Handstands In The Dark: A True Story of Growing Up and Survival (7 page)

‘I’m sorry, Mammy!’ Mij would sob to her and they’d hug and be sorry and sad together.

He was truly lovable when he was good, but Mij was insecure and was having problems outside the home too. He was easily led, broke into a shop with some friends and was sent to a local Borstal home with a monkey-puzzle tree outside. Mammy was grief-stricken and visited him weekly for about a year until he came home. The only real effect Borstal had on him was that, afterwards, he started putting on even more weight.

My other brother Vid, despite having tried to sell me to the paedophile caretaker, was bright at school but not really interested in education. He tried his best to keep the family together and would help by going out and stealing food and money for Mammy if Mij had been particularly nasty to her.

In all this madness, my schoolwork began to suffer. I started missing two or three days a week – sometimes because I had no lunch money or because Mammy asked me to run errands instead of going to school – and eventually my Guidance Teacher, Mr Burgess, started to ask questions about my home life. I sat with him in a bare office containing only a desk and two chairs. He offered me a cigarette, but I told him I didn’t smoke and, for the first time in my life, I told someone something about myself.

‘There’s trouble in the house and I don’t think I can cope with it any more,’ I told him.

I fell apart and cried.

‘You have bruises,’ he said gently.

‘My brother is hitting my Mammy,’ I explained to him, speaking slowly. As I spoke, the frustration started to spill out of me; it was like a wall of grief coming down. I stuttered out about Dad leaving and Mij hitting us all and then, just I was just about to open the floodgates to reveal what my Uncle was doing to me, I took a breath and stopped. I felt this kind, caring man, Mr Burgess, could sort it all out for me, but fear held me back. I had already told my own Mammy years ago and she had been angry with me. Mr Burgess looked at me with the saddest eyes I had ever seen in an adult. He held onto my hands and tried to wipe away my tears at the same time. He told me:

‘If someone hits you or attacks you, Janey, go to the police. Don’t let anybody hurt you. Always go to the police.’

I sat there knowing this was not an option: Mammy would go mad at me if I ‘told’ on Mij, but I pretended to accept Mr Burgess’s advice. I promised to try and get more schooling in. He promised to keep an eye on me. I begged him not to get social workers involved. By this time, both my brothers had social workers coming to the house. I didn’t want to give my Mammy another problem.

* * *

I had no school blazer, but I finally got an anorak and sewed the school badge on the breast of the lurid blue quilted material to make sure Mammy could not pawn it. Even so, it was in the pawnshop four weeks after the summer holidays began – with the badge still on. Mammy must have persuaded the pawnbroker he could sell it to someone else from the same school for some other poor kid.

On one of my twice-a-month visits to my Dad during that winter, he asked me:

‘Where’s yer coat? It’s freezing cold.’

‘I don’t have a coat, Dad.’

‘And why are ye wearing open plastic beach sandals?’

I was 13 and all the other girls were wearing fashionable high platform wedges. He took me into Glasgow city centre and bought me a coat, some new jumpers and shoes. He was puzzled when he saw me immediately scuff the shoes and tear the labels out of the woollens. It soon dawned on him that I was damaging the goods so that they could not be taken back to the store for a cash refund. We kissed goodbye and I hopped on the bus home, blissful in the knowledge that Mammy would shout at me for not getting cash, but that the clothes would stay mine. That weekend, when Dad came round to our home, he must have had a showdown with her, because she went berserk at me when he left:

‘Tell yer Daddy
every
thing! Go on! Tell yer Daddy
everything
, will ye? Tell yer fucking wonderful Daddy that cares so much aboot ye! Yer Daddy that fucked off and left you! Yer Daddy that leaves ye here!’

And she slapped me round the head a few times. I was left feeling torn by the whole thing, I was mad at my Dad for leaving me with all this shit; angry at Mammy for not being able to cope.

* * *

One week shortly afterwards, the school organised a sponsored swim in aid of a charity. The kids had to collect sponsorship cash, swim the lengths promised, then hand the cash over to the school. On the day of the swim, a friend and I decided to skip English class and just fool around under the pretence we were going to see the gym teacher – we just hung around the toilets laughing and running about. We thought we had got off scot-free but, later, the headmistress came stropping into my biology class and demanded that the friend and I come outside into the corridor. Once there, the headmistress grabbed me roughly by the neck of my shirt, pulled me up to her face and said:

‘You are a thief, Currie. You are nothing but a common thief!’

