Handstands In The Dark: A True Story of Growing Up and Survival (4 page)

WE OCCASIONALLY WENT
on holiday in the summer months when Dad got time off work. Then too, I was safe from my Uncle. One year, we all went to St Andrews on the Fife coast – the home of golf. It had one of the most beautiful graveyards in Scotland and I had a real fascination for graveyards – I felt very calm and safe in them. The graves in St Andrews were really, really old and the bereaved wrote on the stones with such passion in old-fashioned writing that I couldn’t quite understand and gave great details that weren’t necessary like
Here lies a dentist
, which isn’t really important when someone’s dead. I would spend hours slowly walking round reading all the ancient stones. I found one that told about the death of a nurse. I was appalled. Until then, I thought nurses did not die because they knew about medicine. I spent hours afterwards asking my parents about death.

‘Does
everybody
die, Dad?’

‘Everybody dies, Janey,’ my Dad told me. ‘We’re all born to die. Everybody.’

‘When am I going to die, Dad?’

‘We’re all going to die sometime, Janey.’

I looked at my Mammy.

‘Everybody dies,’ she told me. ‘All of us.’

* * *

At home I was always surrounded by alcohol. In our street, there were a few shebeens – drinking dens – someone’s apartment where all the local alcoholics and hard drinkers would congregate to get truly drunk when the pubs were closed. The door to a shebeen was never closed, so we kids would troop in and wander among the seated, standing, stumbling and sometimes unconscious drinkers, trying to collect empty bottles to take back to the shops. In those days you got money or sweets for returning the bottles. Once, my pals and I went into a shebeen next to my home, stepped over all the drunken people lying on the floor and peeped under a bed looking for bottles but, instead, we saw about five tiny dead kittens being eaten by the cat and dog of the house. It was like a jigsaw of dismembered, half-chewed paws, limbs and body parts which you couldn’t match. Wee black and white kittens’ heads with glassy, staring eyes and bloodied necks rolled about as the cat and dog ate their bodies. I ran screaming out of the building.

Later that same day, a man was murdered in that same room on that same bed. A drunken argument broke out, a man was accused of hurting a woman in the house and someone killed him with an axe which we children found when we were digging around on wasteground at the back. Later, we stood outside the house as the police – always called ‘the Polis’ in Glasgow – questioned local kids. At first, I thought we were in trouble for not helping the kittens. I was traumatised over the poor dead cats. The drunk’s death just washed over me and the rest of the kids. We never told the Polis about the axe. Drunkenness and its consequences were just accepted as normal.

I hated alcohol and blamed it for most of my problems. I hated to see my Dad drunk; he lost all control and all common sense. My Mammy had never been a drinker but now she had a nervous breakdown and became addicted to the Valium prescribed by our GP. It was the 1960s and, when women felt depressed, they brought in Mother’s Little Helper to help carry the burden. Everyone’s mammy in my neighbourhood seemed to be on Valium. Mine became a dull, anxious woman on it. I would come home from school and find her slumped on the floor, completely unconscious. Her stress levels must have been enormous. Each day was a new challenge on the debt trail. On bad days, when she had really bad financial problems, she would go round to various members of her family begging for cash, always hiding it from my Dad who never really knew the full extent of her problems and was left happy in the knowledge that she took care of money matters. The Valium was my Mammy’s only true friend and she always took too many tablets to get herself out of the depression. She couldn’t just take one tablet; she had to be ‘oot o’ it’ – completely unconscious. She became addicted. She used to take me up to other people’s homes where she knew they got prescriptions too and beg tablets off them. She got the doctor to prescribe Valium for me so she could get more tablets for herself. Maybe she had more demons to grapple with than I knew about. Dad was always shouting at her and got so angry with her doctor he eventually went to the surgery to confront the man who kept his wife doped up.

‘Women need these tablets,’ the doctor told him.

‘She is
unconscious
!’ my Dad yelled. ‘Fallin’ doon all aboot the place. She cannae cook. Unconscious. She’s
fucked
!’

So my Dad beat up the doctor in his surgery. The police were not called; violence was commonplace.

