The photograph and the letter (Blip 99)

"The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there."

The amazing story behind this photo on the left, I've added at the end.

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My fingers run over the envelope as the unmistakable handwriting jumps out at me and simultaneously makes my heart jump. My mum is one of the last great writers.

Today brings with it one such blessing, an Easter card, a treasured letter that I'm yet to read because I want to savour the contents. I don't want its contents to be in the past, I want it to remain something I can snuggle up and look forward to, and yet the irony i don't miss: how hard it is now to remember the days when letters were the main form of communication and news from the homeland would be weeks or months old news by the time the recipient laid their longing hands upon it.

And within the contents of that treasured envelope, three photographs. One of me as a child with my younger sister Geraldine and our Auntie Bernadette who still lives in Glasgow. The two black and white photographs spill out from the comfort of the card and shower me with good feeling, nostalgia and sentimentality. Antique photographs taken within a stone's throw of the Paisley Road Toll where my mum was born and grew up before a Dubliner named Joseph met a Glaswegian named Mary and then along came 5 children, me. Their tenament still stands and I felt such great pain at the loss of those great buildings that didn't make it. My Grandad Arthur was forcibly removed as the bulldozers came in.

My Nana, the original bearer of the Craigan cheekbones, a kind and devoted mother and my Godmother who sadly died when I was about 7, Aunties Angie (nee Agnes but she never liked her name), Catherine who became a very great woman with an exterior hardened by the great tragedies that inflicted her life yet with a soft and generous spirit and great fortitude, Bernadette seated on Nana's lap like a little urchin and my mother Mary with her hands crossed in front.

And so today I had to hit the freeway, drive down what really is such a short distance to make a surprise visit to Auntie Angie and my cousin Lisa. Her walls are adorned with everything I love best: rows and rows of black and whites, faces staring at us from the past. At every visit, I cannot fail to study each and every one even though I've repeated the same for the last 22 years, back to when I first saw the photos when I was just 19 and travelling across the Pond for the first time on a university exchange programme. I enjoyed 6 wonderful weeks with Auntie Angie who was terrified about me taking the multitude of buses from Redondo Beach to Downtown LA. Yes, I guess it was quite a long journey and I was spot the white face on the bus. And that I loved! I loved the excitement! I loved the adventure! I loved temping in Downtown! Back then we'd sit up late into the night and watch The Way We Were and a host of silverscreen classics.

Today has brought me back to so much. My Auntie will be 80 in May. She has been the one I've turned to on so many occasions, back when my in-vitro-fertilisation attempts would repeatedly fail and I felt I would never be that which i most yearned to be: a mother. Her own terrible tragedies which almost exactly replicate that of her sister Catherine's, the loss of a son and young husband, continued to bond the two sisters, so desperately far from each other and still now as Auntie Catherine keeps watch over us all from her much deserved seat in Heaven.

Have I become what Angie was, an expatriate in a foreign land, yet her bridges were so sadly burnt. She left Scotland to escape what was then persecution of marrying a Protestant, my family being Catholic. She eloped first to New York, then Canada and soon after, fled the extreme Canadian winters for Southern California. I cannot imagine the pain of sailing through the Firth of Clyde with the certain knowledge it would be a decade before she would see her beloved parents and sisters again. It is excruciating.

She remained faithly married and hopelessly in love with Uncle Stanley until his death in 1989, just months after I left LA. Auntie Catherine remained faithfully married to her husband David who died within months of Uncle Stanley. Catherine's son was viscously taken from her as a teenager, killed whilst protecting his friend who'd been hit upon, and Angie's son, as a man in his 40s. David was a great pianist who tuned the piano of Scottish rockers Simple Minds. The men shared their great love of music.

And now I must go. A big letter awaits me...

In the photograph:
Left: My Mother and her sisters and mother. Auntie Angie, my mum seated in front of her, my Nana Catherine with Bernadette seated on her lap and Auntie Catherine behind. Nana's mother was Catherine as is one of every generation since, 5 to date. In Blip fashion, a photo of a photo.

I've just read the letter: Amazing. I'm gobsmacked. As the picture tells, there was little money to go around back then and photographs of that era are rare. Yet my Mum writes: "This was taken when we were evacuated to Donegal [Ireland] during the war, just outside the house where mammy was born"...

Right: Auntie Angie today in Los Angeles, her eyes on the boys

I've just read the letter: Amazing. Mum writes: "This was taken when we were evacuated to Donegal [Ireland] during the war, just outside the house where mammy was born".

Just backblipped 27 December which suddenly means I'm all up to date but also that Wednesday's will be my 100th.