Where There is Evil (11 page)

Granny Jenny had moved to a tiny sheltered house in Bellshill. My mother phoned her every day, and I visited regularly. I said nothing when I noticed that pictures I had given her of my family
disappeared. I guessed she had sent them to Leeds. As she reached her nineties, and eventually Alexander was her last living child, she sometimes became pensive. Robbie, her favourite, she mourned
openly, but once she discussed Alexander. She pondered on the terrible things he had done. When I looked at her quizzically, she added hastily, ‘I’m just meaning the awful things he pit
your mammy through, hen. He pit ye all through hell, and me and Grandpa, tae, God rest his soul. Aye, he wis certainly awfy stupid.’

Renowned for her sense of humour, that day she was depressed. ‘Wicked, wicked,’ she repeated to me, ‘but all of us love our ain. Ye can’t help lovin’ you and yours,
even when ye know they’ve—’ She broke off and wiped her eyes. She motioned me closer to her chair.

‘Even when they’ve what?’ But whatever she had been about to confide, she had thought better of it.

Her bright blue eyes dropped from mine. ‘Och, leave it.’ She waved me away dismissively. ‘Sometimes ye’re better tae pit things behind ye, and not stir it all back up.
Mak me a cuppa tea, Sandra, hen.’

I decided she had meant the way my father had jettisoned all responsibility for his first family.

Meanwhile, Ronnie and I saved until we could buy our own home, a feat unheard of in the generation before ours; raising our children in middle-class bungalows rather than the tenements or
council houses familiar to our parents. I enjoyed the early years of parenthood but although I would not say I smothered my children when they were small, I found it hard not to over-protect them.
I could barely let them out of my sight when they were little, and I was always on the alert. I told myself it was normal for a young mother to check constantly who was hanging around the school
gates, or who was speaking to kids. I told myself this was uppermost in my mind because of my primary-school training, from the years of being responsible for large groups of children. I just
couldn’t get out of the habit, that was all.

The day came when I realized the truth about my reluctance to leave my children with other adults. I had returned to full-time work and was now a lecturer in child education in a college.
‘Auntie’ Rosie, our childminder, had my complete trust, and was adored by both of our two children. Her home was just yards from ours, the arrangement suited everyone beautifully.
However, that day when I arrived to collect Lauren, nobody was there. I was told that Rosie had had to go to the dental hospital for emergency treatment; they wouldn’t be long. I was
thunderstruck when Rosie told me later that she had been longer than expected at the clinic, and Ally, her husband, had spent the afternoon with Lauren across the road at the Chambers Street
museum. I started to shake. I blurted out, in a complete panic, that I had only met Ally once or twice, and I heard myself ask: ‘Ally has been checked out by the social work department, too,
hasn’t he? He doesn’t have any kind of criminal record?’

Many months later, when I was able to speak to Rosie about my past, she said that although she’d been offended at the time, what I had said was clearly understandable.

Today, I still insist on knowing where my children are. There is no question of my daughter going off anywhere alone, not even for a country walk. It is, many people say, a sad reflection on the
way society has gone. I don’t agree. The dangers were there before, but they went unrecognized, and now at least, while we know we cannot wrap children in cotton wool, we can give them
mechanisms for self-protection, explain to them that their bodies are their own and that nobody has the right to touch them.

In 1992 life was going well for me. I had a good marriage, two children who seemed popular and well adjusted at their schools in a pleasant suburb of Edinburgh, and I’d
an interesting job. My teaching career had taken a step forward in 1989, when I’d been promoted to senior lecturer, then shortly afterwards to section head. While this brought much more in
the way of administration, I enjoyed it, and attempted to keep a balance between the work I often brought home and the demands of my role as a mother and wife.

After a long, difficult spell, however, when I filled in for almost two years for someone senior to me who was on sick leave, I jumped at the chance of a full week’s training in management
skills, between 3 and 7 February. The seaside hotel venue was in Portobello, close enough to Edinburgh should any family emergency occur. I had a distinct sense that if anything was to go wrong in
the family, it was bound to happen when I was away for any length of time.

