This is the draft introduction to a book I may or may not finish, inspired by Mum’s 1968 Good Housekeeping Diary. If I publish it, would you read it?

Introduction

From the Good Housekeeping Diary and Account Book, 1968:

‘Although most of us acknowledge that keeping accounts is a good way of checking spending, it is something we tend to dodge unless it is made easy. I hope that you will find the accounts section in this Good Housekeeping Diary a help by making it simple to record your expenses.[1]

‘Our recipes this year have been chosen to give you ideas for entertaining each month, and to suggest interesting family meals. We have also included some quick-to-make desserts which look pretty enough for a party. You will find the Institute’s own selection of household hints and some addresses which we have found useful for getting specialised information or buying unusual things by post.

‘The Good Housekeeping Institute is at your service for 1968…

‘The vast file of information at the Good Housekeeping Institute has been collected as a result of years of testing, research and practical experience of domestic matters. It is available to any reader of Good Housekeeping Magazine who needs help with an individual household or cookery problem. Hundreds of queries are answered by telephone and letter each week by the Institute’s trained and sympathetic staff.

‘Groups from women’s organizations, clubs, schools, and colleges are invited to visit the Institute and see it at work. Bookings (for groups of not more than fifteen at a time, please) must be made in advance…’

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It is 30^th January, 1968. The North Vietnamese have just launched the Tet Offensive. In Glenrothes, our mother has more pressing concerns as, for the fifth day running, she has to check on Mrs Anderson.

It will be a year of seismic changes and historic events. By its end, Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy will be dead from assassins’ bullets; the Prague Spring will bring Soviet tanks into the Czechoslovakian capital; the May Paris riots will have come close to triggering a second French Revolution; in December, the Rolling Stones will release ‘Beggar’s Banquet,’ the album that includes ‘Street Fighting Man’ and ‘Sympathy for the Devil.’

It’s not that these things would have passed Mum by – she was always engaged in world events, and had sharp opinions of her own about them all – but she had her own issues at hand that year. Her husband’s health; her father-in-law’s death; her youngest having to wear a leg caliper.

Her Good Housekeeping Diary for 1968 deals with the latter events, albeit in a few terse comments. They were closest to home and heart. However, that shouldn’t belittle her intellect. She was a university graduate – unusual for a woman of her generation – and a formidable character to boot, as we’ll see.

There are any number of books on the Tet Offensive. This is only the second piece of sustained writing about our mother, as Dad, shortly before he died, wrote a short biography of her, without which manuscript – as well as the extensive research he and my sister did into our wider family history – this little book would not have been possible.

Dad also, incidentally, published three histories of Glenrothes, the Scottish New Town where I grew up and which he did so much to shape in his job at the Development Corporation. Again, I’ll be standing on the shoulders of the self-effacing giant that was our father as I draw on these, as 1968 was a pivotal time in the place I called home for the first 20-odd years of my life.

Despite that relative wealth of material, there are things we will never understand about our mother and her life as a ‘mere’ 42-year-old homemaker that year. Who Mrs Anderson was, for example – there are at least three candidates – and why she needed checked on. What thoughts and feelings Mum had about the death, at 67, of her father-in-law on 4^th May, due, Dad wrote elsewhere, to ‘criminal negligence.’ For that matter, why Dad was to end up in hospital at Christmas as the year ended, although there are probable causes, as we’ll see.

Nevertheless, her diary, Good Housekeeping Institute recipes and all, provides a window into a world that none of the books about the Tet Offensive, not one Rolling Stones discography, nor even all the 1968 Wikipedia entries stood on end can do justice to. It’s the world of an ordinary yet extraordinary woman, perhaps classifiable even then back at the dawn of Big Data in terms of age, social status and voting intention, and yet utterly unique and indefinable.

In a way it’s entirely appropriate that we should have to piece together our mother’s life back then from a series of brief notations about things like the need to check on Mrs Anderson 5 days running. On one level she was an open book that you could read from her words and actions: by turns kind, fierce, demanding yet with a well-developed sense of humour. On another, what drove her, how she felt about the things that mattered most, were often screened from even those of us closest to her, then and subsequently.

Perhaps that’s not so surprising. She may have been born in the Jazz Age, but it was to older parents whose formative years had been in the Victorian era. She had lived through the Second World War – the end of which, let’s not forget, was little more than twenty years distant – but the first global conflict had in its own way influenced the way she was. Now, just over 5 years into her husband’s career as Secretary and Legal Adviser to Glenrothes Development Corporation, she was beginning to grow into the role that the wife of such an official was expected to fulfil. Kicking and screaming at times, but still.

New Year’s Day, 1968, a Monday, dawned dark and cold in Scotland, the temperature hovering around zero in Lowland towns like Glenrothes. Further north, in Mum’s native Aberdeenshire, it was minus 7. In common with most of the rest of the population, our mother made a slow start to the year, with nothing scheduled until Thursday, with the twin excitements of time spent with the Maclauchlans and, for Dad, the Investment Club.

At least for our parents, this period of inactivity would not have been caused by a three day hangover. The occasional sherry really was all they stretched to.

[1] The only use our mother made of the 133 pages of detailed accounts styles in the Diary ‘Baker; Butcher; Milkman; Fishmonger; Greengrocer…’ was, firstly, to record measurements and proposed materials for decoration of my sister’s room, and secondly, what looks to be a shopping list ‘3lb Plain Flour; Baking Soda; Pal Meat; 1 Potato Salad; ½ Streaky Bacon.’ If it’s not a shopping list it’s one hell of a recipe.

The additional 4 pages laid out to record bank transactions are completely untouched. Our mother didn’t do accounts. For that reason alone, subsequent references will be to ‘The Good Housekeeping Diary.’