No More Silence

CHAPTER 5

‘Give Your Ma a Kiss’

‘It would seem that Mrs Whelan is basically a weak, inadequate individual almost wholly unable to cope … There has been a serious and consistent deterioration in the already weak family structure’

SOCIAL WORK REPORT

‘Davie, give your ma a kiss.’ The dark, exotic stranger, with her red lips and raven-black hair piled on her head in a beehive, offered me a pale powdered cheek. Morag’s condemnation of cosmetics as the wiles of the Devil flew into my mind. ‘I’ve been waiting for this moment for a long, long time,’ she said in an accent that was pure Glasgow but underscored by the softer tone of Middle England, where she had apparently been living for several years.

She had come back to the city with an impractical and naïve dream of reuniting her family. I would learn soon that the novelty of being reunited with that family would last little more than a few weeks, presumably far less time than her anticipation of this reunion.

From somewhere behind her, the strains of ‘Nobody’s Child’ were emanating from one of the as yet unknown rooms in this strange and too modern dwelling to which we had been brought. The song is a mawkishly sentimental ditty that began life as a country-and-western song. It had been espoused by a much-loved Scottish singing duo known as the Alexander Brothers. Ma was of a maudlin disposition. As an adult, the irony of that particular song playing is not lost on me. She favoured these sad songs by performers such as Jim Reeves about tribulation, heartache and the odd dog dying. In Glasgow, they are described as songs that ‘make the blood run oot the record player!’

‘I’ve never stopped thinking about you all,’ said this creature I had no memory of. ‘We’ll be one big, happy family now. We’ll muck in together. It’s all going to be all right, you’ll see.’ She was dressed in a two-piece pale-blue suit – what used to be referred to as a ‘costume’ – and she wore black leather stilettos.

Where are her wellies? I thought.

As she bent low to cuddle me, it felt so awkward, angular and unnatural. The mask of white powder and rouge seemed to hide more than her face. My thoughts returned, as they would do for some time, to Morag, until the months and years eventually distanced me from her. When Morag clasped you in one of her fierce embraces, there was warmth in it. This woman, who smelled of smoke curling from the burning Senior Service cigarette in her hand, had no maternal love in her. I kissed a stranger.

We were all awkward with her, but especially Irene. She refused to go near Ma and hid behind Jeanette. Irene had been devastated by leaving Uist. I would learn her resentment towards Ma was all-encompassing. To her dying day she blamed our mother for us being put in care. Irene could not and would not bond with Ma. She would also blame Ma for the cruelty and abuse we suffered at Quarriers. They had a difficult and fractured relationship, which would endure until Ma’s death, in 1980, when she was just 49.

When Irene set eyes on Ma and our new home, she began wailing loudly, burying her face in Jeanette’s skirt, resisting all attempts by our mother to comfort her. Johnny and Jimmy, who were older and had clearer memories of Ma, were less awkward and hid behind bravado.

The social worker, who had escorted us from Glasgow Airport, broke the tension. ‘Right, I’ll put the kettle on,’ she said. ‘This has been a big journey for you all.’ It was an under-statement of massive proportions.

Ma gave up on Irene and took Jeanette, with Irene still clinging to her, into the bedroom where the two sisters were to share a double bed. Johnny, Jimmy and I were to sleep in a second bedroom. As the oldest, Johnny had the privilege of a single bed, while Jimmy and I would share a double.

Our address was 34 Katewell Avenue, Drumchapel, Glasgow. This was the neighbourhood of the young Billy Connolly, who would go on to make a living from his ability to translate the barren existence of life on estates such as these into a hugely successful comedy career. The Hollywood actor James McAvoy, a star of such films as Atonement, The Last King of Scotland and The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, had yet to be born into this often troubled place. The comedian and the actor represent nuggets of gold in a mountain of dross. The vast majority of the rest of us would be shovelled through lives characterised by want and unfulfilled potential. There would be few escapees. Good people lived here, but good chances were few. Kinship and community spirit were their armour.

