These are my grandparents Isabella Jane Martin and James Pitcairn Sym photographed at their farmhouse in Kinnochtry north of Perth, Scotland in the late summer of 1917.
A few hundred miles south, men were being slaughtered in their thousands as World War I ground on into its darkest hour at the battle of Paschendale. To the north, Russians were about to start slaughtering each other on the path to a revolution that would change the world.
But looking at this photograph, you wouldn’t know these cataclysmic events were happening.
Jim and Belle sit on rickety chairs in the sunshine dressed up for a photograph that would have been pretty special 107 years ago when cameras, cars and telephones were urban middle-class novelties in central Scotland.
I don’t know why they dressed up and posed for a photo on that day. I don’t know why Jim wasn’t fighting in France with thousands of other Scots. I don’t know what Belle did before she was married.
I don’t know much about them at all.
I know Jim was a potato and arable crop farmer who bred Clydesdale horses, and I know Belle was born at a nearby Flowerdale farm, but that’s it.
While darkness was happening all around them, they sat in the sunshine looking forward to the birth of their first child, unaware of the long shadow about to fall on their own lives.
Just a few months or possibly weeks after this photo was taken, Belle would be dead, succumbing to the trauma of giving birth to my mother on October 1, 1917. She was 27.
My mother weighed 1lb (0.4kg) when she was born and placed in a shoebox by the log fire to see if she survived the night. The nearest hospital would have been Perth — an hour away by horse and cart. To help Jim cope with a newborn baby, a young war widow called Lizzie was sent up from the village. Lizzie stayed for the next 45 years, and we knew her as Nan. Such was the suffocating conservatism of the times, the relationship between Nan and Jim was never discussed. It became a skeleton in the family cupboard and Belle’s memory faded along with the pain of her loss.
We have no photos of Nan as a young woman, but I now wear the wedding ring given to her by her young husband, who died on the Somme.
Jim never remarried, despite living with Nan all those years. Later photos show him with vacant, puffy eyes and a stooped frame in his 40s. Five years after Belle’s death, a Perth sheriff’s court found him guilty of being drunk in charge of a motor vehicle, and his licence was suspended for six months. He died in 1951 aged 63. I can only surmise he was broken by drink, two wars and economic depression — but most probably by the loss of Belle.
This is the family story that has been handed to me and which I have now given to my children and grandchildren. As in all families, it’s a little golden thread we all hold and pass along to the next generation. Jim and Belle’s thread is thin, but it is still intact.
Family stories are our chance at immortality — once they stop being told, we fade away and become ghosts.
So that is why this week, three generations of our family are making the trek to central Scotland to place flowers, scatter some of my mother’s ashes and say a few words over the grave of Jim and Belle in the lonely little churchyard of Collace just south of Kinnochtry where they came to finally lie together once again after being separated for 34 years. I am not a religious man, but it somehow feels right to complete the circle.
With us will be three of their great, great-grandchildren, who now hold the golden thread of their lives.
John Lewis is a former journalist at The News.
