It's Not Where You Start

4

Sadie The Lady

My mother's upbringing could not have been more different to my dad's. While he was born into a chaotic, often violent and unstable domestic environment fuelled by alcohol abuse, my mother, Joyce, came from a much more secure and happy family background.

The lynchpin of the household, and the glue that held the smooth running of the Wilson family together, was my grandmother, Sarah, who I used to call Sadie the Lady.

The product of Irish immigrants to Glasgow in the early 1900s, Sadie's early life had been hard but happy, despite the undoubted poverty she was born into.

She arrived in this world as Sarah Veronica Gilmour Nicoll on 7 August 1923, the second of four surviving children. Two older siblings died in infancy before Sadie was born, an all-too-common occurrence at the time. There was hardly a family in Glasgow, or anywhere in Scotland, that didn't share similar stories. There just wasn't the medical knowledge or access to treatment that we have today.

Sadie was lucky to survive. When she was very young she suffered from a bout of Diphtheria, a highly infectious and dangerous disease which was rife in Glasgow in the 1920s. It accounted for a large proportion of the city's high childhood mortality rate as it usually claimed the lives of more than 40 per cent of those who got infected. Her most abiding memory of the time was having to spend days in a steam tent in hospital after having her tonsils and adenoids removed as part of the treatment for the disease.

It wasn't just the children who were at risk of premature death. The average life expectancy of a working-class man in Glasgow at the time was about 48 years. Her father didn't even make that.

The sudden death of her beloved dad, Henry, at the age of just 42 was one of the biggest blows of her early life and it hit her very hard. He had worked in a galvanising works where fumes from the industrial process were suspected of giving him heart problems, or at least making any undiagnosed existing condition worse.

The day he died, on Sunday 4 December 1932, Sadie was just nine years old. She had been getting ready to go to a church parade and was dressed in her Brownies uniform when there was a knock on the door. It was a policeman who had called to tell her mother, Janet, that Henry had collapsed at work and had died in hospital earlier that day.

Even though it was a tremendous shock, Sadie said her mother insisted she, and her brother and sisters, should carry on and attend the church service. She remembered there was a Christening, which made her sad because part of the sermon given by the priest talked about 'one life ending as another begins'.

On the way back from the church her little three-year-old sister, May, started singing a traditional lullaby, 'Baby's Eyes Are Irish', which her Ballymena-born father had taught her. It was a highly emotional moment as the song contains the line: 'Daddy's gone to heaven, he's gone to paradise, leaving his poor little baby, with lovely blue Irish eyes.' Sadie said everyone started to cry, including the Sunday school teachers.

The loss of her father meant Sadie's mum was left on her own, bringing up four children in a first-floor flat in one of the old brown stone tenement buildings where they shared a toilet with eight other families. Their home had just two bedrooms, a living room and a kitchen with a bed in it. That's where her mother slept while Sadie and her brother and sisters had the bedrooms.

They never had much money but they were a close-knit family and it instilled in my grandmother the importance of love and stability. Sadie stayed there until she was 19. She only moved out when she married my grandfather, Charlie Wilson, and they set up their own home.

Sadie was only 16 when she met 22-year-old Charlie at a dance in 1939. Glasgow was renowned for its dance halls and movie theatres back then and Sadie always loved to dance.

Their wartime romance was made easier as my grandfather Charlie was unfit for military service. He was stone deaf, a lifelong condition resulting from an early childhood ear infection that was never properly treated. It didn't help that for a long time he wore his hearing aid in the wrong ear. When he did eventually change it, he managed to get a little bit more hearing, but not much. He could not hear you if your back was turned. Incredibly, even though he could not hear the music to dance to, he and my grandmother were brilliant together. She would tap him on the shoulder and he would feel the vibration of the music through the floor. By all accounts, friends and family who saw them together said they moved beautifully around the dance floor, but my grandfather never heard a note.

