No More Silence
David Whelan
David had everything. No-one knew the London businessman was born into a world beyond poverty, the son of a rapist father and disturbed mother. Abandoned as a baby, he spent most of his childhood in care and suffered appalling sexual abuse. But no-one knew. But a call from the abuser's wife, 30 years on, proved he was living in a house of cards.The youngest of five children, David was the son of a drunkard rapist father and a mentally unhinged mother. His father was jailed and his mother deserted the family, leaving five urchins to battle to survive in an inner city Glaswegian slum. Rescued, but separated, David grows up with vague memories of Ma, but no memory of his siblings.For the next years of his young life David was shipped from pillar to post, until the authorities decided the best place for him and his youngest sister was Quarriers Children's village, where he was delivered into the hands of a paedophile.Helpless, powerless and alone, it was beaten into David that no-one cared for him and no-one loved him.Finally David escapes and goes on to build a life of success, determined to bury his secret and never tell anyone what happened to him. Then he receives a phone call from his abuser's wife, and all that he has built comes tumbling down. She asks David to be a character witness on behalf of the man who stole his childhood. Instead David chooses to tell the truth, turning the tide for detectives involved in a massive investigation and changing his own life forever. This is his remarkable story.
DAVID WHELAN
WITH MARION SCOTT AND JIM MCBETH
No MoreSilence
He thought he’d got away with it. But one day
little David would find the strength to speak out.
To ‘Robbie’ for unswerving commitment, and to my
brothers and sisters, Johnny, Jeanette, Jimmy and Irene.
You are always in my heart.
Contents
Cover (#u36f312aa-c8c6-5f0c-b996-ed2b46797b09)
Title Page (#u10773a73-1f5f-5e51-85fa-a2049b9a112f)
Prologue
CHAPTER 1: Born Into a World Beyond Poverty
CHAPTER 2: Paradise Found
CHAPTER 3: Of Long Summer Days and Billy the Ram
CHAPTER 4: Paradise Lost
CHAPTER 5: ‘Give Your Ma a Kiss’
CHAPTER 6: ‘Where’s Yer Whore of a Mother?’
CHAPTER 7: A Very Special Place
CHAPTER 8: Who Was William Quarrier?
CHAPTER 9: The Intimate Stranger
CHAPTER 10: I Lose My Shield
CHAPTER 11: ‘Are You Clean, David?’
CHAPTER 12: The Strange World of the Beast
CHAPTER 13: The Beast of the Bell Tower
CHAPTER 14: Public Applause, Private Degradation
CHAPTER 15: Hope and Awakening
CHAPTER 16: Escape
CHAPTER 17: Climbing the Ladder
CHAPTER 18: A Family of Strangers
CHAPTER 19: Return to the Lair of the Beast
CHAPTER 20: The First Cracks
CHAPTER 21: A Single Tear for Ma
CHAPTER 22: Finding Morag
CHAPTER 23: Dining With Diana
CHAPTER 24: Success on a Plate
CHAPTER 25: Three Phone Calls Change My Life
CHAPTER 26: Pandora’s Box
CHAPTER 27: Telling Irene
CHAPTER 28: The Others
CHAPTER 29: Accused
CHAPTER 30: The Yellow Bird Café
CHAPTER 31: Witness for the Prosecution
CHAPTER 32: Roll of Shame
CHAPTER 33: Falling Apart
CHAPTER 34: Finding Da
CHAPTER 35: Fighting Back
CHAPTER 36: No More Silence
Help and Support for Victims of Abuse
Acknowledgements
Copyright
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
Prologue
We had arrived. I had fallen asleep on the journey to a new life that promised peace, security and safety. I awoke with a start, in time to see the words spelled out in flowers – ‘Suffer the little children.’ My first sight of and welcome to Quarriers Children’s Village. I did not realise then that the ancient words, spoken by Jesus in the New Testament, which were displayed so beautifully in a floral arrangement by the entrance, would be corrupted before I was much older. Nestling in the Renfrewshire countryside, this was a place far from the grime and unpredictability of life in an inner-city slum.
My sister Irene sat next to me in the back of the social worker’s car, her eyes luminous with uncertainty. I shrugged off sleep and wiped moisture from the car window. My first sight of the bell tower. It rose high above what I would later learn was known as the Children’s Cathedral. I had never seen anything so breathtaking. My world had been the drab, monotonous, utilitarian architecture of a sink housing estate, where no one looked up. Heaven was such a hard place to find. Structures such as the Children’s Cathedral dominated only places where there was hope. The soaring steeple pointed to Heaven, but I would soon find it was pointing the way to Hell. He would see to that. The bell tower was where he took me, its impenetrable walls stifling my screams as he stole my innocence and planted the seeds of my own destruction, which would come many years later, when I was an adult and believed that I had left the past behind.
His name was John Porteous. He is at the heart of this story, but there will be few mentions of his given name. I once called him ‘Uncle John’, but I was a child then and trusting. I had yet to be betrayed by the man whose duty it was to protect me, to keep me safe. Therefore he is for ever the Beast – it is how I have referred to him in my mind ever since. For three decades it took all of my strength to block out the unspeakable things he did to me over my time at the children’s home. A single phone call, 30 years after I escaped his clutches, proved to me that my entire existence was an edifice built on sand. In a matter of a few seconds, the façade that masked the pain of a lost childhood and a misguided sense of shame was torn away. I was forced to stop running in a race that I could not win, a race away from my past. This time, this time justice had to prevail and I had to play my part. The phone call placed me at the centre of Operation Orbona, the biggest police investigation into systematic sexual and physical abuse at a children’s home. Eight of the abusers would be convicted, and I would witness the Beast going to jail.
I thought then it was over. I was wrong. It was just the beginning. Before I could reach the light, everything in my life would be taken from me. I would lose my successful career, the millionaire lifestyle and everything I had so carefully created as a shield against my secret pain. This is the story of how I fought back.
CHAPTER 1
Born Into a World Beyond Poverty
I am searching for memories. I am four years old. I think I am alone. I am still hungry, but I force myself to save some food, the remains of lunch. Mother, a tall, fragrant woman with a kind face and a ready smile, is in another room. Father, big, bluff, reassuring, is out of the house, but I don’t know where. He left with a cheery wave, ruffling my hair with large, clean hands.
I am in the drawing room, a generously proportioned space that is little used. The ceiling, with its ornate, elaborate cornicing, seems very high above me. Light floods in through the tall window, which looks out onto a broad expanse of lawn, running into the distance towards a destination that is as yet unknown to me. Mother’s dog – a Cairn terrier? Misty? – is trying desperately to attract my attention, begging for what I have in my hand. The dog dances at my feet, but I reject the animal’s overture. This is about survival.
I glance around the room, searching for prying eyes, before I unwrap the food from the napkin in which it is hidden. I am safe. I can hear the sound of clinking crockery coming from the kitchen. Dishes are being washed in a sink. Margaret, the middle-aged woman who seems to be part of the family while simultaneously distant from us, does the washing and cleaning for Mother.
Mother is elsewhere, entertaining two of her friends, regular visitors to the salubrious detached Victorian villa in one of the most exclusive suburbs on the Southside of Glasgow. I have already been wheeled out to be touched and poked affectionately by my mother’s companions.
‘Such a lovely boy,’ says one.
‘Such big eyes,’ says the other, in a voice that tinkles like glass.
They smell so nice, better than the women in the place where I was before, a crowded, noisy, dismal barracks inhabited by a legion of nobody’s children, all of them like me, all clamouring for attention. This strange new world is very different. I have not inhabited it for long. I don’t know precisely how long. Time has yet to develop any meaning.
I am alone, though, with the food from lunch, which I push down under the cushions on the huge sofa. Even if someone sits down, they won’t be able to see it. My hidden treasure now lies beside what remained of breakfast. I ensure once again that no one has discovered my secret place. If they don’t give me any more food, I won’t starve.
I was born into a world beyond poverty, the youngest of five children – the son of a brutish father, who was a drunkard and a rapist, and a mother who was emotionally and mentally unhinged. Naturally, I have no recollection of the period. I rely on my eldest sister, Jeanette, for information, and on the sparse notations in my social-work file, which record the time before I awakened to the world and was able to remember. This document, the story of my life, runs to just two typewritten pages.
My first true memories are of these recently acquired ‘parents’ – two Glasgow doctors who fostered me from a children’s home. I cannot even remember now which children’s home it was. I was in so many homes that my memory of them is fragmented. They have merged in my mind as little more than a vague recollection. That day, when I hid the food – was it in 1961? – represents my first clear memory. Whatever instincts of survival I had acquired clearly still prevailed. I would learn later that it is commonplace for children who spend their first years in care to secrete food. It is also accepted that such children tend to steal the food of others. It’s a survival mechanism – who knows when you will be fed again? Here, in this privileged place of sweet-smelling women and benign men, there appeared to be no shortages. What little experience I had gained, however, had taught me to hedge my bets.
