Football
My granddad was born in 1908 and lost to us when he was ninety-one. He was the most stubborn human being I have ever known. Years later, I recognised that same stubbornness in my own children, and it was one of the things I adored about them. The photo is my granddad in 1920, he kept it in his bible and often joked he remembered when only the big house had a car.
According to family lore, when he was very young he was cared for by his older sister and her husband, who had an ice-cream parlour in Blairgowrie. He remembered being returned to his mother’s care and bribed with a hen. Even as an old man, he remained deeply aggrieved about that hen.
My great-gran was a housekeeper on the Sandeman estate at Faskally and later became the first housekeeper at Bonskeid House when it became a youth hostel. Granddad remembered helping to move her from a tenement in Tollcross, Edinburgh, and making the journey north.
“All those bloody steps!” he would say.
When I was very young, we took a trip to Pitlochry. I remember being at the Faskally Hotel on a hot summer’s day. Granddad was in a storytelling mood, and he began telling us about the dam and the landscape that had existed before the valley was flooded.
As a young man, he had worked as a bothy boy on the estate. He played football on the pitch in the valley, partly in the hope of impressing a girl who lived in the farmhouse—and while trying to avoid her father.
Beneath the water now lie the remains of that pitch, the farmhouse and the older river landscape. He remembered a waterfall where salmon ran upstream. Local legend held that Napoleonic prisoners of war had made baskets there to catch the fish, selling their catch to local people, and that some of the prisoners had not been especially eager to return home.
I can still see that afternoon. I can feel the warmth of the sun and hear my granddad’s voice as he described a world that had vanished beneath the water.
That is one of the ironies of growing older. The conversations you most want to continue are the ones you can never have again.
But when my granddad returned to Pitlochry, he said he could still feel the football pitch beneath his feet.
The water had covered it. It had not taken it from him.