She marched the other girl and me up to the school office and told us that, when we had skipped English class, another girl’s sponsorship money had been stolen.

‘You lied about your reasons for leaving class. You did not go to see Miss Stewart in the gym. So I know you are
thieves
!’

I protested my innocence: ‘But I wa—’

The headmistress slapped me hard on the right cheek and the pain rang through my head. ‘You’re a thief!’ she screamed right into my face. ‘You’re nothing but a common thief! That girl collected money for charity and you stole it!’

I turned and ran from the school and belted all the way home. I was in tears when I got there and blurted the whole story out to my Mammy. She looked me straight in the eyes and asked: ‘
Did
you take the money, Janey?’

‘No, Mammy, I never took it.’ I felt my own anger rise at the same rate as my Mammy’s. She lit a cigarette, grabbed her coat and marched me back to confront the headmistress.
At last my Mammy was my hero! She would save the day!

All the way along the road to the school, Mammy was puffing on her cigarette, muttering to herself: ‘Hit you, did she? … Fucking hit you, did she?’ and then she would mutter: ‘I’ll fucking show
her
what fucking hitting is.’

Slowly, it dawned on me that my Mammy was walking so fast and her voice was getting so vicious that she was going to lose her temper completely. I stopped her halfway to the school and pleaded: ‘Mammy, please don’t get too upset. Don’t swear. Remember, I have to stay at the school. Just take it easy, Mammy.’

She paused long enough to take one deep drag on her cigarette and to spit out the words: ‘No one hits my wee lassie. No one! I mean it! And she won’t hit you ever again!’

By now, I was shit-scared of the whole thing and began to wish I had never told her about what had happened. But it was too late. We were already at the door of the school office and she was dragging me in behind her, demanding to speak to the headmistress. Out of the big brown door appeared my dragon headmistress, all long tweed outfit, coiffed blonde hair and polyester white scarf, strutting for a showdown. I stood there as this large woman eyed my wee Mammy. I followed the tweedy woman’s eyes down. Mammy had unkempt grey hair pulled to the side, no make-up on her lined face and wore a very shabby pale blue cotton coat, no tights and cheap brown plastic shoes which her toes had partly burst through. I realised at that moment what other people saw when they looked at my Mammy and for one awful second my Mammy saw the look of distaste in the headmistress’s eyes as well. I felt sad for my Mammy. One disdainful look from this figure of authority and she almost crumbled. Mammy had been about to launch into her big defence speech, but the tweedy woman’s nasty look momentarily floored her.

After that fleeting second passed, though, she pulled herself up to her full height and asked matter-of-factly:

‘Why did you hit my daughter?’

‘She is a thief.’

Both women then dived into a shouting match, accusations flying from Mammy, the headmistress drowning her out with her side of the story; Mammy eventually cornered the woman into a lame admission:

‘Yes, I pushed Janey.’

Mammy took one step back and punched the woman hard in the middle of her face. My elegantly dressed headmistress went flying backwards, hitting and tumbling over a chair to land flat on the floor with her long tweed skirt right up over her chest revealing light brown tights with white knickers underneath. Mammy jumped on her and started delivering more punches into the woman’s head with her wee fists. I stood totally gobsmacked. The school office burst into wild activity and, as Mammy was dragged off the headmistress, the woman lay on the floor, gasping, with her hair pulled up and tufts of it on the floor. Mammy looked down at her snarling: ‘Charge me! Get the Polis! I hit an adult and you hit a child! You hit my daughter and she has a witness!’

With that, Mammy turned on her heels, grabbed me by the hand and marched out of the school leaving everyone in the office in a state of shock. The police were never called. The girl whose cash had been ‘stolen’ admitted she spent the money on food because she was hungry and the headmistress told everyone at our school assembly that there had been no theft. I sat smugly as I was vindicated and my Mammy became a legend at Eastbank Academy. The aftermath was that the headmistress and my Mammy had another meeting. My Mammy came out and told me:

‘Look, she’s accepted that you never stole the money, but you dodged a class and I punched that cow, so you’re going to have to take six of the belt.’

