The attractive woman was almost 22 when she conceived after making love with the 20 year old handsome man from Belize a small Caribbean country in central America. How exciting it must have been for her.
Like many families nowadays my family has two distinct parts. Mother's the Scottish side of my family though a substantial number of them are in Canada due to there being no work in the early 1920'swhen many popleleft the Highlands for distant lands. My Father's immediate family are in Newcastle upon Tyne in the North East of England but all the others are on the other side of the Atlantic. Some in the USA and others live in the tropical paradise that is Belize in the Caribbean.

I was born in a small 3 roomed crofters house, called. Ivy Cottage. A single story stone built dwelling it had a small barn and byre attached to its eastern gable wall and a large garden to the front surrounded by a dry stone dyke. The only water supply tap was located some 30 yards away at its far end.

It was a small craft consisting of about four acres of arable landsurrounding the Homestead and there was the moor and the hills in the immediate vicinity where the sheep grazed among the heather and they short grasses. Our nearest neighbour's house was some 200 yards to the south.

The cottage with its central entrance into a lobby consisted of two main rooms, the bedroom to the left where there was a big wooden double bed, a dressing table , chest of drawers and an open fire. In the main living room/kitchen where the cooking eating and socialising took place on the right a table were situated beneath the window and on the opposite wall a large wooden dresser that has seen better days.

The stove for heating and cooking was under an open chimney and burned coal wood or peat. the flaw was an area of grey flagstones with a couple of threadbare rugs scattered about.

There was also a tiny central bedroom about six-foot 6 inches square which we called the closet, it was accessed from the kitchen and lay behind the hallway or lobby.

The members of my family were descended from Christine Ross and John MacLeod my great-grandparents. My grandmother Christina, called Teenie, had a brother, John, who emigrated to Canada in the 1920's. In May of 1921 Teeney produced a daughter and named her Ellen. was a short woman with long black hair ends in bands over her ears and it was with the help of neighbours that she ran the croft by herself .

Ellen attended the local school and finished her education at the summer term after her 14th birthday. At first she went into service at what was locally known as the big house. Hector Mackay a member of the landed gentry in the village of Lairg owned Sydney House and employed domestic staff and farmhands to run the agricultural business of mixed farming.

My mother then worked in the Bank House in the village before taking up her next position in the nearby village of Golspie. It was while working there that she met my father, one of a number of Belizean woodcutters who had come to Scotland at the request of the government to help with the war effort.

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