Every week my Mother would drive up to 12 Campsie Road in her dark green Austin Allegro nicknamed Syd after the fortuitous arrangement of numbers on the registration plate to enquire after my Grandmother Kate’s shopping needs (usually a few tins and a half loaf from the nearby Co-op), to deliver the Daily Mail (she would turn immediately to the Fred Basset cartoon strip, which always made her chuckle) and to clean the house, kneeling on the linoleum to scrub the kitchen floor, wiping the windows, vacuuming the carpets and removing the crumbs and brown spill stains from the gas cooker’s white top, leaving it gleaming.

I would stay behind to keep her company. A smell of rancid butter and fustiness clung to her as she shuffled through in her peenie [apron]. The scrape of the match summoning the blue flame to life, the mugs and the thick slices of white bread, slightly salted and marmalade, perhaps a Digestive biscuit and the pot on the tray, two bags left to infuse. Once when she was “ben the hoose”, the largest of the three ducks flying along the wall nodded at me. For many years afterwards I stared at it, yet it never attempted to communicate again.

She would shout at the wrestlers on the black and white screen, revelling in the villain’s perfidy. She knew them all by name, but I could never understand the appeal of the ludicrous sight of middle-aged men strutting around the ring in their underpants, the palpable fakery of the performances (no doubt having absorbed my Father’s disdain for the sport), the preordained outcome of the morality play.

The ground floor flat where she lived was sparsely furnished, a display cabinet for a few brass ornaments (mostly miniature implements, coal scuttles, bellows and the like, a source of endless fascination for G as a toddler) and a cocktail cabinet stocked with glasses and half bottles opened only for first footers. Above her bed an icon of Virgin and Child, the sole visible token of her Catholic faith (apart from the size of her brood).

She seldom reminisced about her days as the wife of an itinerant agricultural labourer (my Father confided that Kate would pick a quarrel to sour relations whenever it looked like her man might be in danger of settling down too comfortably), always intending to chronicle the hardships of a vanished way of life in a memoir. It was never written, yet I gleaned what I could.

The women on the farm were made to do men’s work, loading sacks of potatoes onto carts, each of which weighed 112 pounds. Usually two tons had to be shifted. There were two “lugs” [ears] at the top of the sack and Kate would form another two at the bottom. She and a friend who had a good lifting rhythm would count to three as they swung the sack to gather momentum before finally throwing it onto the vehicle. The men would tease them and their laughter in response distracted them to the extent that they hardly noticed how exhausting their toil was.

During the Second World War Kate was in the Land Army, driving four different tractors in a rota, taking workers to the fields, dropping them off, taking the harvest back to the farm and picking up more workers to take them out. The lady of the house “brocht oot pieces” [brought out sandwiches], as all the men were provided with sustenance, however meagre. She announced to her husband with a hint of pride that he would need it after his exertions to which he replied that Mrs Wilkie deserved it more as she had never stopped.

Another of her many duties consisted of feeding two intimidatingly large breeding sows (she was five feet three). The pen they were kept in appeared flimsy in relation to their weight, strength and the frenzy of their greed. When they heard the clatter of the swill bucket they would come rushing towards her, frantic with the desire to immerse their snouts in the mixture, so she would fling several handfuls to the opposite end of the sty. The ruse never failed: they would run as quickly as their stumpy legs would carry them to the opposite end of the sty, freeing her passage to the trough where she would empty the bucket and retreat unscathed. Although he was of slight build (five feet two), her ploughman husband was very strong. She warned him never to have anything to do with keeping pigs or she would end up “Widow Wilkie”, so great was her wariness of the animals.

She always encouraged him to find better employment than the drudgery of farming as he did not lack the brains, but he refused. When he finally retired and they were forced to leave the countryside her heart was heavy with the prospect of being tied down. Her sisters could never understand the attraction of the straw and the mud, only visiting her for holidays (during which they constantly complained of the stench of dung, which Kate herself did not notice, it filling her nostrils all the time).

