Crossroads and Characters

53. HOW TIME OBSCURES.

During a working day John 'Jock' K mounth spent much of his time sitting crosslegged on his tailor's table, stitching. That's how he is recalled by the handful of people in the village who still remember him.

He was a contemporary of the eleventh Lord Rollo, and came from a large and well-known mostly working class Perthshire family. It was one in which the variations of spelling the family name were quite astounding: Kinmounth, Kinninmont, Kinmond, Kininmoth, Keninment and several others.

Jock Kinmounth (in the local dialect this became shortened to K mounth, and people never were really sure how he spelled his name,) had a good reputation as a tailor of men's suits, and his business was steady. Everything was cut and sewn by hand. He augmented his tailoring with suit pressing.

He worked in the upper storey of a house down a small close which was unofficially called Thimble Close but had no official name.

He apparently never had wife or children, living alone with his housekeeper.

He was, in an unobtrusive way, an important part of village life.

But even in a traditional village, time is at work obscuring memories: street and house names alter, buildings change contours and fabric or are obliterated. And the memory even of people who are thought of as institutions can vanish in an astonishingly short time.

Look today in the village records for Jock Kinmounth and you will find virtually nothing. Any census records which might refer to him are still confidential, and there are no local birth or burial records: he may have come from elsewhere and been buried back in his native town.

And look today down the nameless close in which he lived and you won't find his house. It has been torn down and is now a garden.