The history of my family in so far as I know it stretches back no further than my natural parents – John Whelan and Evelyn Wolfries. I know nothing of my grandparents or great-grandparents. If they were anything like my parents, perhaps it is just as well I don’t know. My birth certificate records that I was born in Stobhill Hospital, Glasgow, at 8.45 p.m. on 27 September 1957. My mother was 26 years old and already had four children. My father was 34 and is described as a builder’s labourer. I doubt whether, in the course of his 75 years, he ever undertook any work as honourable as honest labouring. He was a drunken hoodlum, a man who employed casual violence to take what he wanted, when he wanted. In the incestuous netherworld that he inhabited, in the environs of 22 Kennedy Street, in the Townhead area of the city, my father was notorious. He considered himself a street fighter, but he couldn’t compete with the real hard men, who fought each other on equal terms and disdained any man who lifted his hand to a woman or a child. My father had no such compunction. He was a monster who beat his wife and children, with the exception of me.
By the time of my birth, he already had 24 convictions and had been jailed for crimes of dishonesty and violence and neglecting his children. I escaped being abused only because I was too young. I don’t believe I hate my father. That would require emotion. I have none for him. As for my mother – Ma – I recognise her now for what she was, a poor soul, weak and ineffectual, and every bit as much a victim as I would become.
The bottom line, however, is that for whatever reason they failed their children miserably, setting in motion a set of circumstances that would lead to the premature deaths of three of my siblings. The oldest, Johnny, took his own life at the age of 27. Jimmy, the third oldest, was tortured by mental illness until his death at the age of 46. My sister Irene died a broken woman, deeply traumatised by abuse in childhood, and passed away just after her 49th birthday. The banners proclaiming ‘Happy Birthday!’ were taken down only a few weeks before she died.
Ma also died young. The years of chain-smoking Senior Service cigarettes and swallowing the handfuls of pills that dulled the pain of her existence caught up with her before she was 50.
Only Jeanette and I survive. Thank God for Jeanette. In the course of this story, she will emerge as the rock upon which my life was built. My father lies un-mourned by us in a pauper’s grave somewhere in London, in an untended, nameless plot of ground, as far as I am aware. There is an old saying where I come from that your life may be measured by the number of people who shed tears at your funeral. I don’t know how many people cried at his. I wasn’t there. None of us were.
My parents abnegated their responsibility for their children. My mother, this weak and irresponsible individual with no real notion of the concept of care, deserted my brothers and sisters even before I was born. It was in effect an act of self-defence. She was escaping the brutality of what we might mockingly describe as a challenging home life. My father beat her. He also beat his children. John Whelan had a perverse sadistic streak. One of his favourite pastimes was to sit his oldest two sons at the table and place a pile of pennies in front of them. If they failed to grab the coins before he did, they were punched. If they grabbed the pennies before he did, they were punched. It was a game with only one winner.
As my brothers grew up, they were challenged to fight. ‘Are you as tough as your old da?’ he would demand, flecking their faces with his spittle, preening himself over his street name, the ‘Little Bull’, earned because of his pugnacious nature. ‘Put ’em up,’ he would say, ordering Johnny and Jimmy to raise their fists. Da was usually drunk, swaying back and forward, as he adopted the same pugilistic stance. ‘Show your old man what you’ve got,’ he would shout, adding, ‘Hit me!’ When my brothers, who were little more than skin and bone, did hit him, they were pummelled into submission and thrown against the walls of the one-room flat in which we lived.
My mother was incapable of protecting them. She had long since been cowed into submission herself. All she could do was hide the bruises on their malnourished bodies from the neighbours. Da ensured Ma’s compliance by trying to father a child during each year of their marriage. However, my mother would eventually seek to escape and ran away in January 1956. It was that year the family first came to the attention of social workers. Within days my father had put us into care. He could not be bothered to assume responsibility for his own children.
Like most battered wives, my mother returned, in November 1956. My brothers and sisters came home, and I was the inevitable result of Ma and Da’s ill-fated reconciliation. Ma was not equipped to look after herself, never mind the rest of us, in such an atmosphere of fear and brutality. Explaining my mother’s fractured state of mind is probably beyond my descriptive powers. Ma was an enigma. She apparently rarely spoke of her own childhood, hence my ignorance of my fore-bears. It appears that she had been badly injured as a child in a bizarre accident – a horse, which belonged to a rag-and-bone man, kicked her on the head. It could explain a lot – for example, why Ma spent long spells in a mental hospital and why she never had a proper education. She could barely read or write. I have long suspected that she was mildly brain-damaged, which could have led to her deteriorating mental state and the bouts of debilitating depression. It was a combination that made her easy prey for my brutish father. He ‘owned’ her. There were, mercifully, moments of respite from his drunken and abusive rages; he spent a lot of time in jail.
Ma had two brothers, Charlie and Davie, who would appear occasionally to threaten my father with violence if he laid a hand on their sister. Davie had lost one of his legs in a childhood accident. Generations of children played a game known as ‘taking a hudgie’. I don’t know where the word ‘hudgie’ comes from, but the game involved hitching a ride on the back of a moving vehicle, an extremely dangerous escapade. Davie had fallen from the tailgate of a municipal dustcart and been dragged under its wheels. The absence of one of his limbs did not, however, diminish his fighting skills. Ma and my siblings would apparently cower in the corner while he and my father swapped blows. My father was subdued by such encounters, but there was a dreadful inevitability about what would happen when Davie left; my mother would take another beating.
If Ma’s brothers had really wanted to help, they would have physically removed her from Kennedy Street, which would have given her the chance to break free from my father’s tyranny. This was not to be, however, and my uncles soon tired of coming to their sister’s rescue. That suited my father. With no one to protect her, he could continue to use her as a punch bag.
It may seem strange to say such a thing, but according to my sister Jeanette the daily assaults on my mother and siblings were perhaps not the worst form of abuse my father inflicted. Psychological scars run much deeper than physical wounds. Jeanette told me, ‘He brought home women and had sex with them on a camp bed in front of us and Ma! He would roar, “Turn your faces to the wall,” before having loud, uninhibited sex, as we huddled in the bed recess. What kind of woman would consent to undress and have sex in front of a mother and her frightened children? It beggars belief.’
I should explain that this coupling was taking place in a tenement ‘single-end’. Anyone who has not lived in one of these one-room dwellings, so common to the inner cities of the period, cannot appreciate the intimacy of such living conditions. Parents and children shared the same bed, which was in a recess in the wall. If you had delusions of grandeur, you put up a curtain, which was drawn across the area during daytime.
We lived ‘up a close’ – a vernacular term for the common entrance to a tenement, which was used to describe the entire building. Our tenement was four storeys high. There were at least three families on each floor, sharing an outside toilet, which was located on the landing between the staircases. Audiences around the world have laughed at Billy Connolly’s description of life up a close – children crowded into bed with their parents, sleeping under winter coats instead of blankets or duvets – but there was nothing remotely amusing about the reality of such a life.
There was no such thing as privacy, but tenement etiquette demanded that you mind your own business. When my father was beating his family or having sex with trollops, every person in the building would have heard it, but nobody ever interfered – rules of the close.
Jeanette remembers a particularly harrowing episode when the two combined. She said, ‘Da arrived, rolling drunk, with his fancy woman in tow. His floosy was drunk too, giggling foolishly, hanging on his arm. We didn’t know women like this. The women we knew were mothers, grannies. These creatures were from another world. Even street walkers, women who sold their bodies, would not have sunk so low. Whenever Da entered a room, it was filled suddenly with angry noise, bellowing his orders for us to look away. Heaven knows why he felt the need to tell us to look away – he was inches from us! We did our best to hide in the bed recess. Ma shut her eyes tight. Her sense of worthlessness must have been reinforced by these appalling scenes.
‘On one particular occasion, one of his women showed some compassion. Our distress was so evident to her that she left. Dad was enraged – “You can’t even keep those brats quiet!” he shouted. Ma tried to reason with him, but it only served to inflame him. He began beating her. She begged him to stop, but he rained down ever more vicious blows on her, punching her as hard as he could in the stomach. To this day, I am convinced Ma lost an unborn child that night. She was bleeding, the frightening red stain spreading across the bed, increasing our terror. Eventually, he stopped, collapsing onto the bed in a drunken stupor. Even then, Ma would not allow me to go for help for fear of waking him. When she heard him snoring, she relented.’
Jeanette, who was only around six years old at the time, has spent the rest of her life haunted by this episode. Terrified that our mother was dying, she fled from the house and encountered a neighbour in the street. The man ran to a public telephone box and called an ambulance, and the police. They arrived simultaneously. As the ambulance took my mother away, the police dragged my father from the house and threw him into their van. He was still so drunk he didn’t know what he had done. I’m certain that Jeanette saved Ma’s life that night. My sister has no recollection of who looked after us until Ma was released from hospital several days later. By then, Da had returned. With no cooperating witness, the charges against him had been dropped.