* * *

Sometimes Dad
would
discover some of Mammy’s debt problems – like her forged signature on the insurance books or her wad of pawn tickets or the fact we had a sheriff’s officer coming round to evict us that very day. Mammy’s cash problems just seemed to escalate. One Christmas, she told us to open all our Christmas toys very carefully so as not to rip the boxes – they had to be pawned that week.

‘Dad is never to know,’ she told us.

Over the next few months, I was anxious in case Dad asked to play a board game with me, because I knew it would not be out of the pawn shop until mid-June. I had no idea what Mammy did with the cash. But the Valium addiction clearly wasn’t helping. She knew this and tried to come off the pills cold turkey, which was a mistake. One night, she and I were alone in front of our big roaring coal fire and I was standing looking through an album of tea cards someone had given me. They told bizarre
Believe It Or Not
stories of people and events from around the world. One of the cards was about a flea circus in America and I was engrossed.
All those hundreds of fleas I have had on my body and in my hair and I killed them all!
The picture showed tiny fleas riding in tiny chariots.
I could have had my own flea circus
, I thought.
And people would have paid me to come and see it – Janey Barnum’s Flying Circus. I could have made money!

Suddenly, my Mammy screamed. I turned and saw her throw her head back. I stood rooted to the spot and watched in the detached way I did when I was being abused. She was having an epileptic fit. She fell down and thrashed about. I seemed to cut all my senses off. It was as if it was not really happening. She was wearing really cheap black plastic shiny knee-length boots and, in the throes of the fit, one of her feet went into the open coal fire. Her screams were deafening but I remained stock-still and watched her burn and thrash about. Her foot stayed in the flames, the plastic by now morphing into a grotesque shape around her charred flesh. I started gasping for breath as the whole scene played out before me, as if I was watching it on television. Eventually I ran and left her – with her foot still burning in the fire – to get my big sister Ann who was downstairs in a friend’s flat. My sister was 13 years old at the time; I was nine. She ran back in with me and pulled my Mammy’s burning leg from the coals and ripped off the boot, taking some skin and flesh with it. The smell of burning plastic and meat was overwhelming. My sister looked so in control but inside she was panicking too. My Mammy was taken to hospital, having suffered terrible burns to her ankle and foot. When she came home, she had to endure weeks of bandage changes and terrible burn treatments. Then she was taken to a mental hospital for a ‘rest’.

I felt awful guilt. I felt I should have helped her. I felt a complete failure as a daughter and as a person.

* * *

The asylum was in the north of Glasgow. Whenever I visited her, I found she was making tea or chatting to some other woman who sat in a complete daze. I was terrified that Mammy would end up like those other women in there. During one of my visits, in the corner of her ward sat a poor wee woman with a glazed look in her eye who held a book in her hand and she was trying in vain to flick over a page. Time after time she lifted the paper up but let it drop without turning it over. This drove me to distraction and eventually I got up and flicked it over for her. The woman looked at me in amazement, then screamed into my face. She went ballistic and threw a big hysterical tantrum. I sat there, a small child, scared and guilty that I had hurt someone yet again. The nurses came over and told me:

‘Just stay back. Don’t help her. Stay close to your mother.’

The images still haunt my nightmares.

I can’t remember when the nightmares started, but they are with me today as an adult and they started when I was a small child. Sometimes I am very small, looking up at people with big feet stamping on me; big cats dragging me in their teeth as I try so hard to shout out and be heard; and I die in my dreams. I see my funeral; I lie in a coffin and will my body to get up out of the box but my stiff limbs are frozen in rigor mortis; I hear the dark demons whispering in my ears, but the box is closed and no one can hear me.

* * *

By the time Mammy was in the mental asylum, my Uncle David Percy had decided on a new game. He would hold me down and choke me until I passed out and I would regain consciousness while he was raping me. Today, in my nightmares, I can still see his face as he strangles me into unconsciousness.

