One Year On: Two To Remember

The world’s very good at noticing the loud things. Applause. Achievement. Titles. Careers. Public praise. What it’s not always brilliant at noticing is the hidden architecture of a decent life. The good people who make the thing stand up in the first place. The parents who kept going. The parents who absorbed the shock. The parents who made home feel like somewhere safe. The parents who did not ask for a medal every time they put their own needs second. The parents who made love feel normal, which I think is one of the great tricks of good parenting. They do something extraordinary so steadily that, as a child, you mistake it for the weather.

That’s the thing. We consume what good parents give us. Of course we do. We’re kids. Then we’re teenagers, which is worse, especially for my parents, given my ability to take stupidity to epic proportions. Then we’re adults in a hurry, full of our own plans and griefs and petty nonsense. We take in their patience, their standards, their humour, their values, their sacrifices, their steadiness, and we don’t always stop to consider the scale of the gift. Only later, if we’re honest, do we realise the house didn’t hold itself up. Somebody held it up. Usually day after day. Usually with very little fuss. Usually while pretending it was nothing much.

But it was. It was kinda everything.

I know this because I was blessed. As an adopted child, I don’t say that lightly or lazily. These two people are the reason I stand where I stand. They gave me a life. Not in the abstract but in the practical, daily, brick-by-brick sense. They raised me. They shaped me. They put love into the walls. They put up with my moronic years. They made belonging feel ordinary, which is maybe the highest compliment I can pay them. They gave me roots so naturally that I didn’t spend every day marvelling at the roots. I just lived. That was their gift.

My Dad, Willie, was my hero and remains so. He was the sort of man people noticed, and rightly. He had presence, which for a man of 5 ft 7in was no mean feat. He had drive. He had charm. He had that rare ability to fill a room without swallowing everyone else in it. He was admired in public and loved in private, which is not always the same thing, but in his case it was. He was the catalyst for Finn Moray and he remains the heart of that project. It beats because his values are at the core. I’ve attached his wee video again from the HorseScotland Awards in 2020, when he received the Lifetime Achievement Award, and I’ve added some more footage to make it a wee bit fuller. This pretty much captures him, his life, and how people thought of him, in microcosm. He earned all the plaudits that came his way.

But today, if I’m honest, I find myself looking just as hard, maybe even harder, at the lady he idolised, my mum, Marjory. Because if Dad was the headline, Mum was the page count. If he was the front of house, she was the engine room. If he was the visible success, she was one of the main reasons Dad’s success could keep showing up dressed and on time.

Marjory, or Margie as her friends and family called her, was the kinda person families are built around and sometimes fail to properly thank. She was the fulcrum. She was the one who made sure home was not just a place but a condition. Warm. Secure. Funny. Ordered enough to function, loose enough to breathe. She put me, my brother Gavin, RIP, and my sister Diane first in the way good mothers do, without speeches, without self-advertisement, without needing to turn sacrifice into theatre. She just got on with it. Which is to say, she did the enormous work that keeps a family from becoming merely a collection of people who share a surname.

Dad may have received the public applause for his career, and he deserved it, but Mum was the key person who made it possible. She backed him. She steadied things. She held the centre. Was there friction at times? Of course there was. They were married, not carved from marble. But under it all there was love, respect and the sort of real loyalty that can survive actual life, which is a lot more impressive than the polished nonsense people sometimes try to sell us.

My mum was no background figure. That would be lazy and wrong. She was selfless, yes, but she was never small. There’s a difference, and a serious one. She came from a middle-class family, with quite a strict mother and a father who was a Merchant Navy engineering officer. She was a teacher of home economics and a really good one. But to describe her job is not to describe her. She was sharp. Measured. Well-read. Dryly funny. Thoughtful in the real sense, not the fashionable one. She had judgement. She had presence. She had a wee look she could give you that suggested she’d seen through the nonsense before you’d even finished presenting it. And she made people feel good about themselves.

That’s a bigger achievement than we give it credit for, if you ask me. To make people feel happy. To make children feel secure. To make a home feel dependable. To give people a place where they can be daft, frightened, ambitious, wrong, heartbroken or ridiculous and still be loved. That’s first-rate human work, in my opinion. It’s not glamorous, which is probably why history underprices it. But it’s civilisation in miniature. It’s how the world gets repaired in private. And we need as much of that as we can get our hands on these days.

She died on 10 November 2009, and I still find myself thinking, I’ll tell Mum this and I’ll tell her that. Then comes the small correction from reality. No, you won’t. And there’s the sting again. It arrives in odd moments. A song. A smell. The making of tea. A memory of pancakes. Neil Diamond. Christmas. Some half-competent attempt by me to do something she excelled at that would’ve earned exactly the sorta expression only she could produce, somewhere between love and despair.

And yes, as I write this, I can feel it in my throat a wee bit. Tears are not a design flaw. They’re the bill for having loved people properly.

One of the things that stays with me is that my mum’s loyalty was repaid. When her health failed and she became an invalid, my father was there for her, all the way, day and night. In fact, before Mum became ill, I think some of their happiest and most fulfilling years came later, when they had more time simply to be together. They spent time caravanning, travelling, and enjoying each other’s company, their trust, and the life they’d built side by side. Not performatively. Not for show. Not because it looked noble from the outside. Because he loved her. Because she was his person. Because when the time came to return the devotion she’d shown him for years, he did. Completely. And I think some of the very best of their marriage lived there, in those hard years. Not in glamour. Not in applause. In care. In duty. In tenderness. In showing up. That counts. Actually, it counts for a great deal.

So I suppose what I’m really trying to say today is this. If you were lucky enough to have good parents, truly good people raising you, then you were given one of the great advantages in life, though it may not have looked like an advantage at the time. It may just have looked like ordinary family life. That’s how these things work. The best gifts often arrive disguised as normality. A kind word. A standing joke. Rules that annoyed you at fourteen and saved you at forty. A house that felt safe. A mother who held the line. A father who believed in you. People who kept turning up.

I had that.

I had two people with heart. Two people who were decent in the marrow. Two people whose parenting didn’t end in childhood but lives on in me now, in how I think, how I love, how I judge things, what I admire, what I can’t tolerate, and what I’m trying, kinda imperfectly, to build myself.

Willie Sheret MBE may have been the more visible figure. Marjory Ingram Sheret may have worked more quietly. But quiet is not lesser. Hidden is not unimportant. My Mum helped make possible much of what my father achieved, and she did so while raising her children with intelligence, humour, standards and love. That deserves honour. Full honour.

So today, one year on from losing my Dad, I’m trying to do more than ache. I’m trying to give thanks. I’m trying to say clearly that I was raised by good people. That I was lucky beyond words. That both my parents mattered, and still matter, and will keep mattering for as long as those of us who knew them and loved them remember them. We carry them with us every day and we always will.

And on days like today, that’s the good stuff.