Ross remembered his mother making supper each night as the family sat in front of their rented 24" black & white Phillips telly.
It was usually something lightweight on, such as Morecambe and Wise, though Ross does recall one Play for Today episode where a distressed wife smashed a dresser of crockery, making his mother shake her head and mutter, "Och! What a waste!"
Supper would be around half-seven or eight with side plates containing toast or a sandwich and a couple of ginger snaps appearing on everyone's chair arms. Mother would then disappear back through to the kitchen to fetch mugs of sweet, milky tea. Ross' father might be at home, depending on his shift pattern.
One day his father was thoughtful enough to knock a hole between kitchen and living room so that supper might be passed straight through the resulting "workmanlike" service hatch, thus reducing wasteful journeys via their short hall. The Scottish Special Housing Association, their landlord, signalled displeasure when finding out later what he'd done.
Money was different back then, pre-decimal, and was worth a lot more than it is today. Finding 7/6d (37.5p) was a big deal for a small boy of eight years like Ross. For hadn't his father gone and organized a whip-round, one that included 11/- (55p) from his brother, so they could all show appreciation by buying his mother a new chip pan as a joint birthday present. Oddly, Ross never found out how much his father contributed. Oddly too, or perhaps thankfully, he never saw his mother's reaction on receiving her present.
To his credit though, the old boy did answer a small advertisement printed in the back pages of a newspaper. Speculating a few quid brought back a cardboard suitcase filled with sundry wares to hawk door-to-door. For a while Ross' brother hated going to secondary school in antiquated rayon shirts, which were translucent apart from the collars and cuffs, and the family never seemed to go short of household brushes or cleaning materials.
Then there was the evening Joe Campbell came round. Joe was a postman who lived in a neighbouring town, and he seemed to have informal business dealings with Ross' father. Before he arrived they closed all curtains and hid in darkness and silence. Poor Joe prowled outside and banged on front and back doors before finally going away again.
Families of coal miners weren't well off back then and few others in Lowland Scotland's working classes earned much either. Grey Britain was still paying off debts owed at usurious rates to the US for the price of two world wars.
Yet despite financial hardship, Ross' dad still found money to buy wood and screws for the boat he was building in his spare time out in their garage. In retrospect Ross guessed he'd harboured ambitions of escaping his mum, who could at times be rather moody and depressive. Maybe his father hoped to sail the seven seas with a woman he was, according to an uncle, having an affair with. Who knows? Never completing his shipbuilding, he instead left behind wreckage and devastation.
At what was to prove their last supper together Ross' mother passed out the evening's cheese toasties through dad's service hatch as if everything was normal. But when she came through to sit with the rest of the family in front of the telly, a worn bar of worn green soap sat atop her own toast.
Ross' father was gone after that.
Proverbs 6:32 (KJV)
32 But whoso committeth adultery with a woman lacketh understanding: he that doeth it destroyeth his own soul.