Hello Lud,
Yes I did have a brother in fact I recall we were called the terrible twins.
I apologise if my memories of the beehive brae are a little hazy but you
Have to appreciate I was only ten when I left.
OK on the other side of the brae was a shop that used to sell sweeties, if my daddy had a few pennies to spare me and my brother would get as much as we could get.
On the same side of the brae, if I remember, was an old slagheap that we often went sliding down on corrugated iron sheets.
My daddy ought to have been the original snake oil doctor because his cure all for every single illness known to man was the dreaded cod liver oil.
He used to chase me and my brother round the room and eventually catch us but if I can quote a lovely old American blues singer called Ruth Brown who said "We's old but we ain't cold", so maybe that cod liver oil didn't do us too bad in the end.
Anyway getting back to the beehive area, my brother and I went to the primary catholic school, roughly halfway between Graigneuk and Wishaw right next to the Catholic Church in the late 50's.
Speaking about Motherwell, my father used to take us down to the Motherwell swimming pool but not for a swim, for a bath because we didn't have a bath in the beehive brae.
The photograph in the middle of me and my twin brother is taken in the Glasgow road in Burbank in 1952, outside my aunt Jeanie's house. The other 2 photos of my father which I'm not too sure when they were taken but I think they where towards then end of the war. My father died in 8th May 1963, and is buried along with his wife in the large cemetery behind traction house.
My twin brother and I moved to the north of England in 1963, where my brother still resides.
I moved to Reading, a town 40 miles west of London, in 1985. I will retire in 2017 and I intend to return to the north of England. It's not because I don't love my country. It's just that all ties have now been severed but I will never forget Scotland and I will never forget the beehive brae.