Sure enough, it did, but it was not to do with Ross and Lauren. My mother told me when I rang her that my grandmother was ill, and likely to be taken into hospital. Worried, I called Jenny on
the Tuesday of the course, and assured her that if she had to go into hospital, it would be like the other two recent occasions when her cast-iron constitution had astonished doctors and she had
quickly been discharged. I reminded her to eat, and joked that my mother and I marvelled at her appetite: she was the only woman we knew, I said, who could eat a pot of mince and tatties by
herself. Although she laughed, I detected a note of resignation in her voice, as if she knew she wouldn’t come home this time.

‘Och, Ah think that’s me,’ she said, quite unsentimentally. ‘We’ve all got tae go sooner or later, and Ah’ve had a long life, Sandra. If Ah go intae hospital,
Ah dinnae want them pittin’ me on thae drip things tae keep me goin’. That wid jist scunner me. Ah’ve lived lang enough.’

‘Don’t say that, Gran,’ I pleaded. ‘You still get a lot out of life, and you always know what’s going on in the world, not like a lot of old
biddies—’

‘Och, Ah know that,’ she said flatly, ‘but Ah hate hospitals, and it’s time Ah went. Thanks for phoning, hen, I’m glad ye did, so I can say cheerio.’

Later, my mother told me that Granny Jenny’s sense of humour had been intact until the last. She died in Law Hospital, in the early hours of the Friday morning when my course was due to
finish. I received an early-morning phone call from Ronnie and, through my tears, arranged that I would go to Coatbridge and Bellshill later that day to take my mother to Granny Jenny’s home
and discuss what must be done.

Ronnie, though, was unaware that my father had been contacted by the police in Leeds and had already come north. Travelling up by train, he had met up with my cousin, William, and
William’s fiancé e, Lily. All three were now installed in Granny Jenny’s tiny house. Later, I discovered that my father had been unhappy to find that one of my brothers had been
appointed by her as the executor of her will. In other words, she had excluded her only surviving child. He was shocked to discover her bank book had the joint signature of my brother Norman. He
would be the one to sort out her financial affairs.

That Friday morning, 7 February 1992, I struggled to concentrate on the final sessions of the management course. The week had been something of an emotional roller-coaster for everyone involved.
There had been role-play exercises and discussions requiring deep soul-searching, which many of the two dozen or so participants had found as gruelling as I had. Nearly all of us had been tearful
at one point or another, including several men.

Jeanie, the course leader who had come from Bristol, had given us an interpersonal skills exercise mid-week, which had caused me some problems. With a partner, we had to compare the messages
given to us by our parents from an early age. I was stunned at the negative ones I had picked up when I studied the topics of politics, money, relationships, sex, employment, etc. When I looked at
the conflicting messages I had received from my parents in my own childhood, I could not understand what had made them think that they had had anything in common when they first met.

From my mother, I had learnt that: to get anywhere you had to work hard; you had to save the pennies so that the pounds could look after themselves; you had to go to church regularly; sex before
marriage was not only out of the question, it could not be discussed. My father’s philosophies were the opposite: a girl staying on at school was pointless (‘a good job’ in a
factory or shop could always be fixed up by speaking to someone he knew); money was something to spend when it was available, and saving it was none of his business – housekeeping, budgeting
and childcare were women’s responsibilities; church was not necessary unless you had an ulterior motive; and sex was there for the taking whenever and with whom you liked.

Deep within myself, I had acknowledged my memories but knew I had sealed that cupboard long ago.

Only once had it been forced open, just a chink. In 1981, when I was thirty-six, Ronnie and I had gone to live in Pitlochry, in the Scottish Highlands, not long after Lauren’s birth.
Ronnie’s job had taken us there for two years. They were happy years for me: I taught art locally in a private school, helped run the playgroup and participated in the thriving amateur drama
club. Also, I had done something I had wanted to do for years. I had saved money of my own, and decided I would use it to change the one thing I disliked about myself. I underwent surgery in
Glasgow at Bon Secours clinic to have my father’s inheritance removed. When asked what I wanted in place of my own nose, the consultant glanced up when I said, ‘Just one that’s
different
.’

I was pleased with the result, and surprised that virtually nobody noticed what I had done, not even close family members. I rarely gave it a thought afterwards, but no longer cared if
photographs caught me in full profile, as one wedding snap had.