When it came to everyday conversation he had developed his own form of sign language which he used to communicate with friends and family.

He had also lost part of a finger in an industrial accident some years before the war. Anyway, as an experienced metal turner and lathe operator he was far more valuable on the home front.

They courted for a couple of years and married on Friday 7 August 1942 shortly after Sadie turned 19. It was a happy union and they stayed together for over 45 years until Charlie died in 1987 aged 69.

Like many couples at the time their life together started rather humbly. Being a wartime marriage the ceremony was pretty basic, a far cry from the sun-kissed beach on Cyprus where Karen and I tied the knot some 71 years later.

Sadie and Charlie's wedding celebration was a simple affair. A brief service followed by a meal with a handful of guests in a Glasgow city centre tearoom, and then a night at the theatre to see Sadie's favourite singer of the day, the Scottish tenor Monte Rey. The weekend was rounded off with a brief honeymoon in Edinburgh before getting back to work and the war effort on the Monday morning.

For a newlywed couple in Glasgow of 1942 Sadie and Charlie were incredibly lucky to find somewhere to live. Only a year earlier, in March 1941, two nights of German bombing, known as the Clydebank Blitz, had killed over 1,200 people and left a further 35,000 homeless. That was only one of 11 air raids on the city during the war which inflicted massive casualties and destroyed thousands of residential buildings.

At the time Sadie and Charlie were looking for a home they were up against 28 other applicants desperately vying for the one room and a kitchen, with a toilet, that they eventually got. Situated in the less than salubrious area of Gallowgate, about a mile from the city centre, their families were not keen on them taking it but there was no alternative.

Despite the limited space it was to be home for the next 16 years as they started a family of their own. By the time they moved to a bigger place in 1956 Sadie and Charlie had been living in the one room with up to four children.

Mind you, family life didn't start easily for them. Two years after they were married Sadie fell pregnant with their first child, Derek. Sadly, he was born prematurely on 12 March 1944 and only lived for ten minutes.

One of the most heartbreaking stories she ever told me was about that day. Sadie had to be rushed into hospital as she had developed problems with the pregnancy and gone into labour early. My grandfather was contacted at work and rushed to be by her side.

Soon after he arrived Derek died and even though he had just lost his son he was expected to go back to work that afternoon. He wasn't allowed to spend any time comforting his devastated wife.

For Sadie it was even worse. She was immediately put on a ward with other mums and their newborns. Within hours of losing her own child a nurse came along and gave her somebody else's baby to feed because she had milk. She wasn't given time to grieve properly. As hard as it is to comprehend now it's just how things were done in those days.

Fortunately Sadie and Charlie went on to have more children, two boys and four girls over the next 15 years, culminating with my mother Joyce, the baby of the family.

By the time my mum arrived on the scene the Wilson family had moved from Gallowgate in the city centre to the more open spaces of Castlemilk, which at the time was one of the biggest housing schemes in Europe.

They had swapped their one room and a kitchen for a three-bedroomed flat. Sadie was in seventh heaven; it was the first home she had lived in with an indoor bathroom since getting married.

Overall, the Wilson family rubbed along pretty well together at the Tormusk Road address for the next 21 years.

My mum was born on 23 March 1961 - a full 15 years and one day after her oldest surviving sibling, Janette, was born on 24 March 1946.

Between the mid-1940s and early '50s my grandparents had a child almost every two years. Grace was born in 1948, Charles, or Chick as he was known, arrived in 1950, Norma in 1952 and then John in 1958.

By the time my mother reached her teenage years in the 1970s all but John were married and had left home. Instead of brothers and sisters my mum often felt as though she had several sets of parents telling her what to do and trying to give advice. It was a situation she didn't enjoy and wasn't always willing to accept.

My mum, who became very close to her parents in later life, admits that as a teenager she was pretty wilful and embarrassed at having an older mother. She resented the fact all of her friends had younger, trendier parents and felt ashamed if her mother came to school looking more...