We had four rooms on the top floor of a three-storey tenement overlooking green fields and fresh hopes. Ma showed us around the flat. There were no carpets on the floors. Patched linoleum struggled to cover bare wooden boards. The furniture was utilitarian and mismatched, all of it second-hand, courtesy of the Social Work Department. The living room was crowded with a hard nylon-covered three-piece suite, which left marks on your legs if you sat on it for too long. By the window were a table and four chairs. The only heat source in the entire house was a minuscule coal fire in the living room, which heated the water in a back-boiler. Ask any child of their memories of growing up in such a house and they will tell you about awakening on winter mornings and scraping ice from the windows on the inside of the glass.

The kitchen was equally sparse. A large white ceramic sink perched on cast-iron legs. The larder – a food cupboard – stood floor to ceiling, dominating a small Formica-topped table in a corner. A four-ring electric cooker completed the ensemble. Refrigerators were still a distant dream from such houses. You kept milk fresh by standing the bottle in a sink half filled with cold water.

Ma’s brothers, Charlie and Davie, had provided us with a temperamental old television set that worked only when it had a mind to. Often it sat dormant in the corner, mocking us, usually because Ma had not put enough shillings in the coin-operated electricity meter. The world being plunged into darkness was a common feature of childhood in such places. It was inevitable when a finite supply of shillings competed with an infinite appetite for cigarettes. Ma would put Senior Service on the mantelpiece before she put food on the table.

So this was what poverty looked like? I’m reminded of a line from one of Billy Connolly’s performances when he said that he didn’t know he was deprived until a social worker told him so. I know exactly what he meant by that. However, my life would be characterised by more than mere poverty. You can be poor but emotionally stable. You can have little but be rich in love. There may be material things you cannot have, but there is often that bedrock of emotional security that protects you. This was the way of life enjoyed by the vast majority of our neighbours. We lived somewhere else entirely. Abuse comes in many forms and we would be victims of it. It was a different kind of abuse from that which I would suffer in Quarriers. It wasn’t governed by malice or sexual deviance. This abuse would be born of ignorance and living in an emotional vacuum.

My mother was not morally reprehensible. It is an overused phrase, but she, too, was a victim. Her notion of love, her sense of compassion and the mothering instinct had long since been beaten out of her by her monster of a husband. Even today, far removed from that time, I find it difficult to allude to him as ‘my father’. However, the combination of conditioning and weakness conspired to make my mother anything but a mother in the sense that most people would understand. This is, of course, the analysis of an adult looking back on the past, which someone once famously and accurately described as a foreign country.

As a child, when I first saw the empty shell of 34 Katewell Avenue – and the rouged face of a woman I didn’t know – I was encompassed by a sudden and inexplicable sense of loss. It went beyond leaving Uist. It was more than losing Morag. It was a different emotion from leaving behind the life I had known. I know now that it was the loss of me. That sense of loss, hidden from me in any intellectual sense, would manifest in many ways. I developed what they describe today as ‘behavioural problems’. Doctors have since found a name for it – encopresis – an indicator of the effects of extreme stress and emotional abuse. The medical profession demand that the words they use carry a certain gravitas. It wouldn’t do to describe a situation merely as a nightmare, which would be my interpretation of encopresis.

My only comfort was acquiring ‘gold stars’. They were my prize for showing signs of ‘recovery’. How I longed for those gold stars. People of a certain age will remember how, when they were at school, their efforts were rewarded with such stars. If you were competent at reading, arithmetic or whatever, you received a small paper star, which was attached to the work. It was something to run home and show Mum and Dad, a badge of honour. I did get gold stars, but not for academic achievement. They were for not shitting in my pants. One of the many manifestations of my encopresis was what they described delicately as a ‘hygiene problem’. I soiled myself, frequently. Perhaps some of you may be able to dredge up a memory of a kid like me – isolated, alone, looking out with dead eyes on the others, who view him with a mixture of pity and disgust. It is the loneliest corner in the landscape of childhood. To her credit, my teacher did not condemn, but worked out an incentive scheme to encourage me to combat this problem. I was given a book. My underpants were checked regularly, and if I was clean I received stars of varying colours. I coveted the gold stars above all others and took to ‘wearing’ my pants in my jacket. I took them off and hid them in my pocket. That way, they remained clean. The teacher would applaud me and fix another star in my book. I was inordinately proud of them. I craved the attention, the applause, if you will, of achieving something, anything. More than anything I craved love.

