Hogmanay

When I was a kid, New Year’s Eve was a bit of a thing.

I didn’t know then but where we lived was the wrong side of the tracks and brutally working class.

It was post-war, the dawning of the 1950s, and everyone on our street lived in a state house. Most of the families harboured a member home from the war, damaged, and my Dad was ours. He signed up in ‘39, a single man in his 30s keen to do his bit. He’d been a merchant seaman, an adventurer, and, to all intents and purposes, a bit of a ratbag. So, with no family ties, he signed up. Fate being what it is, he then met my Mum, a widow with two kids, and they fell in love. Enough to say he survived Crete, Palestine, Egypt, and North Africa until he copped his lot at El Alamein in 1944. Blown up and shot in a roadside ditch by a Junkers Ju 87 (Stuka) he was no further use to man or beast, so he was shipped home, married his darling and I was born in April of 1945.

Sounds like heaven?

It wasn’t.

His was a ready-made family and I was born into it. My Dad spent extended periods in hospital diagnosed with shell-shock – today’s PTSD – but no-one really knew what that was then. Mum was at home with three kids, one a baby, and our life was tough but also not unique. There were dozens of families just like ours with paranoid, damaged men for whom the war never ended.

My Dad, having served for five years in the front line, was at the extreme end of the scale of physical and mental damage.

We had bugger all – no phone, fridge etc and never a car. My Dad biked everywhere. I was a kid so had no idea about any of this and my siblings, wisely, said nothing. I loved them all and we did everything we could to make the best of what we had. We went to movies, bussed to the beach occasionally and home life, raw and alone as it often seemed to be, was simply what it was.

But that’s another story.

New Year’s Eve, though, was one of the things we did.

Being of Scottish descent we went First Footing.

First Footing comes from the Manx tradition of ‘qualtagh’ whereby, at midnight, you try to be the first foot over the doorstep of your neighbours to bring good luck to the house, and you bring gifts – a coin, bread, salt, a lump of coal, and whisky – gifts representing all the things the new year would hopefully bring, such as prosperity, food, flavour, warmth and good cheer.

The first footer in would ideally be a dark-haired man for the good luck to work, a sandy-haired or red-haired man or a woman would bring bad luck and had to be avoided. Typical Scots, no middle ground. We were fortunate because my sister’s boyfriend was a dark-haired piper who, in full kit and kaboodle, led our strange procession through the houses in our immediate neighbourhood bringing seasonal good fortune to anyone who was mad enough to welcome us in. This ritual lasted for quite a few years but eventually petered out as marriages occurred, kids left home, and parents aged. They’re good memories though – Poppa Mervyn in his kilt piping away – the kindness of strangers, and a sense of community where there really wasn’t one at all.

Our piper passed a few years ago now. He was a very good man. My sister passed this year, and I was informed. Despite being estranged I loved them both dearly and her funeral healed some wounds.

Families can be brutal to those who are different.

My brother passed this year also. Growing up he was my hero and, while that never changed, we were never close. He was, however, one of the bravest men I’ve ever known. Many, many sadnesses for sure, stuff I could have done better, but no regrets.

Things are what they are.

Tonight, eons in time and place from any Scottish Hogmanay, these memories will drift in through time’s soft mist, welcomed, but never to be repeated. Time moves on and we must move with it.

Of that small, somewhat insular, post-war family, I am the only one left. Each of us has done what our parents did and happily birthed other families each of whom has set out on its own unique journey and evolved its own unique rituals and traditions, New Year’s Eve no doubt being one, and life goes on. Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr in ‘The Wasps’ reminds us that ‘plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose’, the more things change the more they stay the same.

So there we have it, life summed up in an epigram stolen from somewhere else.

Me, in a nutshell.

As for all those offshoot, random families, and yours too, big ups to them.

To all of them.

Bless them.

Bless them all.

Nollaig chridheil agus bliadhna mhath ur.

Happy New Year.