Epilogue MAG

Epilogue for Mmm and Aaa (MAG)

Points I want to cover (see Journal 1st February 2025):

• Myself
• Aaa and Jjj
• Mmm 
• Ccc
• Shocks - Jjj
• Losses and Discoveries
• Points of view and start and end points

Writing a family history is a challenge intellectually and emotionally. I could compare it to detective work or as completing a jigsaw. Both of these convey something of my experience but completing a child's dot-to-dot puzzle gets closer to my emotional journey writing about Mmm Sss and Aaa Ggg. The clues for the overall picture were very limited. The "picture on the box" was at best indistinct. At the detailed level, ideally, each "dot" would associate person, place and time with an event and I would join the dots to construct the story. This turned out to be much harder than I imagined.

This was a puzzle where many of the dots were indistinct or missing altogether and the numbers which gave the sequence were sometimes muddled. Where there are two events, the natural, maybe the only thing to do is to join them with the equivalent of a straight line. Sometimes I could recognise a lacuna and make some allowance for it but often enough the discovery of a new fact, or the re-evaluation of a detail of existing evidence brought the realisation that there were events which I had not known about. Sometimes these discoveries were moments of epiphany, and just as often they were slow, extended periods of the realisation that something was not quite right.

My relationship with Jjj and especially Aaa Ggg has developed considerably. After the initial shock of discovery, Jjj has become a pleasant part of the story. I see his life, right up to the tragedy of his death, in a rosy glow. He was loved, he loved in return and he was happy.

My feelings about Aaa are more nuanced and ambivalent. His early life remains mysterious and it is impossible to tell if this is simply absence of evidence or concealment. There is a lot to admire about Aaa. He chose an adventurous path. There is no doubt in my mind that he and Mmm Sss were passionately in love. Sadly, in their case war and disease mean that passion led to anguish.

I wish that I could share what I have found with my sister Ccc. Looking back at the indistinct nature of my own early memories, I wonder how much she ever understood about the tragic circumstances surrounding her birth. I continue to believe that Ccc's early life on Islay was good and I would have liked the opportunity to tell me, as an adult, what she remembered. I like to think that knowing a more complete version of what happened to Mmm and Aaa would have been a comfort to her.

What I have learned during my research has rather changed my feelings about my mother, Mmm. I now know for certain that she had terrible experiences and did terrible things. The two sides balance but they do not cancel out. When she was alive I do not think she was able to tell me what happened and I'm not sure that as a young man I would have been able to receive the message. Now that I am old, I would like to hear her story from her point of view but of course her voice is silenced. I hope that I could listen with unconditional positive regard and sincere sympathy and that my listening would be helpful to her. Even after all these years I still grieve for Mmm.

Writing this tale has taught me some things about stories in general: the tone of a story depends on more than the content, the facts; it also depends on where the storyteller starts and ends their tale and what point of view they choose to use. If I had chosen to end in 1952 or 1953 then the tale would have been an unrelieved tragedy for Mmm but not for Ccc. By 1956 it becomes a triumph over adversity for Mmm but much complicated when you include Ccc and my father (). In 1957 I () add a further layer of complication.

And the story does not end there. There was more turmoil to come as together we all entered the Swinging Sixties and the age of the atom bomb and the space race.

[3rd February 2025]