Ma was not big on love. Where Morag had been a homemaker, Ma was the opposite. Cooking, cleaning and washing could have been cities in China as far as Ma was concerned. She was so wrapped up in her own troubled mind there was little hope of that changing. The role of a mother would be assumed by Jeanette, who was by now 14.

However, with the blissful ignorance of those who do not know any better, we were all getting on with what approximated to a life. Johnny, my oldest brother, was 15 and had just left school. He was supposed to get a job, but there was too much of Ma in him. It isn’t a surprise that Johnny was Ma’s favourite. ‘I only ever wanted Johnny. I didn’t want the rest of you,’ she used to say.

Johnny favoured drinking and betting over industry. That being said, he was a sweet soul, kind and good-natured. When he had money, he brought it into the house to supplement the meagre state benefits, which were our sole source of income.

Jimmy was 12, but the family dynamic demanded that he act a lot older than his years. He was a different personality from Johnny, less good-natured and, God love him, a thief who regularly stole money from Ma’s purse and watched as others were blamed. Irene, who was 10, once took a terrible smacking from Ma, who accused her of stealing a 10-shilling note, a huge amount of money then, the difference between eating or going hungry. Irene had seen Jimmy take the money, but he was such an accomplished liar that he brazened it out. Ma looked for any excuse to condemn Irene – she had never forgiven her for rejecting her – and Irene was blamed.

In his defence, Jimmy was the family clown and made us laugh. When he was in trouble, he turned on the charm and swam out of hot water. Jimmy was once on the hook for some infraction and he escaped censure in the most remarkable way – he became Shirley Bassey! She was one of Ma’s favourite singers and when Jimmy appeared dressed as the diva, wearing Ma’s make-up, with two oranges stuffed down the front of her good frock and singing ‘Hey, Big Spender’, it diverted her wrath.

Jimmy wasn’t always so lucky, but his escapades were redeemed by a hilarious sense of the bizarre. He once shop-lifted a can of lager and was soon to be found in the close half drunk and loudly singing a Sandie Shaw pop song: ‘I wonder if one day that you’ll say that you care.’

When he sneaked into the house, Ma was waiting behind the door. She thumped him round the ear and sang back, ‘I wonder if one day that you’ll do what you’re bloody well told!’

Jimmy and Johnny were a handful, but they endeared themselves to Ma – unlike Irene, who never forgave her for taking her away from Morag. Jeanette, as always, was the rock. We were a troubled crew. It was apparent to those around us that the Whelans were different. It was often the mundane that brought those differences so sharply into focus. I can still laugh at one episode when I brought a pal home from school. We were in the kitchen and I had just poured milk into the tea and raised the drink to my lips.

‘Why are you drinking out of a jam jar?’ he asked.

‘What?’ I replied.

‘A jam jar. That’s a jam jar!’ My companion, a boy from the other end of the street, was sitting opposite me at the table.

‘What?’ I repeated.

‘It’s a jam jar. You keep jam in it. Where’re your cups?’

‘Don’t have any. They’re broken,’ I said.

‘Can’t you get new ones?’

I shrugged. Explaining the vagaries of day-to-day existence in the Whelan household was becoming part of life in this brave new world of Drumchapel, where those around us seemed to have things we did not – like proper cups.

My pal extrapolated the theme. ‘You don’t have many clothes either.’

