

After drafting this rest of this story I went out to hear a folk singer in Madderty village hall, in the Perthshire countryside.  I met a couple of people I knew, not unusual in a region of over 2000 square miles and only 155,000 people, and recognised several others. More unusual is that the woman has lived for twenty or thirty years on land bought by her parents, in fact below their original home and that these parents were in Nigeria at the same time as me and my parents in the late 1970s.  The lady herself did not live there most of the time, being several years older than me and already at boarding school.

There is an curious footnote to this tale which will be the subject of this post.  Perhaps 25 or more years ago, before my children were born, we went for drinks at her house I suppose not long after she and her husband had completed renovations of their steading, I heard, partly beforehand and was filled in by my parents later, that they had not been able to move into the large main house above because her parents had been forced to sell to to the tenants they had rented it to, presumably while this lady's father had been abroad with the military.  The tenants had refused to move out. I don't know why they weren't evicted.  Maybe they didn't want the unpleasantness, maybe the tenants had some hold over then and a sale was easier.  Maybe the truth is something else altogether.  It sounded an unpleasant, if not especially rare situation.  

The interest is only elevated in that a one time high flyer and prime ministerial candidate later claimed this to be his ancestral home, which I suppose depends very much on the definition of ancestral. It sounded like an invented fiction.  The high flyer had written books of his adventures before entering politics.  Years before that dad predicted he could end up running the country.  The man, highly intelligent, motivated, with eyebrow-raising self-belief and voraciously ambitious, has been compared to Lawrence of Arabia.  Despite his conservatism he has also been compared to the far more radical Scottish aristocrat, and adventurer, Robert Cunninghame Graham, who founded the Scottish Labour Party and was first president of the Scottish National Party.  “Don Roberto” as he was affectionately known in Argentina is buried in wondrous tranquility on the island in the centre of the Lake (not "loch") of Mentieth. But, given the apparently embellished tale of the contested ancestral seat one has to wonder what else in the man of our times’ stories is fabrication.

To me, the oddest thing was that we were all having drinks together - the ousted family and the interlopers.  There was certainly understandably hushed bad feeling and resentment, but it was all papered over - for neighbourliness I suppose. The patriarch of the interloping renters, now long deceased had been a diplomat as I recall, the son became a politician, the mother of my friend, or acquaintance really, had worked in the High Commission in Nigeria, our families were military so it's fair to say that everyone present excelled in facades. I've always admired the social feat on my friend's part of hosting the people who apparently forced her family out of their home. I doubt I could have got over the inevitable rancour and resentment to that extent.

I never asked but I expect my acquaintance would have said What else could we do?  We'd been forced to sell, we had better just accept the new circumstances.  Perhaps these aren't the facts at all.  Perhaps her father would have explained it differently.  Perhaps the so-called sitting tenants would have too. But all of the parents are dead now and so is my father and it is just me left with these memories and these questions.

I had realised that afternoon, writing one of these African stories, in this case about servants that, with dad dead, and mum ravaged by Alzheimer's I was the only person who carried the memories of my family in that place at that time and it was a very special time.  It struck me as a responsibility.  I exclude my parents' monstrous son who was only four at the time, though, according to old claims,  blessed with a memory far exceeding that infants that age.  We had photographs, whole albums of them, but he had appropriated I suppose is the most generous term them, so all I have are my memories, which may well go the same way as mum's. 

I wondered what this woman who was, when on school holidays, in the same place at roughly the same time as me, could remember and so,in the few minutes before the concert began, across the row of chairs that divided us, I seized the opportunity and asked her. (to be continued).