It would not be long, however, before the police were back, with a far more serious charge – rape. It was a time to rejoice in the close as a dozen burly policemen bounced him down every stair and off every wall to the ‘paddywagon’. Neighbours cheered and jeered. Women hung out of the windows on every floor, resting on their big, beefy arms, enjoying the spectacle of their hated neighbour being ‘huckled’. No one enjoyed it more than the police, who knew him for the monster he was. He had picked up the woman in a pub and raped her in an alleyway.
I was a babe in arms and too young to be aware of this momentous event in our lives. It was October 1958 and Da was about to be sent to jail for eight years. He was gone – it would only be a matter of weeks before Ma was gone, too. If she had the strength of character of a normal mother, she would have used this respite to take us far away from my monster of a father. Instead, she deserted us, leaving us to heaven knows what fate.
Jeanette vividly remembers the day she left. My sister was sitting in the street outside the tenement, watching the trams trundle past. She heard Ma’s high heels clattering down the stairs. Jeanette looked up and Ma appeared, all dressed up. Her hair was carefully coiffed, piled high in an elaborate beehive. Her lips were a gash of pillarbox-red lipstick, which exactly matched the colour of her coat. She wore black patent-leather stilettos – a sure sign that she was going somewhere special.
‘Where you going all dolled up, Ma?’ Jeanette asked.
‘Mind your own business,’ Ma said sharply. She tottered off on her high heels, looking over her shoulder long enough to say, ‘Look after the children for a while.’
My sister tried to follow Ma, but she boarded a tram heading into the city centre. Even at such a young age, Jeanette knew she couldn’t leave us alone long enough to establish where Ma was going. None of us would see her again for eight years, until the family was brought together in a short-lived and ill-advised reunion. I would learn years later that she had gone to Banstead, in Surrey. God knows why she went there. I can only reason that she wanted to put as much distance as possible between herself and our monstrous father, or perhaps she just didn’t want to bring up five children on her own.
When Ma left, I was still in a pram, Johnny was seven, Jeanette was six, Jimmy was four, and Irene was barely two. Under normal circumstances, one might have expected Johnny to take the lead because he was oldest. It was, however, Jeanette who kept us alive when Ma left. Picture this child, knocking on neighbours’ doors, begging for pennies to feed us. Even at that age, she covered up the fact that Ma was gone.
‘Where’s your ma?’ they would demand to know.
‘She’s in her bed,’ Jeanette would lie.
Somehow, she managed to scrape enough money together to buy bread and milk. Jeanette coaxed us to eat with what little food there was in the flat. The cupboards were soon bare except for stale bread and a handful of cereal. Jeanette remembers us crying with hunger. Even the etiquette of tenement life could not allow such a situation to continue. It became apparent to the women in the close that my incessant crying – coupled with my older brothers knocking on their doors begging for food – meant something was terribly wrong.
The ‘cruelty man’ – from the Royal Scottish Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (RSSPCC) – did not come a moment too soon. When he arrived in the house, I was trapped under my upturned pram. My brothers and sisters were so desperate for food they had climbed onto the pram, in an attempt to reach the high cupboards, and tipped it over. I could easily have died. Once again, the neighbours were out in force, to see the final departure of the Whelan clan from Kennedy Street. No one cheered or jeered this time.
We were taken to a children’s home the name of which I do not remember. At Glasgow Sheriff Court, on Wednesday, 28 January 1959, the RSSPCC was granted a Section 66 petition, which allowed Glasgow Corporation to commit us into care. Five months later, it was decided to send my four brothers and sisters to a foster home on the Outer Hebridean island of North Uist. It was also decided that I would not go with them. I remained behind, in the children’s home. I only learned many years later that the authorities wanted to put as much distance as they could between my siblings and our brutal father. My older brothers were bruised and covered with welts from a belt. And they believed that my sisters and I would also be at risk if he had access to us. Irene was just a tot and I was a babe in arms. But it was thought that five children, including two babies, would be too much for a foster couple. They went. I stayed. And so my brothers and sisters disappeared from my life, along with my infantile memories of them and my parents.
It is a strange fact of my life that childhood memories elude me, especially those from my infancy. It is as if I have suppressed many of them. Perhaps the influence of my father, a man I effectively did not know, is stronger than I imagine. Whereas most children would enjoy fairly precise memories of their formative years – from about the age of three to four – I struggle to reclaim mine. Consequently, I have only the vaguest recollection of the two people who arrived at the children’s home one day and talked soothingly to me of becoming my new mummy and daddy – their words. I do not even remember their names. They will be written down somewhere, but I have no access to those records.
By the time I was ensconced with the two doctors in their big house in Newton Mearns, just outside Glasgow, I believed I was alone in the world. Nobody thought to tell me otherwise. Even behind the scenes, however, the mother I didn’t even know existed was manipulating my future. I learned later that the doctors wanted to adopt me, to give me their name and offer me a stable home and opportunities that someone from my background could only ever have dreamed of, but Ma refused to sign the adoption papers. God knows why. It was clear from her actions that she had not wanted me or any of her children. The doctors had treated me as their son for nearly two years, a period during which apparently they exhausted every avenue in an attempt to keep me, but ultimately, when it became clear that they could not be assured that I would be allowed to stay with them, they decided they could not live with that uncertainty.
On the day I left them, they were distraught. They stood by the door of that big house, watching me as I walked down the path flanked by two social workers.
Before I reached the garden gate and the waiting car, I pulled away and ran back to them. ‘Was it because I stole the food?’ I asked.
CHAPTER 2
Paradise Found
Paradise was 17 miles long by 13 miles wide. I took the measure of it on 6 August 1964. North Uist, in the Outer Hebrides, a place as remote as it is beautiful. My new home. I was seven years old, and an extended island family of 2,205 hardy souls who lived on the western fringe of Europe were waiting to welcome me to the next stage of my young and not uneventful life. Four of them would be the brothers and sisters who, until that momentous day, I did not know existed.
‘I have something to tell you, Davie,’ said the social worker, as we rode in a taxi from the tiny airport at Benbecula across an alien landscape beneath an endless sky.
I felt very small. The incredible excitement of the journey from Glasgow to the airport, and then the wonderful adventure of the flight, had subsumed any questions that had been forming in my mind. It had only been a few hours since I had left the doctors’ house. My innocent enquiry about the food had sent them fleeing indoors, with tears streaming down their faces. I was confused. As I was ushered into the car, I heard from behind me a terrible howl of anguish, which I could not understand. They wanted me to go away, didn’t they? There was no time to think about it now. I would think about it later. Now there was only space and wind and blue sky.
The social worker sensed that I had come back down to earth physically and metaphorically. It was time for answers. She placed her arm around my shoulder, drawing me closer to her in the back of the car, enveloping me in comforting warmth. I was too young and damaged to recognise such an action as intimacy, which had played little part in my life so far. However, I sensed she wanted to share something special with me.
‘Do you know you have brothers and sisters, Davie? Did you know that?’ she asked.
I was not sure what having brothers and sisters meant. The concept was unclear. My life had been a pretty solitary affair until that time, usually me and whichever adults had charge over my care. I looked for inspiration at the back of the silent driver’s head and beyond, to his view of the astonishing landscape spreading before us. Neither he nor the cloudless sky offered any explanation.
‘They went away when you were still a tiny baby,’ the social worker continued. ‘While you’ve been in one place, they’ve been in another – here,’ she added, her hand indicating what seemed like a vast plain beyond the safety and seclusion of the old car, which was now rattling along a rutted track. ‘But now,’ she said, ‘you’ll all be together.’ She looked towards the front, beyond the driver, to the ribbon of road lying ahead. ‘We’re nearly at Knockintorran – look!’ she said.
The blue ‘reek’ of peat smoke was a thin, almost transparent column leaking into the sky from the chimney of an isolated single-storey cottage that was dwarfed by the landscape. I could sense the rough texture of the grey walls, which, from this distance, looked as cold as the feeling in my stomach. I was still grappling with this brothers-and-sisters problem.
It would soon be resolved. They were lined up against the wall of the croft house, an honour guard for the new arrival. They would soon have names: Johnny, Jeanette, Jimmy and Irene. Ranging in age from 9 to 13, they, too, had spent a significant portion of their lives separated from me, but they had the advantage of memory. A man and woman were standing behind the children, a tentative smile playing on their kind and ruddy country faces. These were folk outwith my experience, dressed in rough-and-ready clothes, with a quiet stateliness that I would come to realise was the hallmark of those who live in wild places. It is hard to describe. They had a dignity that belied their appearance. Morag and Willie MacDonald were my new mother and father.
I learned later that I was here because my natural mother had refused to agree to me being adopted by two childless doctors in Glasgow, despite not being able to care for me herself. Unbeknown to me, while I had been in and out of children’s homes and foster care, my brothers and sisters had been staying with Willie and Morag. Ma’s demand, which reunited me with my siblings, was arguably the only true act of compassion she had ever shown her children. The social worker gently pushed me out of the car and into my new life. The woman behind the children waved my brothers and sisters forward. It was an awkward moment.
