Dimensions
126 x 197 x 14mm
Alistair Moffat grew up in Kelso, in the Scottish Border country. After the deaths of his grandmother, Bina, and his father, he realised that both had conspired to keep hidden what they saw was a shaming family secret. As inconsistencies unravelled and tongues loosened, Moffat realised that he had unwittingly grown up in ignorance of his family's past.
In this book he vividly recreates his own working-class childhood in Kelso, ruled over by the matriarchal Bina who lavished unconditional love on him as she raised him - a lost world of terrace council houses and gardens with picket fences, of local grocery vans and French onion-sellers, reruns of the Second World War played out among the potato patches, and Dan Dare, Digby and Jack Brabham.
He describes his long search for the truth about Bina's family as he scours local records and seeks out the places where Bina lived her early life - the old life on the land where work in all weathers was unrelenting and hard, where women toiled as bonded farm labourers. As he gradually uncovers more of Bina's story he begins to understand why she, his father and others in the small community of Kelso conspired to keep the family secret.
Alistair Moffat's beautiful memoir recreates his childhood landscape and the landscape of the past with equal immediacy.