I shrugged again. As a nine-year-old, I was unsure of the point he was trying to make. By now, we were developing a reputation – the children of the mother who seemed to spend most of her time sleeping, the family with too few clothes.

‘You don’t have much,’ said my companion, looking around the spartan interior of our home. ‘Why don’t you have carpets?’ he asked.

‘We do!’ I said.

‘No, you don’t. Those are doormats.’

I looked down at the disparate collection of mats on the floor, laid together in the impression of a carpet. Johnny had been busy. He stole them from the front doors of our neighbours. My companion was rendered silent by this strange household he had entered. He took another broken biscuit from the plate. They were Woolies’ finest. We would all wander to the nearest shops and ended up pinching broken biscuits from Woolworths. We were hungry.

Drumchapel was the antithesis of Uist. The only legacy of that idyllic place, the memory of which was diminishing rapidly, was that the Whelan children who were still at school had developed an oddball reputation as the only family in Drumchapel who could sing in Gaelic. Soon after our arrival we were invited to an open day at the local Kingsridge Secondary School, where we performed like a bizarre, deprived version of the von Trapp family from The Sound of Music. Jimmy and Jeanette were at the school, while Irene and I attended Cleddens Primary School. The teacher’s attempt to make us feel special by exhibiting our language skills may have been with the best of intentions, but it backfired. In the world of a poor Glasgow childhood, anything that sets you apart from the herd presents you as a potential victim. We took more than a few beatings for being different.

The school Irene and I went to was opposite the flat and we could see it from the windows. Being so close to home gave me a certain sense of security. I felt that when things were at their worst I was never far from safety, whatever that meant in my case. Home at least was a place of refuge.

In those days, Drumchapel was not a community. It was a collection of tribes gathered from all over the city, who brought with them their religious and social prejudices, as well as a territorial imperative harking back to where they came from. The rigidly designed new streets with their Eastern European aspect became mere extensions of the city districts lately deserted by their new inhabitants. Tribalism brought conflict, particularly of a sectarian nature. In the Glasgow of those days, you were a ‘Billy’ or a ‘Tim’ – a Protestant or a Catholic, a supporter of Rangers or of Celtic. It was not an option not to pick a side. We were Billies – Protestants. The religious divide in Glasgow, while wide, is nowhere near as lunatic as that of Northern Ireland, where the conflict had originated and been transferred to Scotland in the late 19th and early 20th century by an influx of immigrants. In the main, apart from a hard-core minority, it took the form of friendly rivalry rather than enmity.

Whatever tensions existed, however, were exacerbated by the great flaw of the Glasgow housing schemes of the mid-1950s and early 1960s – a lack of basic services. They had the atmosphere of internment camps as opposed to communities. The bus service was almost non-existent, and there were too few shops. Residents couldn’t call ‘the scheme’ home because it had no high street, no heart. If you asked someone where they came from, they did not reply Drumchapel. They said Partick or Govan or Dennistoun, or whichever part of the inner city from which they had originated. In spite of it all, there was still a sense of newness, the beginnings of hope, but the newly planted trees would have to grow much higher before there was any true sense of community.

The day-to-day problems of the Whelan family were less philosophical than actual. The cracks were beginning to show in Ma’s resolve. Her ambition to be a family once more was foundering on the rocks of reality. Her first words to us – ‘We’ll be one big, happy family now. We’ll muck in together’ – had not come to pass. Within weeks of our arrival she had begun to take handfuls of pills. Ma spent a lot of time in bed, leaving us to fend for ourselves in a hand-to-mouth existence. A mother’s duty fell to Jeanette, and it was she who tried to hold us together. Ma didn’t even dress us or put shoes on our feet. That was the role of social workers, who would trail us to Glasgow city centre for new clothes. The use of the word ‘new’ is a misnomer: I never owned an item of new clothing during childhood, apart from a school uniform. The Welfare dressed me as a child. Our ‘department store’ was a vast warehouse in John Street, where the clothes racks marched in serried ranks to apparent infinity. For some reason, I was always excited by the place. I still don’t know why. The smell was the first thing you noticed, a mixture of mothballs and sweat. It was the smell of poverty. You carried it everywhere you went. It singled you out.