During the exceptional summers of 1982 and 1983, I immersed myself in community drama festivals, and took the children for swimming and picnics in the loveliest of spots. The small town felt so
safe that even in the depths of winter I could return home from babysitting in the early hours and walk back alone through the little wood near our home at the golf course. I could marvel at its
beauty without once feeling fear. Childhood anxieties of being attacked were remote, and I would join with others in agreeing that Pitlochry was typical of communities thirty years ago. It was in a
kind of time warp. I was in a place where everyone knew everyone else, and where folk felt able to let their children play where they liked in the knowledge that they would come to no harm.

Suddenly a bombshell dropped. It was during a panto put on in Pitlochry Town Hall when I was taking the part of principal boy in
Aladdin
that I happened to encounter a former neighbour
from Coatbridge. ‘I remember you, Sandra!’ she remarked at the after-show party. ‘And I remember your dad particularly well. Big, tall, handsome bus driver with dark hair,
right?’

I nodded politely as I passed round food for my friends Ian and Linda. I was about to explain that my parents had divorced in the late sixties when she added, ‘He’d a wee black car,
hadn’t he, and was a great one for the ladies! But I always felt sorry about what happened to him, you know.’

I frowned. She went on to tell me that my father, who I had always thought was in hospital between 1957 and 1959, had been in prison. According to her, he had been sentenced for the rape of a
thirteen-year-old girl, my parents’ babysitter. As the woman chatted, I attempted to act normally, but I felt sick. In fact, I needed a brandy, a drink I rarely touch.

Suddenly it registered with the woman that her revelation had come as a shock to me. ‘I thought you knew,’ was all she could say. ‘You couldn’t miss it at the time, it
was in all the papers.’

‘I’d only be eight,’ I muttered. ‘I never knew.’

Cringing with humiliation, I felt I could not discuss it with my husband. Why not just pretend it had never been said? The discovery, however, preyed on my mind and I resolved to speak to my
mother. I was devastated. How could she, to whom I was so close, hide something so important all these years? I remembered how adults had whispered or stopped talking when I entered rooms. I had
always felt that my father’s absence when I was between the ages of eight and ten had been something shameful. I had been right.

I tackled my mother about the length of time I’d been kept in the dark. I told her how upsetting it had been to learn the truth in my thirties from a near stranger. The information, she
reluctantly confirmed, was correct. My father had served a prison sentence in Saughton, Edinburgh. There had been no long hospital stay. I noticed, however, that she was defensive of her actions
and protective of my father’s behaviour. ‘I was only trying to shield you,’ she said stonily, and then broke down. ‘I thought it was the right thing to do at the time. Then
I always just kept putting it off. But it wasn’t rape. The girl was a teenager who was very promiscuous – she was round all the drivers. Alex was the one who happened to get caught. She
was a wee tart.’

Her last phrase was delivered with a venom most unlike her. It hit me that she blamed the child involved. Astonished, I pointed out that the girl had only been thirteen and my father thirty-six:
was she seriously trying to say he had been led astray? I was not satisfied with the scant details she provided, and later I resolved that I would find out more about the events that had led to his
arrest in December 1956, just before my eighth birthday.

But the opportunity to question her further did not arise easily.

After my initial shock at the conversation I’d had with the woman, I found I was able to put it out of my thoughts, but only for a short time. In my dreams, disturbing images and memories
began to surface. I forced them back: lots of people know someone who’s been in prison, I argued inwardly, it’s something I’ll have to learn to live with. I knew, however, that I
could not reveal to anyone asking me outright why he had served his sentence. ‘I just won’t tell people what it was
for
,’ I resolved.

I tried to talk to Granny Jenny who wouldn’t even look me in the eye. ‘All I’m gonnae say, Sandra, is it’s long past, and I hate talkin’ aboot it, for Ah believe it
jist aboot killed his father. Sanny wis never the same after yer dad – after whit happened. Yer grandfaither wis a different kind o’ man a’ thegither. The one thing Ah can say
aboot Sanny is he died as he lived.
He
never harmed a soul, but he always said yer daddy killed—’