Layers

Thirty-eight and fifteen Robert St, Glasgow. My great-grandparents Archie and Jane Rowley lived here and raised twelve children from 1911¹ until their deaths in 1932² and 1942³. Today it is a car park in a light industrial area, a candle workshop and a retail outlet⁴.[4]

I do not see the carpark. I see nineteenth-century tenements taking their shape from the road. Covered in black grime, dirty dusty windows, filthy grimy footpath, few cars and much horse dung. Children everywhere, playing, laughing, running, fighting, talking, shouting, screaming. All in the melodious tones of my mother tongue, music to my ears, indecipherable to outsiders.

Two streets away, the shipyards overshadow all of Glasgow. It fills the air with still more noise; hammering, welding, scraping metal; and smell; acrid, dusty, foul. Its smoke clouds everything with underworld, ghostly dimness.

This is my inherited memory, layering the landscape in ways that only family can. The shipyard disappears taking the pollution, noise, and jobs. Next, the tenements, children and adults. Progress is what it is, the sun is bright here now, in the carpark of the candle factory.

References:

1. Scottish Birth Register, 1911, GROS Data 646/02 1851, Georgina Marion Rowley (http://www.scotlandspeople.gov.uk: accessed 18 October 2012) [↩]
2. Scottish Death Register, 1932, GROS Data 644/24 0628, Rowley, Jane  (http://www.scotlandspeople.gov.uk: accessed 17 August 2012) [↩]
3. Scottish Death Register, 1942, GROS Data 644/24 0628, Rowley, Archibald (http://www.scotlandspeople.gov.uk: accessed 22 March 2005) [↩]
4. “Robert Street, Glasgow, Scotland.” Map. Google Maps. Google (https://www.google.com.au/maps/: accessed 12 December 2017.) [↩]