Читать книгу No More Silence - David Whelan - Страница 6

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.