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Note: Mum was born in Bothwell Street, Dunfermline on 27th February 1937. She was a premature baby and her health was always a bit precarious. It was known she had a heart murmer and a 'weak chest', however with the advent of modern diagnostics it was found that she was in fact a medical miracle in the 1980s. She was born with a blocked aorta (the main artery from the heart) which is usually fatal and requires immediate surgery after birth. However, nature had been creative and produced lots of little blood vessels leading from the heart to a point above where the blockage was. We believe this unique 'case study' made the Lancet at the time!! When she was about 5 years the family moved to North Queensferry to be near her maternal grandparents, Dugald and Isabella McCallum, as her parents marriage had broken down near the end of WW2. She attended North Queensferry Primary School, and later Inverkeithing Secondary. When she left school she worked as a sewing machinist at the Modo factory in Inverkeithing. She met my Dad at the dancing in the chapel hall in Jamestown and they married in 1956. She could be quite fun loving when I was a child and I remember her dressing us up and putting makeup on us. However, overall she tended to be quite reserved and had a 'deep' personality that did not make close friends easily. Mum was an independent woman who knew her own mind and could be a bit eccentric. She didn't care much what others thought and lived her life the way she saw fit. This brought much merriment (and occasional embarassment!) to us her offspring. She enjoyed reading, crosswords, TV quizzes like 'The Weakest Link' and 'Countdown' and was a passionate gardener. She was very fond of animals and had a veritable menagarie at various times of cats, dogs, guinea pigs, hamsters, rats etc. She was very helpful to older neighbours in need and in turn when she needed help her neighbours helped to look out for her. Mum had problems with emphysemia (COPD) for the last 30 years of her life. This was complicated by high blood pressure. She had been having increasingly frequent bouts of illness over the last few years which had increased significantly over the past year. She was really only very unwell the last couple of months as her heart started to fail under the strain of her breathing difficulties and high blood pressure. She spent a week in hospital and at the end slipped quietly away in her sleep.
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