Someone, I can’t remember who, said, ‘Hello, Davie!’
I had come home.
I still do not know what possessed social workers to despatch a gaggle of poverty-bred street kids from Glasgow to an island where English was the second language, but I bless them still for it. I would discover that my brothers and sisters were much changed from the urchins who had left the city so many years before. They formed a circle round me, and standing in the centre I suddenly had the feeling that I was where I was meant to be. Maybe that was what this brothers-and-sisters thing meant.
They were clearly fascinated by me, this small stranger who had without ceremony been added to their number. They looked from me to my new parents, asking questions in an unfamiliar tongue; they had acquired Gaelic. Children learn by osmosis and it would not be long before that incomprehensible and musical language would morph into words and phrases that I could understand.
I brushed aside the clouds of insects that had formed around my head – midges. Those familiar with the west of Scotland will know the scourge of these minuscule and annoying creatures.
Morag and Willie MacDonald took me into the warmth of their home, warmth that was as emotional as it was physical. Heat emanated from a large open fire beside an Aga, upon which a great black kettle was coming to the boil. I would discover that this kettle boiled from dawn till bedtime. Morag walked into a wall of steam. To this day I remember her in a halo of cloud. She never strayed far from that cooker and its huge pots of potatoes and stew, which took two hands to carry to the wooden deal table in the middle of her kitchen. It was the heart of the home.
My first – and erroneous – impression of the croft house was that it seemed sparse and bleak, but it was soon lit up by the bright, if stern, Morag. In retrospect, I realise Morag had none of the vanities of the city women I had known. Her looks were unprepossessing. Make-up and hair-styling were dismissed as the work of the Devil. Morag was a devout Christian. Her uniform of shapeless dress, cross-over white pinny and men’s socks, rising out of sturdy shoes that would not have looked out of place on a man’s feet, was good enough, thank you very much.
Willie was her soul mate, a silent, strong, hard-working man with cool blue eyes that took in everything but gave little away. He, too, wore a uniform – dungarees under a suit jacket and wellington boots. The sleeves of his collarless shirt were invariably rolled up to reveal bulging biceps. The ensemble was completed by a ‘caidie’ – a bunnet, or flat cap – which was removed from his head only at the dinner table or to wipe the sweat from his brow.
Their home reflected the couple. The term ‘modern amenities’ would have meant little to them. The toilet was in a shed at the back of the small garden. It was a treacherous journey in the dark. There was no electricity. The soft glow of light in the three-bedroom croft was generated by paraffin lamp, and while the world had long since been seduced by the age of television, it was an apparatus that Morag regarded as an abomination and an affront to the Good Lord. An ancient battery-powered radio, which broadcast the mournful Gaelic songs that became one of the soundtracks of my life, was sufficient for Morag and Willie. It would take me some time to come to terms with this strange new world of the Western Isles, a place with its own unique personality.
When I arrived on the island, the community survived on crofting. In English terms, crofters would be tenant farmers. My new parents had the lifelong tenancy of the croft, which had been passed down through generations of the family. Morag and Willie paid their rent to the ‘laird’, in this case the Fifth Earl of Granville, a cousin of the Queen, who owned a 60,000-acre estate, part of which was divided into the small farms.
The Outer Hebrides are a bleakly beautiful collection of islands, stretching from the largest, Lewis, in the north, through Harris and the Uists to the butt of Barra, in the south. Separated from the mainland by the Sea of the Hebrides, it is a world apart in every sense. North Uist is flat, almost devoid of trees, and blasted by Atlantic winds that would soon cleanse me. Moorland extends as far as the eye can see in a landscape punctuated by croft-house chimneys and their plumes of peat-fuelled fire smoke. The adjoining crofting communities of North and South Uist, where Gaelic is the first language, are steeped in Highland history. When I eventually went to the local school there were children who had not spoken a word of English before they began their education.
This is the birthplace of heroines such as Flora MacDonald, the saviour of Bonnie Prince Charlie after the 1745 Jacobite Rebellion, which sought to restore the displaced Stuart dynasty to the thrones of Scotland and England. The romantic venture ended tragically with the defeat of the prince’s ragtag Highland Army by a superior British force at the Battle of Culloden in 1746. To this day, however, the memory of how Flora spirited away the fugitive prince ‘over the sea to Skye’ is still strong in the minds of the inhabitants of the islands.
Memory and heritage are precious things in a spectacular and timeless landscape ruled by majestic red deer, which roam a land of lochans teeming with trout, beneath a sky that is the domain of eagles. I had never seen or experienced anything like it. Until I became part of it, my horizon was defined by the distance from the front door of my house to the end of the street. This was another world, where quiet folk spun cloth that was fashioned into the clothes they wore. The food on their table came from the land, the fruits of their own labour.
It was my first evening at Knockintorran and I was about to partake of those fruits. To a child raised on watery soup and insipid stews, the richness and quantity of Morag’s fare would provoke the mother of all belly aches. All of us had somehow muddled through in the hours preceding dinner, operating in that self-conscious atmosphere in which much is thought but little is said. The social worker had long since departed. We were a guarded group as we gathered round the table, with the hatless Willie at its head. My brothers and sisters were subdued. There were obviously rules, which I knew nothing of, but I was street-smart enough to learn.
The table groaned under baskets of homemade bread and scones waiting to be smothered in butter, which had been churned by hand that day, and jam made from fruit grown in the garden. Morag emerged from her cloud of steam, bearing a large pot of potatoes, which she placed on the table. I reached out to take one and learned, somewhat painfully, the first rule of dining at Knockintorran. A wooden spoon tapped my knuckles.
‘Now, young David,’ said Morag, ‘you don’t snatch your food until we’ve thanked the Good Lord for what He’s given us. I’ll let you off this time because you don’t know any better, coming from that heathen city you’ve grown up in, but you will go to your bed hungry if I see bad manners like that from you again. Got it?’
I got it.
Willie bowed his head. Morag and the children followed suit as he intoned words in Gaelic. Later, when my ear attuned to the language, I would learn that he said, ‘Lord, for what we are about to receive, may we be truly thankful.’
When he finished the prayer, my new life began in earnest. Those who eat together become a family.
CHAPTER 3
Of Long Summer Days and Billy the Ram
Billy regarded me with solemn, unblinking eyes, lulling me into a false sense of security with his quiet dignity.
‘Go on, Davie,’ said a voice behind me. That was Johnny.
‘Have a go!’ This was Jimmy.
‘I don’t think you should,’ cautioned Irene.
‘You’ll know all about it if you fall off,’ warned Jeanette.
It had been several weeks since my arrival and I was settling nicely into my new life with my brothers and sisters, but I desperately wanted to be accepted. There was still a sense of distance between me and them. I knew that Billy, a ram of monstrous proportions, with great curling horns, might be the means to prove me worthy of their affection, but he petrified me. I was pretty scared of all the animals on the croft. If truth be told, I am still wary of anything on four legs. My knowledge of animals had been confined to the mangy cats and dogs that patrolled the streets of Glasgow.
Jimmy and Johnny were, however, well versed in the ways of the country. They thought it would be fun to introduce their newly found brother to Billy. I don’t know what age Billy was, or whether he was suffering from some malaise, but his great shaggy coat looked as if it was in tatters.
‘OK,’ I said at last.
‘Good man,’ said Jimmy, who swung me onto the creature’s back, while Johnny held its horns.
‘Daaa-vie!’ wailed Irene.
I was numb with fear.
‘Ready?’ said Johnny, letting go of Billy’s horns without waiting for a reply.
Still robbed of speech, I nodded. ‘GO!’ shouted Jimmy, and I was off, like a National Hunt jockey heading for the sticks.
Someone was screaming in terror and I realised to my horror that it was my own voice. God Almighty could that beast run, round in circles, up and down, with me bouncing ever higher on his back. Johnny was already rolling on the ground, helpless with laughter, when the world went into slow motion and Billy came to a grinding halt, throwing me into the air over his head. I hit the ground and skidded through a muddy puddle. My shrieks had brought out the household and a bedraggled boy with a very sore bottom was gathered up by Jeanette.
She crooned, ‘Davie, Davie, are you all right?’
I was speechless with shock as she carried me back to the adults, who were trying very hard, damn them, not to laugh at my discomfiture. The family gathered in the kitchen as I was deposited naked in the tin bath. My indignation was complete when Morag rolled her sleeves high up on her leg-of-mutton arms and began soaping me all over. Very soon I was respectable in clean shirt and shorts, and placed into the care of my siblings.
‘Get off and play with your wee brother for a few minutes while we grown-ups have a talk,’ said Morag, who added, ‘And mind now, you’ve got jobs to do, so don’t wear yourselves out.’
We all ran through the open door, out into the sunshine. ‘Davie’s a good sport,’ said Johnny.
I was now officially one of them. I cried.
My brothers and sisters were soon revealing their individuality and personalities. Jeanette was five years older than me and she was the little mother, taking my hand and kissing me on the cheek, ruffling my hair and tickling me until I laughed out loud. She would whisper me to sleep in my bed.
