The sky was crystal clear, of the deepest blue. Jamie wondered how anyone could die on such a gorgeous day. Maybe that's the best way to die, looking out of the hospice window on a beautiful garden, gleaming and luscious after the recent summer rain.
They had been with Jamie's grandfather when he died, sitting by his bed and telling tales just in case he could hear.
‘Hey, Dad’, Jamie's mother had said, ‘you'll never guess what we did today. We've booked to go on holiday at one of those eco-farms. It's not dear. We'll stay in a caravan, eat with the farmer's family, and help on the farm three or four hours each day. Wish there had been such things when you were younger.’
‘Yeah, Gramps, what would you say to paying to work?’
‘Ach Jamie, you're missing the point! The farm is in a spectacular part of the Highlands, far enough east to escape the worst of the midgies, and after lunch, we can do what we like, go where we want. I can't wait.’
Jamie smiled. Of course he wanted to go. He just wasn't sure about farm work without all the farm machinery. ‘But they do everything by hand. What about my back, my hands? You can't play guitar with red raw hands.’
‘It's not all tattie howkin'. And they do have some machinery, they just don't use it much. It's a small-scale farm. Lots of wee fields of different crops. And anyway, there are things about your grandfather that might surprise you’, Jamie's mum, Rose, said as she gently wiped her father's glistening face.
‘Like…?’
‘Did you know he spent time in Barlinnie Prison?’
‘What?’ Jamie said louder than he meant to. ‘Sorry, what?’, he repeated more quietly.
‘Yup, when he was a young man in the early 1930s, the factory he worked in was being automated and he started a one-man campaign against it. None of the other workers understood the significance of the machines being installed. But your Gramps paid attention to the world and knew that men would lose their jobs so he had a go at smashing the first machine up just after it had been installed.’
‘What, Gramps? But—’. Jamie couldn't marry this image with the placid, kind old man who took him for walks in the countryside and seemed to know all the plants and animals they came across.
Rose laughed. ‘Well, the old Clydeside industries were closing down and the new mass production methods were the only alternative to bankruptcy. Your grandfather tried to explain that automation would end many of their jobs, and change many others, but none of his workmates agreed with him. It was hard and dirty work, after all, and some quite fancied a change. One guy just shook his head and said your grandfather had been reading too much H.G. Wells. Another called him a 'bloody Communist', which I suppose was fair enough. Your grandfather grew up on a croft and had always been close to the natural world, and he knew the importance of community even if it was scattered across miles of moorland. But by the 1930s, if you weren't hell-bent on maximising output there must have been something wrong with you.’
‘I'm pretty sure it's still like that’, Jamie quipped. He was in his second year of studying economics at Glasgow University, and wondering what else he might do. ‘It's just that the outputs are different.’
‘Exactly. And what your grandfather railed against all those years ago was where automation would stop. I remember him telling me about the demise of the North American passenger pigeon when I was a wee girl. I'd made the mistake of trying to argue that if a few sweeties were a good thing, a treat, surely more sweeties were even better.’
‘Look!’, Jamie said in an urgent whisper, pointing at Gramps' eyelids as they fluttered slightly. ‘Do you think he can hear us?’
Rose smiled. ‘Perhaps.’ She remembered the story he would tell about how there used to be billions of passenger pigeons, literally, and reports of mile-wide migrating flocks that obscured the sun. By the dawn of the twentieth century there were none. Many believed that people hunted them to extinction, for food and to protect their crops.
She went on, ‘At the time I really didn't see why he got so upset about those pigeons. There were lots of other pigeons, after all. He just hated the thought that our behaviour, how we live, could make such an abundant species extinct.’
‘Like the dodo?’, said Jamie.
‘There weren't as many dodos as passenger pigeons but both apparently tasted good so maybe, a bit like the dodo. But it's not just hunting that can do a species in. The poor old passenger pigeons' forest habitat was full of potential telegraph poles and railway sleepers.’
‘Eh?’
‘Habitat loss. I guess they don't teach student economists about that. Have you heard of ecological economics? Maybe you—’
There was a change in Gramps' breathing. They both looked at him as his watery blue eyes slowly opened. He looked momentarily confused, then looked at Rose and Jamie.
‘Of course I can hear you’, he said in a hoarse voice. ‘Bloody racket when I'm trying to rest.’ He smiled. ‘You missed out the whole point of the pigeon story, that people can deplete the seemingly undepletable. And what are you doing, telling the boy I was in prison?’
‘I think it's cool’, Jamie assured him. ‘A rebel in my gene pool!’
A nurse bustled in. ‘Is everything OK?’, she asked as she looked at her now-awake patient. ‘Hello George, nice to see you're back with us again.’
‘I just popped by to see the family’, George said. He held Rose's hand, which was nearby on the bed, and gestured for Jamie to come closer. George looked at Jamie, fondly but with a serious edge.
‘Do you know what some of the guys said to me, about automation taking our jobs? 'Oh yeah, can you imagine a machine answering the telephone or doing accounts, or treating the sick? Big Jock added, 'or, here's a good one, serving at the corner store?' They all laughed at that one. But seems I wasn't too far off the mark. Jamie, son, you can't stop progress but you don't have to go along with it. You walk your own path.’ He patted Jamie's arm.
It was 2005 and at 92 years of age, George had lived through unimaginable change—unfathomable, even. Wars fought and freedoms won, the fall of empires and the rise of computers, people on the moon, for goodness sake. Yet he couldn't help but feel that we'd all become less able to do those things that mattered most like growing food, making things and just being able to sit quietly and be at peace with ourselves. He sighed and tried to clear his mind of all that bothered him. He looked at his daughter, and her son—his legacy, his gift to the world.
‘Are you thirsty, Dad?’, Rose asked half filling a glass with water. ‘Can I get you something?’
‘No, not really. But could you move this bed a bit closer to the window?’
Rose and Jamie took a side each, kicking free the wheel locks, and swivelled the bed so that George had a perfect view of the garden.
‘Aah, that's braw!’, he said quietly. ‘Look at those fuchsia bushes. And white roses, I've always loved a white rose. We used to have a big old bush in the garden when you were a wean. That's where we got your name, you know, your beautiful name—’
George smiled, closed his eyes and his grip on Rose and Jamie's hands slackened.
About the author
Mandy Meikle lives in a miners’ row on a moor in Lanarkshire. She has tried her hand at poetry (Evensong was longlisted for Butcher’s Dog Spring 2021 issue), flash (fridayflashfiction.com/apps/search?q=meikle) and has had one short story published (xrcreative.org/2023/01/29/yaalia-3/). Mandy has a background in microbiology and edits the Reforesting Scotland Journal.
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What a tender and evocative story. I loved it. Thank you.
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