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 –