I was closest to Irene. She was nearest to me in age. Irene was a serene girl. It quickly became apparent to me that Morag regarded her as special. I’m certain she loved us all in her own gruff way, but it was as if Irene were her own daughter. It was touching to watch the solemn child interacting with this childless woman. It was new territory for them both. Irene and I would remain close until our teens, when she was abruptly removed from Quarriers after reporting that she had been physically beaten. Having to deal with our shared abuse and facing up to our abusers brought us close together, but for the moment we were safe from the future, distanced by geography and time from the bad days that lay ahead.
James, or Jimmy, was the joker, an incorrigible youth who enticed me into the barn one day to exhibit a country skill that I would have no problem in leaving behind me when I eventually left Uist.
‘Look!’ he said, holding out a pillowcase that was squirming alarmingly. ‘I have something to show you.’ He opened the bag to reveal a chicken. ‘Watch,’ he said, pulling the head off the chicken and throwing the quivering carcass at my feet.
I ran for my life, mouthing silent screams, to the echo of Jimmy’s laughter. I believe Jimmy quite liked wringing chickens’ necks, an everyday pursuit in the country, but a definite character flaw where we had come from.
Johnny was the oldest, older than me by six years. Poor Johnny had suffered, and it showed, God love him. He apparently took the worst of the beatings from our father and his sleep would be for ever broken by nightmares that caused him to wet the bed. He would be mortified and the usually sanguine Morag would be furious. Johnny would have to wash himself and his sheets in cold water from the pump at the side of the house. My brother never talked about it, but we could sense his pain, which resulted from the torment inflicted on him by my wicked father. He was, however, a good person. During the eerie night hours, when the world was filled by strange noises and animal songs, he would be the first to comfort me.
Life was good, but there were legacies from our old existence. My brothers and sisters were all afraid of the dark, thanks to our less than loving father. When we lived in Kennedy Street, he invariably chose to arrive late at night, when he was in a drunk and violent mood. He would rouse the boys from their sleep and challenge them to fight. Morag understood our distress and provided us with paraffin Tilley lamps. That light saved us from the darkness.
Morag was kindness personified, but even that good woman would not allow herself to be seen to be spoiling the Whelan brood with such fripperies as chocolate. I’m certain, however, that she had a deal going with soft-touch Willie. He would often call us into the barn and ceremoniously close the door after ensuring, somewhat theatrically, that his wife was out of earshot. Bars of Cadbury’s Dairy Milk would appear as if by magic from his dungaree pocket. As he broke up the chocolate into equal shares, he would say, ‘Wheesht now. Don’t tell Morag. She’ll have my guts if she finds out I’ve been spoiling you.’ We would wolf down the chocolate, promising never to reveal our secret.
Soon after, I would be required to keep other secrets, terrible secrets, but I still delight in the ones we shared with Willie, a good and honest man.
Long before we returned to the bad times, the croft would echo to our laughter. We were content. Life was anything but easy. Morag and Willie were disciplinarians, insisting on the maintenance of Christian values that were adhered to strictly. The Sabbath is a big day in the Hebrides, the last bastion of Presbyterianism. No games were allowed, no playing, no washing on the line, no radio. Reading the Bible was the only recreation permitted. In spite of being nominally a Protestant, something in my Irish Catholic genes railed against the notion. I was content to go along with it, though.
On the Sabbath, we went to church three times. The Reverend Ian MacDonald had a particular talent for making scripture as unutterably boring as it could possibly be. Hollywood may have by that time injected high drama into the Old Testament tales of Moses and Samson, but the Reverend Ian could not. I recall there was much talk of heathens, hellfire and damnation.
The church was fashioned from grey stone as dull as his sermons. It was typically Protestant, devoid of decoration. There were no statues, paintings or stained glass to reflect a rainbow of colours that might have illuminated the Reverend Ian’s dreary monologue. I prayed for the day the strong gusts of Atlantic wind might blow off the corrugated-iron roof. It was as cold inside as it was outside and our legs required to be swung to and fro to maintain circulation. This did not please Morag. ‘Don’t think God doesn’t see you, Davie Whelan – playing instead of praying.’
There would be a brief, if welcome, respite for lunch before afternoon Sunday school. The final service at 6.30 p.m. was mercifully shorter than the morning version. I never worked out why God required our presence three times on a Sunday. Morag declared it to be representative of His love. God must have loved us an awful lot.
School was just as stern, although even our teacher, ‘Corky’ – more properly Miss McCorquodale – could show compassion to young boys. In one of my small acts of rebellion I was sucking a gobstopper during a lesson when it lodged in my throat and I began choking. The teacher was clearly not familiar with the subtleties of the Heimlich manoeuvre, so she bent me over and started beating me on the back. When that failed to dislodge the offending confection, she proceeded to stuff her fingers down my throat in an effort to make me sick. Blue in the face, I vomited the sweet and watched as the gobstopper, red and magnificent, clattered to the floor and smashed to smithereens. I had been so enjoying it.
‘That’ll teach you,’ said Corky, rather unsympathetically, I thought.
There is little room in the island mentality for moral weakness or gobstoppers. I believe moral weakness was expected of us – we were the ‘city slickers’, for ever the outsiders, but we were strangers who were exotic and welcomed because of it. Even our surname set us apart among friends with names such as Mary McIntosh, Alistair McDougall, Donald Archie McKay, Susan McCluskey and the gloriously named Marina Sherwood. There were also more MacDonalds than you could shake a stick at.
Many of the children arrived at the village school in boats, which fascinated me no end. It was Irene’s job to ring the big hand bell that demanded they come to class, a task she performed with relish. Mr Blance, the headmaster, ruled with a rod of iron over the proceedings, and while the tawse – a leather belt used for corporal punishment – stayed in his desk drawer mostly, the threat of it was ever present.
My introduction to the Gaelic had already begun around Morag’s great Aga, but it was reinforced every morning as I passed the wall chart that recorded the days of the week and numbers up to 10 in both languages. Despite our being different from these uncomplicated island folk, so secure in their heritage and place in the world, they welcomed us with their revered Highland hospitality. Long days passed in an atmosphere of kindness and laughter.
It wasn’t all drifting along on fluffy white clouds, however. Youngsters of today could not conceive of children, from the youngest to the eldest, working in the fields – the back-breaking work of scything hay and cutting peat until the blisters on your hands are transformed into calluses. I can feel them still today.
If Morag ruled the home, Willie’s domain was the fields. Willie was a typical crofter, forever mucking out, herding cattle and shearing sheep. His sheepdog, Tidy, would round up Billy and his ilk, answering Willie’s every shrill whistle of command. When he was not tending animals, Willie would deploy his enormous strength to the crops. He could swing the scythe through hay as if he were cutting tissue paper. Willie appeared to work every daylight hour that God sent. When the Aga in the kitchen was not providing food, it was drying his outer clothes after a day in the elements.
He had one despicable bad habit that to this day makes me queasy. He would blow his nose and deposit the contents on the ground. Even a snotty-nosed ‘keelie’ from Glasgow had enough manners to know a hankie should be used. However, in the scheme of things, it was a forgivable fault. And for those with the experience, there is no finer feeling in the world than laying down your tools at the end of a hard day’s work. What a glorious feeling to see the arrival of the tractor that would take you home to one of Morag’s dinners. By now, my belly aches were a thing of the past. You may have all the money and possessions in the world, but there is nothing more precious than rest and filling yourself with good food.
Then there’s the added joy of the bath. Bath time in the MacDonald household consisted of lining up with your towel beside the great tin bath, which Morag had filled with hot water from the contents of endless kettle runs. The pecking order was youngest to eldest, a happy position for me: I always washed in the cleanest water. Morag would dry us in front of the fire with a rough, if kindly, touch and make us squeal with laughter by hitching up her skirt and warming her legs by the fire. It was a favourite pastime, leading to what we Scots describe as ‘corned-beef legs’ – hot red patches on our traditionally pale skin. She would quickly return to decorum when the croft door, which was never locked, opened to admit a guest. Our childhood was populated by the people who congregated in our home, prattling away in Gaelic. Not a lot happened in such an isolated community, but they could gossip for hours.
The arrival of a visitor was the signal for the children to go out and play. Hide and seek among the hayricks was a favourite, but it was the sandy machair that became my adventure playground. Machair is a Gaelic word describing the extensive fertile plain that lies between the sea and the cultivated land. It is unique to the Western Isles and a world-class conservation site. We would roam far and wide, exploring fjord-like sea lochs that stretched to infinity and from which came the blustering Atlantic winds that had long since blown away the grime of the city from our life. We could hear Morag and Jeanette’s voices in the distance, calling us in for our tea, but we would ignore them. Only when Morag’s voice darkened with anger did we realise we had run to the end of our rope. Jeanette would then appear at the side of the croft, waving a white tea-towel – a flag of truce. To ignore that signal was to go to bed hungry. We invariably made it back in time for dinner, although Johnny did on one occasion run out of the invisible rope.