* * *

While my Mammy stayed on in the asylum for an unknown length of time, I was carted off to live with an aunt of my Dad’s in Uddingston on the outskirts of Glasgow, a big open wooded area totally different to Shettleston. There were lots of houses which all had front
and
back doors
and
upstairs sections. I had never lived in a home where the family ate so much and bathed twice a week. My aunt and her husband were very kind to me and made me feel very welcome. They had a son – my cousin – around the same age as me. Their house was very clean and they even had a rabbit and a strawberry patch in the garden. I was mesmerised by the total difference of lifestyle. Within days, I had eaten all the strawberries and accidentally killed the rabbit. It was not really my fault; I picked it up to stroke it and the animal got a fright. When it struggled I dropped it. And then I picked it up and accidentally strangled it by holding it too tight round the neck. It was very old. I can still remember the total shame I felt when I saw my cousin cry. I thought
Only I can make everyone hate me within a couple of days
.

My aunt did her very best to fit me into their lifestyle but she was disgusted by the fact I was lice-ridden and very mouthy and I soon discovered she had a secret. Alcohol. What I found weird was that she was a
secret
drinker – before this, nobody in my direct family had ever been ashamed of their booze problem. After I discovered my aunt’s secret drinking, I grew to like my cousin – we had at least that one thing in common – and, during that summer, we would go out to the nearby woods with his pals, but I found he was not very confrontational and could not fight for himself. One day, a big friend of his walked us into a dark, densely wooded area and grabbed at me.

‘We don’t think you are a girl!’ he snarled. ‘You have short hair and you always wear trousers and you play football! Show us your fanny or we will call you a boy!’

The big boy pushed me and told my cousin to hold me down while they had a look at my fanny. I was way too fast for them and was annoyed my cousin did not defend me. I grabbed a large stone, leapt at the big boy and whacked him on the side of the head. He squealed like a little girl and I just kept hitting him around the head –
crack! crack! crack!
– cracking the stone down on his skull;
he had tried to look at my fanny!
My cousin had to pull me off him. The big boy bled so badly that I had to wrap my T-shirt around his bloodied head and we had to take him home. His mother was furious and, despite my protestations of self-defence, I was not believed. She marched down the street, confronted my aunt at her front door and, within hours, I was back in Shettleston with my Dad.

In the meantime, my Mammy was benefitting from her stay at the mental asylum. She resisted any real therapy and ended up helping the nurses organise the in-patients’ routine. Helping other people helped her. She would chat to everyone in her usual familiar way, pretending to herself that she was not really ‘one of them’ – only a helper temporarily staying in a mental ward who happened to have some burns on her legs and a bit of a stress problem. She got to know all the nurses by their first names, something that wasn’t common in those days. They genuinely liked her and had great laughs with her. She came out with a whole catalogue of funny stories about all the poor women she’d met and how they were all totally mental.

I was overjoyed to have her back home. I loved to hang around with her and go shopping every Saturday. I liked the local Asian corner shop in Darleith Street, the next road to Kenmore Street, which was owned by a wee Indian man called Aslim – Mammy took to calling him ‘Asylum’ and he politely corrected her for at least the next eight years. But I hated the local butcher’s shop round the corner from Darleith Street. It had beautiful hand-painted ceramic tiles on the walls depicting cows and bulls grazing happily in a field and standing beneath lush trees with blue skies in the background. I would look at these stunning animals in the picture and then at the big scabby dead and bloody carcasses hanging on hooks in the shop. I hated the dead animals touching my face, which they sometimes did. The butcher’s shop smelled of blood and had dirty sawdust on the floor. One day, when it took forever to get served and I got really bored, I took a look up inside one big cow carcass. I actually stuck my head in the animal’s hollow flank and slowly climbed up into its ribcage until I was completely inside the dead beast. When I was completely encased, I boomed out in a low, deep voice:

‘This is the cow talking! You must all stop eating me or I will haunt you! MOOOO!’

There were gasps of horror from all the women in the queue.

My Mammy was embarrassed and angry. All the women shouted at me as she pulled me out of the cow. I was all greasy and bloodied. The butcher came and slapped me round the head, at which point my hungry dog Major, who was waiting outside for his weekly scraps, ran in snarling and took a bite at the butcher but missed. He then realised the cow was a better target – and tastier – bit into the carcass and hung onto its sides as everyone tried to remove both mad dog and child from the shop. The butcher yelled at my Mammy: