A Reunion in Glasgow
by
Jean G. Duncan
My name is Jean Greig Duncan. The year is 1959 and I have just arrived in Glasgow. Tomorrow, at the age of 42, I am to meet with my father, Sam Robb, for the first time. Beside me, my husband Harry is sleeping peacefully. I am wide awake. Memories of my childhood pass before me like a silent movie. While growing up in Winnipeg, I did not take much notice of his absence until I went to school.
My classmates were always talking about their "dads" and would ask me why I didn't have one. When asked, my mother explained that he had been injured in the war and had left Winnipeg. Later on I learned that he had taken my two-year-old sister with him. Years later when I was twenty years of age, I was reunited with my sister through a remarkable series of events which I won't go into here, except to tell you that finding my sister took me to Toronto, and it was in Toronto that my sister gave me my father's address. Then I began to correspond with him.
After my mother's death, my father had remarried and moved back to Scotland. I had now acquired a stepmother, Betty, and two step-brothers, George aged twenty-eight now, and Ronald, twenty-six. We exchanged letters and family snapshots. When I married Harry Duncan, my sister, Irene, came from Toronto to be my Maid of Honor. I carried a sprig of white Scottish heather in my wedding bouquet, a lucky charm from my overseas family. Sadly, Betty passed away of influenza at the end of the war in 1945 so I never got to meet her.
In 1959 I received a letter from my father, Sam. He wrote that he had recently suffered a serious heart attack. His doctor had warned him that a second would, in all likelihood, be fatal. He went on to say that it would be worth a million pounds to him if he could see me before he died. When Harry read the letter he said that we must go to Glasgow.
Now that I was actually there in Glasgow, I found that I was having second thoughts. Should I have come? Although my mother, Jean, had never condemned my father in my hearing, she must have suffered terrible heartaches on losing her firstborn daughter. As I was only ten years of age when she died, she must have kept her thoughts to herself. Was my father, a wounded veteran of the First World War, a victim of circumstances beyond his control? And, most important, how would I react when we met?
Harry and I had finished dressing when the telephone rang. It was the hotel receptionist calling to say that Mrs. Duncan's father and brothers were waiting for her downstairs in the lobby. I had a moment of pure panic. I told Harry that I couldn't go downstairs, and started to cry. My dear husband hugged me and said, "It's going to be all right." Strangely enough, it was. My father took me in his arms while Harry and the young men exchanged greetings. They stepped aside to give us a moment to ourselves. I felt instantly at home with my father, and with George and Ronald. We then had breakfast in the hotel dining room. The morning passed so swiftly that the next day I could not even remember what I had eaten. I think that it had been all pre-arranged because the boys whisked Harry away to go sightseeing and Dad and I were on our own.
We discovered that we were alike in many ways. For instance, we both loved walking and exploring places. With my arm firmly tucked in his, Dad gave me a guided walking tour of Glasgow's historic monuments and various points of interest. We ended up in the city's centre at St. George's Square, where we rested, talked, and fed the pigeons. Afterward, Dad took me to his neighborhood pub and, with great pride, introduced me to his friends as his youngest daughter from Canada. Harry joined us for dinner at George's house and there I met my two sisters-in-law, Agnes and Margaret. Harry and I spent a few more days in Glasgow. My father was insistent that we both see more of Scotland, and he put us on a bus for a three-day trip to Edinburgh and the surrounding countryside. When we returned we were ready to head for home.
I had spent a week with my father and brothers and enjoyed every last minute of it. But a strange thing had happened. I had come to Glasgow to see my father, and to ask him what exactly had happened to make him leave my mother and myself. But I could not bring myself to ask him these questions. Neither of us referred to the past at all, probably deciding within ourselves to forget what had taken place forty years earlier. I was happy that I had made the trip to see my father, and deeply touched when he said on parting that he was proud to be my father.
I had found closure in Glasgow. But I had found out something far more important that I might not have realized before I went on my trip. The man who had stood with me at my wedding, the man whom I had grown up with — the late John Lawrie, was my real life father. However, when Sam Robb died of a heart attack a few years later, I was glad that we had met.