She would try her hand at any task once, including calving. The calf was coming too slowly and they were afraid that it would die. Kate offered to help her husband. He had to sit on the cow’s neck to keep its head down, preventing it from rising too fast, which would mean that the calf would drop to its death. Her job was to take a rope and tie it to the calf’s protruding feet. Every time the cow winced in a convulsion of pain, she would tug the rope until, at last, the calf emerged. There was so much blood and such an overpowering smell that she was prompted to remark that had she known in advance it would be so messy and unpleasant she would never have volunteered.

The calf “grew up braw” and she would occasionally be sent out to feed it. The cow would be milked into a pail, which she would take to the calf. As it needed something to suck on, she would place her fingers in its mouth, withdrawing them once it had begun. She expressed her anxiety to her husband that one day it would take her fingers off, but he dismissed her concerns: “Och awa’, it’ll no dae that!” He was right.

He taught her many skills – farming was not nearly as simple as it appeared and there was a lot of learning to be done. He refused to instruct her in the art of milking, however, in spite of her nimble fingers. The reason: if she were asked, she could truthfully deny being able to and the farmer could not force her to work on Saturdays and Sundays as well, leaving her some time to herself. She did not start in the mornings until nine, walking the children part of the way to school, but that suited the farmer, as she could then harness and lead out the horse. Acquiring the technique took a great deal of practice and the horse took perverse delight in trampling on her toes as they came out of the stables.

It was a spoiled beast and the children had once made the mistake of giving it a morsel from their sandwiches. Ever since it had refused to budge until offered a similar treat. She “got fly for it” and put a sandwich on the byre. The horse would spot the bread and jam, munch it and then be perfectly content to walk off to the fields.

All her acquaintances called her “Auntie Kate” and she was used to catering for large groups. They never went hungry as she had a potato ration. If they wanted a neep [Swede] they knew they just had to go to the shed where they were stored. Nobody had much money and Kate wished for a little more.

After they had moved to the town, she bumped into one of her former employers in Canal Street. He doffed his cap in greeting and when she asked “How’s yersel’?” he replied that he missed her and could use her on the farm, would they not relent and come back? She had looked both healthier and happier in the days when the unpolluted air had painted roses on her cheeks.

She shocked me once by confiding that the best thing that had ever happened to her was a hysterectomy operation (much later on, my Mother unburdened the traumatic memory of her lost brother. It was stormy and Kate had gone into labour, her last pregnancy. My Mother wanted to fetch the midwife, but Kate was adamant that she could manage herself. When she finally admitted that something had gone wrong and called for outside intervention, it was too late. My Mother was forever haunted by the sight of a perfect baby boy strangled on his own umbilical cord). Hers was a tale of thwarted potential, the doors to intellectual attainment slammed shut in her face because of her class and gender. She grudged her daughters success, however, resentment festering within at the prospect that they might transcend the limitations of their lowly station. When my Mother passed the scholarship exam to the fee-paying Academy Kate used the pretext of not being able to afford the uniform to snuff out her hopes. The family could not do without her income, so she cycled the miles into town every day to her sales assistant’s position in Largs record department (whence her considerable knowledge of classical music, opera in particular).

Cathy, my Mother’s younger sister, sought refuge from the spiteful stifling through marriage, landing an architect with a large detached house on the outskirts of Edinburgh. Evelyn, the third sister, travelled even further to escape Kate’s influence, disappearing to England. Their absence left my Mother at her mercy, to be treated like a skivvy, with all the attendant contempt. Following her divorce and her husband’s protracted suicide through alcoholism, Cathy returned, her hatred for her mother tinged with guilt from the knowledge that her unwillingness to become involved placed a disproportionate burden upon her sister for Kate’s care.

She exploited my Mother’s love without giving in return, lacking her daughter’s kindness and generosity of spirit. My Mother did not replicate her behaviour, never ceasing to give me encouragement, a debt that I have always sought to repay through achievement, through showing her what might have been had she only been given the chance to prove herself.

Kate ended her life in a home. My Mother had to fight long and hard for her to be given accommodation there, as she had no assets to sell to fund her place (the cruel practice of local councils stripping the elderly of their property and depriving their children of any inheritance has only recently been outlawed). The urn with her ashes lies on a shelf in the shed at the bottom of the garden. Her children will never scatter them.