knuckle-duster, and you thought Daleks were tough?
The result of Ma’s profligacy was that she was constantly in debt. Hiding from money lenders, the rent man and even the little man who ran the corner shop became a way of life. Ma owed everyone. We would be sent on errands with no money to pay for her cigarettes or other ‘messages’. Ma reckoned shopkeepers would feel uncomfortable turning a child away. She was often correct in that assertion, but when they refused you turned away with a sense of embarrassment that gnawed at you all the way home.
Perhaps my sense of embarrassment indicated my growing isolation from those around me. I don’t know why, but I was never part of what psychologists would now describe as my peer group. I never became ‘pure Drumchapel’. I remained a novice in terms of street-smarts. It was arguably caused by the time I spent with the middle-class doctors, followed by the otherworldliness of Uist, which had left me with the aptitude of a much younger child. This was exemplified one day by a visit from the dreaded tally man. I was in the kitchen when I heard a knock at the door. This was an angry knock, an attempt to remove the door from its hinges rather the signal for the arrival of a visitor. The rest of the family scattered as I walked into the hall and opened the front door.
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