Amidst the pride and treasured family memories, hides tragedy and loss

When Ms Boyd, a writer and trade union official learned that these homes which held the most sacred of her childhood memories were to come down she knew she wanted to make something that would preserve and commemorate the lives of the people who had lived there. And when Bella, her baby was born two years ago the seed of an idea took root.

North Lanarkshire Council granted her permission to recreate her gran’s home in the same block where she’d lived. Ms Boyd had salvaged many of Peggy’s possessions after her death and now she’d carefully curated them in those spaces where she’d first encountered them as a child. These items of furniture, old family photographs, holy pictures and statues - all the familiar and sacrosanct curios of working-class decency and rectitude – have become an art installation and the setting for Ms Boyd’s poetry.

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“When I brought these things back here, there was an eerie, but warm feeling,” the former Herald columnist says. “I’m taking this display cabinet and the Sacred Heart image back up these stairs and putting them in the same places where she’d had them.”

These rooms now thrum with old photographs – hundreds of them – chronicling the lives of her gran and granddad; of their work colleagues; of family holidays. In them, Peggy is revealed as a handsome, elegant woman. The images are both unique and general. They recall a time when people placed great value on the little keepsakes and ornaments which hung over lintels and fought for space on a mantelpiece.

When these flats come down, there will be very few places left in Coatbridge where the people whose families were raised and had their being there can tell their own families this is where they’d come from.

“I wanted to tell Bella that this is where we had lived and that this flat is the last place where my gran and my granddad my dad and I shared. It was my gran’s home, but it was my home too. It’ll be here for a wee while longer though, because some Ukrainian refugee families have given it a renewed lease. God bless them. They’ve saved it for a while.

There is poetic resonance in the Ukrainians’ presence here and a spiritual connection forged in work and community. Ukraine is one of Europe’s steel manufacturers and a poignant reminder that nothing remains of this old heavy industry which gave life to this area. “The Calder steelworks where my grandfather worked has long gone. This area was once the heart of coal, iron and steel,” says Ms Boyd, “now there’s nothing left.”

Cat Boyd outside the condemned blocks of flats (Image: Gordon T)There’s a barely-repressed fury beneath some of Cat Boyd’s poetry which is inscribed on the walls of this flat. She says it conveys an anger that the lives and loves and deeds of people like these are rendered anchorless and placeless and often passed over when histories are written.

You sense that what she’s made here will evoke memories and carry echoes for many others who haven’t had the opportunity or the time to convey their sense of loss and the memories of departed relatives. There’s a simmering resentment that their lives and the old industries that supported them have never been properly recognised.

“The story isn’t really about me and my gran, or my relationships with my wider family: it’s about that bit of history. It’s about my granddad Boyd being born in a miners’ slum and then me – three generations later – living in the leafy west end and looking at my baby and thinking: how did we get here?

“And then wanting to tell her that it was all made possible on the backs of labour; of people’s struggles and the way they just kept going and wanted something better for the next generation. I knew that my gran wanted something better for my dad and that he wanted something better for me.

Cat Boyd with her art work (Image: Gordon Terris)

“They had hope and optimism, but they – and so many thousands of others like them – had to make so many sacrifices. There was an understanding that if you gave it your all and worked hard and were honest that you could make a better life for your children. My principle reason for making this work is not merely to recreate my gran’s flat, but to say that people lived here once.”

Tragedy and loss are also present here. Ms Boyd leads me to a corner of the lounge where a wooden cradle, formed from a wooden drawer sits. A shawl covers half of it and a birth certificate lies on a tiny white mattress. This is Moira’s corner.

“Moira was my gran’s first baby, but she’d died at two weeks old. She’d been born on March 11, 1946, yet I hadn’t known anything about her as my gran hadn’t talked much about it to my dad. When Bella was born I experienced an overwhelming sense of her needing to know about Moira.”

We imagine that exposure to death and suffering made the wartime generation impervious to tragedy; that they didn’t experience grief as keenly as we do. It’s a lie, of course. People were expected not to make a fuss, if only because others nearby would be dealing with their own losses. They bore their pain quietly and privately.

“I’d gone through every single possible funeral record I could find, hoping to find details of where Moira might be buried. Perhaps they just cremated dead babies back then. I spent entire nights from dusk until dawn researching records that might indicate her resting place. And then I found her in the most intense way imaginable.”

Cat Boyd's family photos (Image: Gordon Terris)

She was making her way to Old Monklands Cemetery with flowers to place on the graves of her maternal and paternal grandparents when her mobile rang from an 0845 number. “I’m thinking it’s another unpaid parking ticket, instead it was Geraldine from North Lanarkshire Cemeteries Department. I’d forgotten I’d emailed them at the start of this process.

‘I think I’ve found who you’re looking for. She’s buried at Old Monklands Cemetery’, she said. And I’m standing in the cemetery right there and then after 18 months of hunting high and low for baby Moira’s grave. She gave me the plot number and the gravediggers directed me straight to it. He told me it was ‘a common plot’, meaning there was no headstone.

“And when I got there I sat down and read her a story and cried all the way through it. So, all of this is for Moira.”

Above the box cradle there are pictures of the cemetery and then she reads aloud the poem she made for this long departed, half-forgotten infant of her kin. It’s an unutterably moving moment.

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The artist also received an unexpected visit from curators of the nearby Summerlee Museum of Scottish Industrial Life. They too were impressed. A spokesperson for North Lanarkshire Council said: “We were pleased to be able to help by providing access to a flat for People I Loved Lived Here Once. The curation team from Summerlee Museum of Scottish Industrial Life visited the exhibition last week and were impressed with the breadth of items on display, the excellent narrative and the various links to North Lanarkshire and its industrial past.

“The team will have discussions with Cat to explore the exhibition being a part of the museum’s temporary exhibition programme in the future.”

Ms Boyd shows me her gran’s gloves here mounted on a plinth behind glass, like a high-value bronze in a municipal museum. “I wanted them to convey her defiance in the face of tragedy,” she says. “Back then, when tragedies occurred, you had to pick yourself up quickly and keep going. I wanted the plinth to represent a tabernacle, because our hands are sacred.

“These were her ‘going out gloves’. My gran’s people might not have been able to afford furs and expensive clothes but nice gloves were an inexpensive measure of class and elan.”