One of the great treats of childhood on the island was the frantic run home in time for the arrival of the big, green Co-operative Stores van, which motored between the crofts. Ian MacDonald drove the van and his wife, Ina, served. Their nod to corporate image was matching beige shop coats. This rolling Aladdin’s cave could be seen for miles, your anticipation growing as it drew ever nearer. Ian and Ina brought wonderful treats – iced buns and glorious cakes with names such as Eiffel Towers. We were given first pick. On one occasion, this was not good enough for Johnny. He was sent to the van for a message and spent some of Morag’s change on sweeties. She was furious: ‘I’ll not have any boy stealing in my house. Now get up to your bed and lie and think about what we will be eating tonight while you go hungry.’
The recalcitrant Johnny climbed out of the bedroom window in his bare feet and dropped down into the courtyard at the rear of the croft. He went to the barn, got on his bike and pedalled off across the fields to the shop in the village. Alas, the dreary Reverend MacDonald saw him pedalling along, captured him and returned him to the croft. The minister had barely departed when Johnny was seriously cuffed about the ears. ‘You’ve black affronted me, out in your bare feet,’ said Morag, using the Scots phrase for being mortified.
Of course, his caring brothers and sisters thought long and hard about the nature of his wrongdoing and the justice of righteous punishment. How we laughed.
Laughter was a constant companion. It was such a joy for a little boy who was still in many ways the timid child in the corner, who could take fright at things that had no power over other children – such as Santa. Santa is rarely perceived to be ominous, but he scared the hell out of me on my first Christmas on the island. We trooped off to the laird’s ‘big house’, Calarnais House, for the annual bash. The ground was thick with snow and we poured into the elegant surroundings of another way of life entirely. I occupied my usual position in the corner and waited for the arrival of this legendary figure. Father Christmas had not featured large in my life until that time. When he arrived with his great white beard and red coat, I ran for it, straight into the heavily decorated tree. I was trapped in the tree, tied up by tinsel, with only my legs visible as it slowly toppled. Poor Santa was only helping when he attempted to extricate me, but the sight of his big red face made me howl even louder.
Santa said, ‘My, my, what a lot of noise from such a wee boy.’ He rummaged in his sack and a brightly wrapped present materialised. ‘Now, see what Santa’s got for you,’ he said kindly.
I bawled and refused the gift. My brothers and sisters pushed me forward, but Santa’s smiling face served only to make matters worse. I bawled louder. I was led from the room, tear-stained and howling. The journey back to the croft seemed dark and terribly long. I got a few sore ‘nips’ in retribution from Jimmy and Johnny. They, too, were empty-handed, thanks to me. I had failed them. Never been a big fan of Santa ever since.
Not every trip to the big house was so fraught. Lord and Lady Granville would invite me and Jimmy there for a birthday party for one of their children, who were educated in England and did not speak Gaelic. There were few children on the island who spoke English as well as we did, so we were brought in to translate, and to keep the laird’s children amused.
It would not be the only occasion when we would rub shoulders with the aristocracy and royalty. The Queen was a regular visitor in the summer, when the royal yacht Britannia sailed around the islands. Her Majesty would come ashore for the annual Agricultural Show and picnic with her cousin the earl and his family. In the year that I was there, Jeanette was chosen to present Her Majesty with a bunch of flowers when she came to open the show. Morag’s ample bosom heaved with the pride of it all, the signal for Jeanette to be prodded, poked and decorated with a brand-new pink party dress that made her look like a fairy on a cake. She hated it with a vengeance.
‘You will not embarrass me, lady,’ said Morag, ‘by wearing a tatty school uniform to meet the Queen. It’s the new dress for you, whether you like it or not.’
Jeanette could never have been described as ‘frilly’ but frilly she was, in spades. Morag had looked out her catalogue – a Bible of delights that had to be ordered from the mainland: North Uist, like my sister, did not do frilly. When the dress arrived, Jeanette was hoisted onto the kitchen table for a fitting.
My poor sister, who was 14, declared, ‘I feel like a pink blancmange! Why can’t I wear my school uniform?’
‘Do you want everyone to think you’re a scruff?’ Morag mumbled through a mouthful of pins. ‘You’ll not give us red faces, do you hear? This is a beautiful dress. If I’d had a dress like this when I was your age, I’d have thought I was the cat’s pyjamas. Now, stop jumping around while I pin this hem. You don’t want the Queen to see you with a squint hem, do you?’
Jeanette suffered for hours until Morag decided the dress was ‘just right’. It was only the beginning of Jeanette’s discomfiture. For weeks she had to practise how to greet Her Majesty with a proper curtsey. This was a joy to the rest of us. We howled with laughter. Poor Jeanette was never the lightest on her feet. She was ordered to curtsey very low and deferentially. Jeanette then had to take three steps, hand the Queen a bunch of flowers and say, ‘Good morning, Your Majesty.’ We practised with her, behind her back of course, stifling our giggles for fear of offending Morag’s sense of decorum. Jimmy and Johnny could not curtsey if their lives depended on it and they would inevitably end up tumbling over each other, whereupon a fight would ensue.
On the big day, we all trooped along to the show, wearing our kilts. Jeanette waited for the arrival of Her Majesty, picking at her dress, an act that had Morag drawing daggers with her eyes. When the Queen arrived in a big Land Rover, she waved to the locals and offered a wonderfully benign smile. Morag was resplendent in her Sunday best, a navy-blue two-piece ‘costume’ suit that smelled disconcertingly of mothballs. Dear Morag looked glamorous … almost. Even Willie had escaped from his dungarees, replaced for the occasion by a suit and a heavily starched white shirt, which, as the day progressed, was intent on choking him to death. In the end, Jeanette was perfect in words and actions. We stuffed our faces and returned home lit by the glow of it all.
We thought the good times would never end. How wrong we were. The only security in the lives of the Whelan children was the certainty of insecurity. The bombshell dropped when the MacDonalds were informed by the Social Work Department that our mother wanted us back and we were to be returned to Glasgow. For some godforsaken reason known only to the authorities, we would be prevented from maintaining contact with the only real parents we had known. There was no rhyme or reason to it, a casual and probably unintentional cruelty. It would be 20 years before we would see Morag again.
I had been on the island for little more than a year when we prepared to return to Glasgow and God knows what. The only thing we were certain of was that it would not be good. Paradise was about to be lost. The halcyon days would be left behind for a return to the slums and – worst of all – Quarriers beckoned.
CHAPTER 4
Paradise Lost
I had cried myself to exhaustion. As the aircraft carrying us away from North Uist arced out of Benbecula into an endless blue sky, my heart and stomach lurched. The feeling was more than physical. The Whelan siblings were surrounded by people embarking on journeys. We were in a sea of smiling faces, but we could not share the excitement that was so evident in our fellow passengers. They had something to look forward to on their journey. We did not, and we were terribly alone with our thoughts and the uncertainty of the future.
I was too young to fully appreciate what had been going on, but I had nonetheless begun putting together the pieces of a jigsaw that had been puzzling me for days: Willie’s grim-faced stoicism and Morag’s demeanour, so withdrawn, shedding tears at the slightest provocation. He had evidently been struggling under a dreadful burden, bearing a secret he could not share. Whatever was going on, Jeanette had been fretting about it, too, and it had transmitted to Irene, who had been abjectly miserable. It would be some time before I learned of the secret meetings in the barn between Willie and Jeanette when our future – or lack of it – was laid out before my eldest sister. Somewhere above my young head, the most recent chapter in our lives was closing and the next sad episode was in the process of being written. Our world was coming to an end. We would soon be leaving the island and we would not be returning. I was not party to the knowledge that we were going back to Glasgow to live permanently, but I knew, somehow I knew. I had been experiencing a dreadful sense of loss without quite knowing why. I wasn’t certain any more of what lay ahead.
Later, as we sat on the aircraft, our geographical destination was Glasgow. From the vantage point of adulthood, I am aware now that the distance between what had been and what would be was measured in more than mere miles. The clues had been there, but I was too naïve to identify them. The atmosphere at the croft had changed dramatically in the early part of May 1966, like the temperature in a room dropping suddenly. I could not, however, see the complete picture, only glimpses of a mysterious canvas. As I said, Morag had begun to cry at the smallest thing and she clung to us as if she would never see us again. She wouldn’t for a very long time. It would be many years before my sister Jeanette turned up on her doorstep, as a grown woman and the mother of three children. It would be even longer before we would be reunited with the only mother we had ever truly known. In the days before our departure, Morag had clung to us, a particular mystery to me because she was hardly the most demonstrative of women. Willie would take himself off to the barn, seemingly unable to hear me when I shouted a greeting at him. I knew instinctively I wasn’t being ignored; he was preoccupied.
