Sometimes when I send one of my Guest Posts to Sheila for her censoring, she will ask how I know so much about her life and her family and tell me that in effect I am reminding her of things she had forgotten. There is one easy answer for me to give, namely, that I was getting versions of the same stories from both Sheila and her sister Leslie at different times. The harder thing for me to admit to is that I remember so much because the Wilson family made such an impression on me. They were so damned exotic and I felt so dull by comparison. When I got to know them in my early teens I found everything about them was like something from a completely different world. Years later when I read “Brideshead Revisited”, I could understand just how overwhelmed Charles Ryder must have felt when Sebastian Flyte took him to met his family at Brideshead. (Please note; while I am likening myself to Charles, I am in no way suggesting that either Sheila or Leslie shared anything with Sebastian. As far as I can remember, neither have ever been sick in my presence, let alone through my open window!)
I met Leslie first, when she arrived with a bang in my class at school, just after I had turned thirteen. She was an exotic creature even then; my goodness, she had lived in Edinburgh (to Glaswegians a foreign country then) and been to school there. She lived in a ‘big house’ – at least compared to where most of us lived and she had a stepmother and four siblings. She even had grandparents in Hawick with, wait for it, an outdoor swimming pool! Even today very few people in the icy north have an outdoor swimming pool.
Her two older step-siblings sounded particularly exotic. Jan was at nursing college and she knew about ‘body parts’ and Leslie was soon spilling the beans to a regular group of wide-eyed teenage girls in the cloakroom. (Note: in our school days there was no such thing as sex education.) Hamish was at Drama School aka the Royal College of Dramatic Art, and he knew Actors, real Actors that we could sometimes see on the stage of the Glasgow Citizens’ Theatre when we went on the organised, educational school visits. Even more exciting, Hamish had been in a film about Greyfriars’ Bobby, a tear-jerking story of a dog that wouldn’t leave his master’s grave in Greyfriars’ Churchyard, Edinburgh. Leslie and I went to see the film together and I still don’t know if I was more embarrassed or proud when Leslie jumped up and down in her seat each time Hamish appeared, shouting ‘That’s my brother, that’s my brother’.
It was also the time of the famous trial about Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Can you imagine the kudos Leslie gained when she brought a well thumbed and page marked copy to one of the cloakroom meetings? I was so naïve I didn’t understand the marked bits.
Then I moved a step closer. I stated to be invited for Tea in the ‘Big House’. In these days ‘Tea’ in Scotland was an early evening meal, normally of one course supplement by cakes and biscuits with a cup of tea. Then I met the rest of the family, including Sheila. Sheila was a ‘blast’ even then and as I have already written about her, I will quickly move on to other members of her family. Next I met the father, Robert. Despite it being a large house, there was only one bathroom; some houses didn’t even have a bathroom and weekly baths meant a visit to ‘the Public Baths’, usually beside the ‘Steamie’ where housewives did their family washing. Anyway, the bathroom! I went upstairs to it and I met Robert coming down. I was rather taken aback as he was wearing a bowler hat, but always a perfect gentleman, he doffed his hat to me. Unfortunately he then let slip the towel that was the only other item he was wearing. I was shocked, horrified and I admit I couldn’t pull my eyes away from an area of male anatomy I had never seen before! (I was the only child of quiet, older parents and had never seen my Dad in a state of undress greater than not wearing a tie.) Robert just smiled and asked whose friend I was. I just couldn’t get over the casual way he accepted a stream of unknown people wandering through his house. Anyone I asked to my home was carefully vetted and spent some time with my parents, who remained in the house for the duration of the visit and often ‘supervised’ any food I was to offer to my friend.
Step sister Jan, sometimes rocked home for the weekend from the Nurses’ Home to add a new dimension to my Friday evening visit. She would arrive full of stories about the parties the student nurses had been to – a lot of them seemed to involve bedpans as sick bowls after experiments with alcohol! I was both shocked and excited. She was also highly political and was very against nuclear weapons. She brought her soapbox with her and tried to persuade anyone who was in the house to come on the next ‘Youth Against the Bomb’ march. My rather conservative (note the small ‘c’) parents would have snatched me away from such a hot-bed of ‘communism’ if they had known! At these stories I felt thrills of subversive delight – even if I never went on the March, I knew somebody who did. Jan would wave aside the meal Leslie had organised, usually Bird’s Eye Chicken Pies and frozen chips. (Robert and his wife always ate out on a Friday so the children were allowed to have their friends round and choose the food.) Jan would raid the fridge or the cupboards and produce something exotic like curried leftover lamb made with curry powder from a wee blue tin and cooking apples and sultanas. Believe me that was exotic in the 1960s. Hamish sometimes appeared and I think he once had his fellow actor Tom Conti with him; much later, Tom Conti played the Greek heart-throb in the film ‘Shirley Valentine’ as well as whatever role he had been playing then in the Glasgow Citizens’ along with Hamish. How exotic could it get? It sure felt exotic to me. Leslie and Sheila had a younger full brother and like most younger brothers of bossy girls he kept well out of the way. The few times I saw him he was a thin, long legged kid with a mop of dark hair falling over his eyes and always a rather sad look in his eyes. Having met the grown up Robbie a few times I find it hard to connect the sad boy with the larger than life, very colourful, confident, successful businessman.
These memories still play in my life; I hadn’t realised how much when I started writing this, wondering if I could remember enough for this post.
I started by saying how my early and formative experience had been very influenced by the Wilsons, just as Charles Ryder was by the Flyte family in “Brideshead Revisited”. So, to those of you who have read the book or watched one of the films I ask, “Was the Wilson household my Brideshead?” Maybe the end for me is somewhat different in that I have grown through the contact – and I am still being treated to Wilson inspiration and exotica through Sheila, Jae and Oscar’s 3G Kili adventure.