Grandpa and the Big House
I didn’t know that amongst the perfect furniture lay hidden losses ...
I barely knew my Grandpa but I knew my Gran and I knew their home - a large house in a nice neighbourhood on the outskirts of Dundee. I also knew my Grandpa had won a scholarship to go to University, the first in his family, and because of this degree went ‘up’ in the world, away from his Glasgow working class household.
I didn’t really want to go up in the world. The idea of a superhighway to a stable nine to five horrified me, especially when I had hardly seen anything of life.
It is a classic story, embedded in my home culture, the idea that we all have a shot at success and in Presbyterian Scotland that shot comes through education and hard work. It echoed the history lessons I had been taught about Glasgow’s progress. Shipbuilding, colonial business ventures, the enlightenment; all underwritten with the idea of hard work, intellect and achieving physical evidence of success.
So, without knowing him, I was educated into an experience about how to progress through life. I learned to admire the big house and its elegant contents. I was to do well at school, go to university, believe exam results would shape my future and get on in the life my Grandpa had already made easier for me.
I didn’t really want to go up in the world. The idea of a superhighway to a stable nine to five horrified me, especially when I had hardly seen anything of life. I found routes of escape: adventures, which led me to Erasmus study in France, a trainee role in Luxembourg, then a junior job in Nicaragua. Supporting myself but not quite in the way that was expected of me.
So, when I arrived in Nicaragua at the age of twenty-four, despite not completely following this linear path, I seemed to expect Nicaragua would operate in straight lines. I had been taught it is possible to improve social problems through progress. And I was working in the development sector, where I had been told I would see progress appear before my very eyes. Instead, for the first time in my life, I saw state infrastructure which didn’t hold up, the chaotic reality of poverty and the complicated way in which change does take place: not necessarily making things better, just making them different.
I found it helpful, when last year, my Aunt told me more about the time that the family moved to that big house in Dundee. She was eight years’ old and her memory of going up in the world was not positive, in fact, it had been a traumatic time.
The process of leaving one city for another caused various disruptions, emotional and financial, to everyone in the family. She left her old school, old friends and home in Glasgow. In particular, the purchase of the big house, meant that their daily life cost more money. And to pay for the new expenses, including the nice furniture that this new house required, my Gran started working. This meant she wasn’t at home when my Aunt came back from school. And my Aunt developed a strong resentment for all the ‘nice’ furniture which greeted her at the end of the day.
It was these tangible results of progress I saw as child. I didn’t know that amongst the perfect furniture lay hidden losses and sadness. I didn’t learn to consider what the family lost by following the promises of progress. I didn’t learn about the loss of cultural practices, which underwrote Glasgow’s growth. No one talked about the ups and downs of living, no one mentioned the structural obstacles and the healing. No one mentioned any of this.
My time in Nicaragua taught me something closer to my Aunt’s experience: that realistic change comes with disruption. Progress requires that systems which operate one way, change. The new way is assumed better but really it requires a choice: sometimes a ruthless choice.
And that choice can require us to devalue what we have in favour of the aspirations we have been sold. It can require us to abandon old ways of living and cast our values as backwards, old-fashioned or inessential: when really, they may have been important, essential and loved.