In the so-called working classes of Scotland there exists a pecking order. We were technically working class, but we were physically and culturally separated from families where dads worked and mothers acted as homemakers. To my knowledge, the man I hesitate to call my father never worked a day in his life. He was a wastrel who lived by his wits and thievery. Proper working-class Scottish families are, in English terms, lower middle class – hard-working, if unskilled to any degree. Below that stratum was the ‘poor folk’ – families in which the dad might not work and the mum might be less than house-proud. Somewhere several levels beneath were families like mine – dysfunctional, deprived hostages to a different kind of poverty that was as much emotional as physical. I would emerge from the John Street warehouse with clothes that no amount of washing could freshen and my ‘sannies’ – thin, black canvas plimsolls that were worn winter and summer as the ultimate badge of deprivation. Ironic, isn’t it, that those flimsy little shoes have become so fashionable today.

The daily third-of-a-pint ration of milk at Cleddens Primary School and free school dinners were the only real sustenance we were enjoying by this time, and even school dinners were an indicator of your status. Privilege came in a different colour from poverty. Blue dinner tickets were full price – 2 shillings, or 10p – paid for by those from the good working-class homes who could afford them. Pink dinner tickets were cheaper, for those who could afford to pay only part of the cost. My dinner ticket was brown – a free dinner and yet another stigma. This sense of disenfranchisement was heightened because the free dinner tickets were allocated last. We had to stand in line, in front of the class, while those who paid got their tickets first. Then the poorest children were dealt with. Even at that age I was conscious it was a humiliating procedure. It seemed an intentional part of the system – as if we had to be kept in our place. Perhaps they believed that it would have been inappropriate to offer us any hope of another way of life. There was, however, no one to champion us against these injustices.

By now, my mother had truly lost her way. Our first family Christmas was a bleak, almost Dickensian affair. On Christmas morning I stood with my nose pressed against the window of the living room, looking out at my peers racing up and down the street on their new bikes and scooters, their squeals of laughter echoing against the glass. I couldn’t be part of their world. I had a Beano album and an orange. Our Christmas dinner would be fish fingers and tinned creamed rice. I turned from the window to a room devoid of festive decoration and my heart sank. Naturally, I told a very different story of our Christmas when I returned to school after the holidays. I regaled my friends with tales of all the great presents I had received. They, of course, knew the truth.

CHAPTER 6

‘Where’s Yer Whore of a Mother?’

‘Despite considerable casework and support to this family, there has been a serious and consistent deterioration. In order to bring some measure of stability to the two youngest members of the family, it is proposed to ask Quarriers Homes to admit them into care’

SOCIAL WORK REPORT

‘Ma! Ma! Maaammy! Please wake up!’ I pulled her, heaving at her shoulders, pleading with her to come back from whatever dark place she had gone. I was sure Ma was dead. I was 11 years old, small for my age and terrified. I couldn’t rouse her. A loud, long and insistent wail came from somewhere deep within me, summoning Irene. My sister, barely two years older than me and every bit as scared, flew into the room.

‘She’s dead! Ma’s dead!’ I told her. Even at that young age Irene was infinitely more practical than me. She applied her hand to Ma’s face. ‘She’s warm, Davie. Stop greetin’,’ she said. ‘She’s not dead.’

I followed Irene’s line of vision to the bedside table, where a scattering of pale-blue capsules lay spilled from the open top of a small brown bottle. ‘She’s taken too many of her pills,’ explained Irene, still matter-of-fact. ‘Ma! Ma! Get up,’ shouted Irene, dragging Ma up from the pillows. She still refused to be roused. ‘Davie, quick, water!’