A Wee Story To Warm Your Heart……

I was brought up and went to school in a remote town in the West Highlands of Scotland. How remote? Well, we like to boast that we are the “nearest town to nowhere, furthest town town from everywhere,” and the nearest point of civilisation is Oban, which is eight days travel by sledge away.
Anyway, what it means is that the wee boy shaking in the seat next to you in day one primary one is the same big boy that is telling you how he got “double tops” from Big Mary behind the bike shed last night 11 years later as you all await to see whether your exam grades are good enough to get yourself out of here and up to university in the BIg City. Any Big City. However lifelong friendships are forged through shared childhood and teenage experiences, and y’know, you get to love those guys and gals……
Lets go back to the summer of 1970 and we are all entering our sixth year… and rumour has starting to spread that one of our gang is missing… we’ll call her Louise. Louise at 16 has only done and got herself pregnant by a guy she met on holiday somewhere and her strict catholic parents are not happy bunnies. We never saw Louise again, and we found out that her parents had put her into some home somewhere away from the local prying eyes..the shame, the humiliation Mr &Mrs C had to endure, and throughout the next couple of years the story began to gain shape…Louise had given birth to a boy, and he was taken from her after one hour… one cuddle and her son was snatched from her arms… she didn’t even get to name him… can you for one fucking second imagine the pain she went through?
It was 30 years before I saw Louise again… her parents were elderly and she had come home to look after them. Life told her story on her face…. she had eventually met another guy, got married, had two kids, got divorced, become a grandmother, but she never forgot her first born, the wee boy that she did not even have a photograph of. She told me she had started to try to trace her son, but as you probably know there are huge hoops to jump through, and ultimately the adoption agencies will only give you details of your adopted child if the child wants to be contacted.
Well it took years, but one day her long lost, long given up son made contact with her. Can you imagine how Louise felt? I cannot. They met. And her son was everything that she hoped he would be.. Her son, let’s call him Tony, told his mother that his father – the guy that Lou had met on holiday in that summer of 1970, over 30 years previous- had also been trying to contact him, and that THEY had met up recently. “Lordy, this is all too much”, thought Louise. But she decided to contact the boy she had met on the seafront in Largs, the father of her son….. Let’s call him George.
George and Louise are now married, and they are my new next door neighbours. And they have a son who is 47 years old.

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