I was given six lashes with a leather strap on my right hand and the headmistress looked like a crazed animal when she was hitting me. Even the assistant head, who was present, looked unsettled when he saw her eyes. I stood there, aged 13, thinking
How many other people are going to hit me? What is it about me?

* * *

After that, my Mammy just kept taking more Valium and lurching from one crisis to another. At least the State made sure the rent was covered and I now became eligible for free school meals. So, in a way, things were a bit easier on the cash front. She made sure we had electricity by getting a pal of hers to break into the central panel for our block and illegally connect us directly – so we never had to pay another bill except on one occasion when an Electricity man spotted the wire. She was prosecuted and ended up in Glasgow Central Court where she turned into Greta Garbo and Rita Hayworth for the day. Watching all those angst-ridden movies on Sunday afternoon TV had paid off. She wrung her hands and cried:

‘Ma own mammy left me in ma teens an now I’ve got ma own weans and I’ve had a nervous breakdown and I’m havin’ the change of life!’ She always mentioned her womb when she wanted to make people uncomfortable. ‘And here’s me,’ she wailed, ‘and ma man’s ran away and left us all and I’ve got a wee lassie at school!’ She held her hand to her forehead and gave them their full money’s worth.

I sat in court thinking
Fucking hell, Mammy! Where did you get that voice from?
She did everything short of looking up to the skies to see her sons flying off to die in the Second World War.

She was given a warning and was told never to reconnect her own supply of electricity ever again. All the way back from the court to the bus stop, the two of us laughed.

‘What a performance I did there, eh, Janey?’ she said with some pride. ‘They all had to feel sorry for me when they saw me fallin’ apart.’

‘Yes, Mammy.’

It was only a few steps later that I realised everything she’d said (apart from the ‘change of life’) was true. She’d performed the tragic role of someone who was exactly who she was.

After this, Mammy fell into an even deeper depression; she started really going mad with the drugs and accumulated even more ‘Valium Pals’ around her: other women who were equally doped up all day on tablets. Sometimes I would come home from school and find them all in our dirty living room with the graffiti on the walls, huddled around our wee fire talking gibberish.

‘There’s a snake sliding up that wall, Janey! Hit the spider off! There’s a spider on it … There’s spiders! … There’s spiders everywhere!!’

I kept to myself more and more, sharing my thoughts only with Major. We would go on long walks as I poured it all out to him; he must have been fed up listening to my shit life. Even dogs have their limits. Some mornings, when Mammy let him out for a while on his own, he would try to follow me to school. This worried me a lot, as he was always hungry and did bite people at random. I often had to chase him back up the street, hoping he could make it home without snarling at someone.

* * *

By this time, I had a sort of boyfriend. He was my Mammy’s pal’s son and we would hang out together but I avoided the contact side of the relationship as I felt I was not worthy of having affection given to me and I was scared that the sex situation might arise. I really liked and was very physically attracted to some of the boys at my school, but would never have had the nerve to ask them out. I had absolutely no self-confidence. I did not believe I could be worthy of anyone’s attention at all.

My sister Ann already had a steady boyfriend and was working as a sewing machinist in a factory; she was 18 and in love. In that one year, she and Jay got engaged, she got pregnant and they got married.

Dad was now living with Aunt Rita and Uncle Robert at Redcar, a small seaside town in North Yorkshire. He came up to Glasgow for Ann’s wedding and it was so good to see him, just as it was great to see Ann happy with Jay, but there was a problem. Jay was a Catholic. It was not
such
a big deal, but enough to create some tension in the family: his Catholicism hung in the air like a bad smell. When she gave birth to her son Jay Junior in July that year, I was ecstatic: he was so tiny and beautiful. I loved him on sight and would spend hours just looking at his face.

My Uncle David Percy also got married that year. His wife Margaret was also a pregnant bride. She had a son around the same time as Ann. I liked Margaret: she was really just a teenager like Ann trying to make the best of her life. My Uncle David Percy and Margaret lived next door to his father – my grandfather – Granda Davy Percy. I would visit Margaret when Uncle David was out of the house – this was easy to do as Granda Davy would tell me if his son was at home or not. We both kept up the façade of happy families; he would make a point of being nice to me in front of his wife. When we were accidentally alone for a moment, he would mostly give me a silent, sinister stare; sometimes he would look out the side of his eyes and snigger at me. I never thought once of telling Margaret about the abuse, I just carried on as if it was all in the past and part of a big bad dream.