What I did not know was that Willie had taken Jeanette to the barn because he had news for her. Jeanette revealed to me much later that this big, strong man was weeping unashamedly when he told her that Morag was broken-hearted because our real mother had demanded that we return to Glasgow, to start over ‘as a family’. He swore Jeanette to secrecy, which must have been a dreadful burden on her. I was playing in the early-summer sunshine, throwing a ball for Willie’s sheepdog – even working dogs were allowed a little fun in their life. Boy and dog were having a wonderful time, but our innocent game wasn’t quite managing to dispel the gloom of misery hanging over Willie as he headed into the barn. He beckoned to Jeanette. Something was amiss. I played on, oblivious to the life-changing events that were unfolding. Willie’s bright, open face, creased by sun and biting wind, had somehow crumpled. It was sorrow. I had seen enough of it in my life to recognise that mask. Jeanette also knew Willie was distressed, and within a few moments she knew why.
‘Lass, I have something to tell you,’ he said in a faltering voice. ‘This is the hardest thing for me, but I have to tell you.’
‘What?’ said Jeanette, alarmed.
Willie took a deep breath. ‘You’re all going back to Glasgow.’
Jeanette was dumbfounded. Tears sprang into her eyes. ‘Why?’ she whispered in a voice that was not her own. ‘We’re all so happy here. Why do we need to go back?’ she pleaded. ‘Don’t you want us?’
Willie had promised himself he would be brave, but he was lost. It was his turn to plead. ‘No, no, no, lass! We love you like you are our own. You know that, don’t you? We’ve never made any difference between any of you. I hope you know that?’
Jeanette was blinded by tears. ‘Is it because we were bad?’ she asked, falling into the trap that has snared unloved children from the beginning of time – believing it’s your fault when things go wrong. My sister grabbed Willie’s hand and said, ‘Please, Willie, it was just a joke. We were only having fun.’ Jeanette’s mind was swimming. She believed that it was the recent prank she and Jimmy had played on Willie and one of our neighbours.
The two of them had found a tin of paint in the shed and had deemed it a great jape to paint the lambs all over – in blue! They hadn’t realised that colour patches were daubed on the animals so each crofter could identify his own beasts. Willie had been really angry with Jimmy and Jeanette and had berated them, but he hadn’t realised I had been watching, and when they were out of sight he’d laughed out loud to himself.
‘No, lass! This isn’t about the sheep,’ he told Jeanette.
She wrung her hands. ‘It’s about the postie’s van, then, isn’t it?’ Another jape. Johnny and Jimmy had seen the post-office van parked in a lane with the keys inside. The postman had been having a cup of tea with a crofter and hadn’t reckoned on the arrival of two unmitigated scallywags. They took the van for a joy ride and crashed it into a hedge, by virtue of losing control of the vehicle because Johnny’s feet didn’t quite reach the pedals. No harm had been done to the vehicle or its drivers, but Morag had been incandescent with rage. She’d bellowed at them, ‘You’ve black affronted me, you two. How can I hold my head up in church with everyone knowing I can’t control you boys?’
Willie reassured Jeanette, ‘It’s not about the postie’s van. That was just a bit of nonsense.’ For a few moments, Willie was lost for words, and when he found his voice, he said, ‘This is something we can’t fix. Your mum has demanded the social workers take you all back to Glasgow, to be a family again. We’ve tried arguing with them, but they say your mum has rights. We’ve loved you all from the moment you came. We’ve tried to give you everything we would have given our own children if God had granted us the blessing of having any. No matter what happens now, we’ll still always love you, no matter where you are. I’m so sorry.’ The cruelty of the moment was heightened when Willie revealed the worst of it: ‘They’ve told us that we can’t even stay in touch with you – no birthday cards, no Christmas cards, nothing.’
Jeanette was inconsolable.
Willie added, ‘You have to promise me not to tell the others. Not yet. It would only upset everyone more. We’re waiting to hear when the social worker is coming to collect you. We just want your last days here to be happy. We want you all to have good memories of us.’
Willie recovered a dog-eared letter from the pocket of his dungarees and handed it to Jeanette. It had come from Jenny, our mother’s sister. Jeanette told me later that Jenny had written to Willie and Morag, telling them she was sorry that we were all being taken away from the only loving home we had ever known. She apparently thanked the MacDonalds for looking after us all so well, far more than her sister had ever done for her own children.
My sister’s face was ashen when she came out of the barn and suddenly I lost interest in throwing the ball for Tidy. From that moment, everything in the croft changed. Heaven knows how Jeanette kept the secret and endured that deeply troubled period.
A few days later, the beginning of the end was heralded by a perfect early summer’s day – 25 May 1966, a date etched in my memory. People who have led normal lives recall the good days in their lives. The disadvantaged and abused remember the bad times. We were told we were ‘going on a trip’. In any other child’s mind, embarking on trips would be anticipated with fun, a sense of adventure, but I wasn’t like any other child and this was going to be like no other trip I had ever been on. Morag told us to get washed and to dress in our Sunday best. I kept asking why. We were only going to school, weren’t we?
She was distraught, struggling to appear as if it was just another day, exhorting us to get ready quickly. ‘Because I told you, Davie – and remember to wash behind those ears!’ The woman could not see for tears.
The household was silent, except for her sobs. I was crushed on her behalf. I had never seen her like this before. She was the sort of woman who would have faced up to the Devil. We were soon all ready and had to endure a silent inspection by Morag and Willie. Even in their grief, they were privately determined that if this was the last time anyone saw us, we would at least be looking our best.
We left the house and trooped down to the school. We didn’t know it yet, but we were going to say goodbye. When we arrived, our classmates were subdued. They knew what was happening. The headmaster and our beloved Corky could not speak. We were each presented with a white leather-bound Bible with embossed gold script. Our names had been carefully inscribed inside the cover in precise copperplate writing. It felt cold in my hand. One associates the Bible with spiritual and emotional comfort. There was no solace in this sad, if beautiful, little edition of the Good Book.
Our school chums shifted uneasily, unable to make eye contact with us. They had been told they would not be allowed to know where we were going, so friendships formed and the bonds created were being severed for ever. We suddenly realised what was happening. We were going. Everything we had known, everything that had seemed so safe and permanent, was being removed.
It was a long, silent walk on leaden feet back to the croft house. We plucked at the hedgerows, as if we could keep a tiny bit of Uist alive in our hearts and minds by gathering these tawdry little souvenirs of the times when we were happy and safe from harm. The taxi was waiting for us. Like condemned men being rushed from a death cell to the gallows room, we were ushered towards the vehicle by the social worker. We all suffered the same moment of panic, looking for a way out, like prisoners confronted by bars who attempt to make a final bid for freedom.
Jeanette was trying but failing to keep us calm, promising us we were safe, that we were together and she would look after us. Irene, poor Irene was howling like a wounded animal. I had only heard such anguish in a human voice once before – when I left the doctors’ house in Glasgow. Irene had to be prised physically from Morag’s bosom.
We left our island life with the clothes we stood in. Our toys and other belongings remained inside the croft, where Morag would turn them into a shrine to the children she loved and lost. I started to cry and I did not stop.
Normality is a majority concept. I thought my life was normal because it was my experience and that of those I knew and loved. Only later, when I was able to make comparisons, did I realise how abnormal our lives were. When people who live normal lives are on the threshold of something new, they describe it as looking forward. Up until that juncture in my short and troubled life, I had never been conscious of looking forward to anything. Such an emotion implies that there is hope, the promise of something, anything. Peace? Contentment? Love? I had never entertained the possibility of finding anything other than the next episode of uncertainty. My time on Uist had taken the edge off that emotion, but it was ever present. My view of the world had never truly been elevated above ground zero and the horizon was an alien, unreachable destination. It did not, however, prevent me from yearning. My dilemma was that I wasn’t sure what to yearn for. I knew, somehow, that I wanted, needed something that had not yet visited me, but without having a means of comparisons or terms of reference by which to judge, it remained an imponderable mystery.
I had been on Uist for less than two years, but such was the influence it had on me that even when I thought very hard about it I could not conjure up a vision of what had gone before. The past was a film running in my mind, but it was an old movie, sepia-toned, blurred and moving far too quickly to make any sense.
By now, I knew that we were being reunited with Ma, a mythical creature, with her long, lustrous hair, dark eyes and faded glamour. I knew her only through what I had been told. If the knowledge that I had brothers and sisters had been a surprise, the fact that I had a mother was a revelation. I had thought I was an orphan. For as long as I could remember I had no real sense of having a mother, merely a succession of female figures who, to a greater or lesser degree, offered me security and care. Morag had come closest to fulfilling the role. However, very soon, I, and my brothers and sisters, would be reunited with the woman who, in spite of her manifold problems, clung to some notion of keeping a family together. I am still not sure why, and I don’t think she was either. I don’t believe she could have articulated her reasons, but I cling to the belief that there existed within her some degree of mothering instinct that would not allow her, no matter how bad things were, to relinquish her brood.
On that day, in the aircraft, when the sun sat high above the clouds in a place that is for ever summer, I could not know how bad things were going to get. I was travelling towards yet more uncertainty, an uncertainty that would characterise my life until the blessed moment when, many years hence, I would escape the horrors that it bred. As the aircraft made its descent through the white clouds and back into the more familiar grey world of my experience, a scintilla of hope began to form in my mind. It would, as always, be extinguished before too long, but in that moment I was comforted by the knowledge that she was waiting for us. Our mother. And from somewhere deep inside me a kind of love for her was dragged to the surface. Can one ever not love one’s mother, no matter how neglectful or remote or cruel? Many good women had looked after me, but this woman was my mother, and my mother wanted me.
It was 1966, and many of the inhabitants of the great industrial metropolis of Glasgow had been transplanted from their deprived and dirty inner-city ghettos into the vast new council housing estates on the periphery of the old city. The city’s fathers had burst with pride when they created the housing schemes in the countryside, into which a beleaguered population could escape, with the promise of a new life far from the slums. It was a time of hope. Who was I to swim against the tide? I ran forward to meet my mother. I should have known that hope always comes with an expiry date.
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, TheLast 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!’
I leaped from the bed to the kitchen and filled a jam jar, spilling half of its contents on the floor as I dashed back to the bedroom. Irene tried to force some of the water into Ma’s mouth, but it dribbled from her lips onto her nightdress.
I had lost all hope when, like the sound of a trumpet blast from the cavalry riding to the rescue, Jeanette’s voice called from the front door, ‘Irene! Davie!’ By some miracle, known only to the forces that protected our mother, Jeanette had come to visit. Jeanette always knew what to do! We had missed Jeanette’s presence and influence on life at Katewell Avenue. Just a few weeks before, she had moved out of the family home for reasons I’ll explain.
Jeanette, however, hadn’t abandoned us. She knew that Ma was a terrible mother and she returned often to ensure that we were being looked after. This was one of those visits, and I have never been so glad to see Jeanette as I was on that dreadful morning. She took charge immediately. It was in the days before telephones in the home were commonplace, so Irene was despatched to the police station and I was told to dry my tears and go to the living room. I sat on the sofa, rocking, wrapped in my own arms, listening to Jeanette’s entreaties. Suddenly, there was a groan. It was Ma! Jeanette’s voice, soothing and authoritative, was bringing her back. The groans grew louder, drowned now by the sound of an approaching siren. Within minutes, the house was filled with big men in uniforms. Irene had by now returned, and Jeanette emerged from the bedroom. We three sat together on the sofa as Ma was carried from the house on a stretcher.
‘It’s OK, Davie,’ said Jeanette. ‘It’s OK.’
The three of us moved to the window, in time to see Ma being carried from the building into the back of the ambulance. Her eyes were open, but she saw nothing. The vehicle drove off quickly and disappeared round the corner of Katewell Avenue. It was 10 a.m. on 4 January 1969, and, unknown to us, it was the beginning of the end for us as a family. The hospital doctors would pump her stomach of the tranquillisers, but she would be transferred to a psychiatric hospital and kept there for almost a year. I wouldn’t see her again until she visited me at Quarriers.
For the moment, the Social Work Department’s immediate task was to ensure the welfare of her two youngest children. Jeanette was of course settled in her own place. For reasons I’ll soon explain, Jimmy and Johnny were no longer in the picture. Irene and I were the problem. The solution was to put us with a foster family until the officials decided on our long-term care. Ma’s short journey to hospital that day would be the catalyst for our much longer journey … to Hell. Irene and I would soon be on our way to Quarriers.
When I look back, I realise that Ma’s overdose had been a long time coming, the result of a combination of heartache, weakness and her inability to cope with the family dysfunction she created. As I said, Jimmy and Johnny had gone by the time Ma was taken to hospital. Their departure – to approved schools for delinquents – had been the final blow to her fragile psyche. Jimmy had been breaking into the homes of our neighbours, stealing shillings from their electricity meters. It had been a bitter-cold winter, and with Ma’s home-economic skills our money had, as usual, been spent on other things. Jimmy was not unlike his father in character, a smoker and a bit of gambler, but there was enough good in him to bring home some of the stolen shillings to put in our meter. During that winter of 1968 we were kept warm with ‘stolen’ electricity. The house was a lot colder when Jimmy went away on what Ma described to us rather quaintly as a ‘long holiday’.
Jimmy’s departure had been a blow, but it was the loss of Ma’s beloved Johnny that had tipped her over the edge. He had eventually been caught stealing the doormats that masqueraded as carpet in our home. Johnny might have been a thief, but you could not fault his sense of honour. He gave himself up to the police after his friend and partner-in-crime was arrested. Poor Johnny … all he wanted was to make our home more comfortable. He was sent to a particularly tough approved school. That experience, added to what our father had done to him, affected Johnny for the rest of his life. He would never speak of those days, even when he was an adult. It was years later, after I had emerged from my own nightmare at Quarriers, that I realised Johnny had probably suffered as I had. We shared the same haunted look, claimed the same dark secret. We differed only in one respect: I survived. Poor Johnny didn’t.
The last days of Johnny’s tragic life will find their proper place later in this story, but for now, when I recall Ma’s overdose, I realise it was arguably one of the most defining days of my life. I remember that look in Ma’s eyes as she was being taken away in the ambulance. There was no light in them. They were unfocused, looking at something only she could see. They were certainly not looking in our direction. If truth be told, I know now that Ma hadn’t been looking in our direction in any meaningful way for a long time. If she had been a normal mother, putting our needs first, she might have recognised that her actions were placing us on a dangerous path. If she had cared, how different might our lives have been? If only … if only … but what can you say? If she had realised her shortcomings, she wouldn’t have been our ma.
Ma had deserted us before, when we were tiny children living in Townhead. While Da was in prison, she was in Surrey, flitting in and out of mental hospitals. During one of her lucid periods, she began a relationship with a Scotsman living in England, a single man, who gave Ma the impression that he would marry her, absorb her family and we would all live happily ever after. It was this that had given her the confidence to come back to Glasgow and demand the return of her children. The social workers had agreed, promising Ma a new home for her and us, with the proviso that she divorce our father. Ma filed for divorce and the die was cast. It’s never failed to amaze me how our lives are washed back and forth on the tides of the whims of others. How many lives were affected, and in some cases ruined, by Ma’s belief in the empty promises of a person who is described in our Social Work reports as her ‘paramour’?
If I’ve learned one thing, it is that one should not cling to a notion of what might have been but deal only with what is. However, today, I am haunted still by the pain caused to Morag and Willie by our departure from their care. They had taken us into their lives and the heart of their community. What might have been had we stayed? Even before Morag and Willie, there had been the two doctors who had wanted to adopt me. What might have been then? Alas, you play with the cards you are dealt, and right now we were dealing with life at 34 Katewell Avenue. Let the heartache begin …
* * *
The Dansette record player throbbed to the sound of Long John Baldry singing that very song. I can’t think of a time in my childhood when Ma’s Valium-fuelled taste in music did not reflect the reality of our lives. It was bizarre, as if we had been conjoined to a weird country-and-western parallel universe. From the safety of adulthood, there are moments when it makes me almost laugh out loud. If I could release the laughter, there would be no joy in it. It would be the sound of someone witnessing the blackest of black comedy. Ma lived in a world of her own, where social workers and any figure of authority were the enemy. A knock at the door froze us, like gazelles sensing the approach of a stalking lion. The most feared visitor was the ‘tally man’ – a Glasgow term for an illegal money lender. ‘Tally’ is vernacular for counting money – for example, ‘Tally up what I owe you.’ Ma loved new things, but she was too impatient and profligate to save for what she wanted; she wanted everything immediately. The tally man was only too happy to oblige – at a massive rate of interest. He also had no scruples about breaking your legs if you didn’t pay in time, even if the legs belonged to a woman. In those days, normal kids were driven behind the sofa by the monsters on Dr Who. In our case it was a big man with cropped hair, a scarred face and a brass knuckle-duster, and you thought Daleks were tough?
The result of Ma’s profligacy was that she was constantly in debt. Hiding from money lenders, the rent man and even the little man who ran the corner shop became a way of life. Ma owed everyone. We would be sent on errands with no money to pay for her cigarettes or other ‘messages’. Ma reckoned shopkeepers would feel uncomfortable turning a child away. She was often correct in that assertion, but when they refused you turned away with a sense of embarrassment that gnawed at you all the way home.
Perhaps my sense of embarrassment indicated my growing isolation from those around me. I don’t know why, but I was never part of what psychologists would now describe as my peer group. I never became ‘pure Drumchapel’. I remained a novice in terms of street-smarts. It was arguably caused by the time I spent with the middle-class doctors, followed by the otherworldliness of Uist, which had left me with the aptitude of a much younger child. This was exemplified one day by a visit from the dreaded tally man. I was in the kitchen when I heard a knock at the door. This was an angry knock, an attempt to remove the door from its hinges rather the signal for the arrival of a visitor. The rest of the family scattered as I walked into the hall and opened the front door.
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