child in a bizarre accident – a horse, which belonged to a rag-and-bone man, kicked her on the head. It could explain a lot – for example, why Ma spent long spells in a mental hospital and why she never had a proper education. She could barely read or write. I have long suspected that she was mildly brain-damaged, which could have led to her deteriorating mental state and the bouts of debilitating depression. It was a combination that made her easy prey for my brutish father. He ‘owned’ her. There were, mercifully, moments of respite from his drunken and abusive rages; he spent a lot of time in jail.
Ma had two brothers, Charlie and Davie, who would appear occasionally to threaten my father with violence if he laid a hand on their sister. Davie had lost one of his legs in a childhood accident. Generations of children played a game known as ‘taking a hudgie’. I don’t know where the word ‘hudgie’ comes from, but the game involved hitching a ride on the back of a moving vehicle, an extremely dangerous escapade. Davie had fallen from the tailgate of a municipal dustcart and been dragged under its wheels. The absence of one of his limbs did not, however, diminish his fighting skills. Ma and my siblings would apparently cower in the corner while he and my father swapped blows. My father was subdued by such encounters, but there was a dreadful inevitability about what would happen when Davie left; my mother would take another beating.
If Ma’s brothers had really wanted to help, they would have physically removed her from Kennedy Street, which would have given her the chance to break free from my father’s tyranny. This was not to be, however, and my uncles soon tired of coming to their sister’s rescue. That suited my father. With no one to protect her, he could continue to use her as a punch bag.
It may seem strange to say such a thing, but according to my sister Jeanette the daily assaults on my mother and siblings were perhaps not the worst form of abuse my father inflicted. Psychological scars run much deeper than physical wounds. Jeanette told me, ‘He brought home women and had sex with them on a camp bed in front of us and Ma! He would roar, “Turn your faces to the wall,” before having loud, uninhibited sex, as we huddled in the bed recess. What kind of woman would consent to undress and have sex in front of a mother and her frightened children? It beggars belief.’
I should explain that this coupling was taking place in a tenement ‘single-end’. Anyone who has not lived in one of these one-room dwellings, so common to the inner cities of the period, cannot appreciate the intimacy of such living conditions. Parents and children shared the same bed, which was in a recess in the wall. If you had delusions of grandeur, you put up a curtain, which was drawn across the area during daytime.
We lived ‘up a close’ – a vernacular term for the common entrance to a tenement, which was used to describe the entire building. Our tenement was four storeys high. There were at least three families on each floor, sharing an outside toilet, which was located on the landing between the staircases. Audiences around the world have laughed at Billy Connolly’s description of life up a close – children crowded into bed with their parents, sleeping under winter coats instead of blankets or duvets – but there was nothing remotely amusing about the reality of such a life.
There was no such thing as privacy, but tenement etiquette demanded that you mind your own business. When my father was beating his family or having sex with trollops, every person in the building would have heard it, but nobody ever interfered – rules of the close.
Jeanette remembers a particularly harrowing episode when the two combined. She said, ‘Da arrived, rolling drunk, with his fancy woman in tow. His floosy was drunk too, giggling foolishly, hanging on his arm. We didn’t know women like this. The women we knew were mothers, grannies. These creatures were from another world. Even street walkers, women who sold their bodies, would not have sunk so low. Whenever Da entered a room, it was filled suddenly with angry noise, bellowing his orders for us to look away. Heaven knows why he felt the need to tell us to look away – he was inches from us! We did our best to hide in the bed recess. Ma shut her eyes tight. Her sense of worthlessness must have been reinforced by these appalling scenes.
‘On one particular occasion, one of his women showed some compassion. Our distress was so evident to her that she left. Dad was enraged – “You can’t even keep those brats quiet!” he shouted. Ma tried to reason with him, but it only served to inflame him. He began beating her. She begged him to stop, but he rained down ever more vicious blows on her, punching her as hard as he could in the stomach. To this day, I am convinced Ma lost an unborn child that night. She was bleeding, the frightening red stain spreading across the bed, increasing our terror. Eventually, he stopped, collapsing onto the bed in a drunken stupor. Even then, Ma would not allow me to go for help for fear of waking him. When she heard him snoring, she relented.’
Jeanette, who was only around six years old at the time, has spent the rest of her life haunted by this episode. Terrified that our mother was dying, she fled from the house and encountered a neighbour in the street. The man ran to a public telephone box and called an ambulance, and the police. They arrived simultaneously. As the ambulance took my mother away, the police dragged my father from the house and threw him into their van. He was still so drunk he didn’t know what he had done. I’m certain that Jeanette saved Ma’s life that night. My sister has no recollection of who looked after us until Ma was released from hospital several days later. By then, Da had returned. With no cooperating witness, the charges against him had been dropped.
It would not be long, however, before the police were back, with a far more serious charge – rape. It was a time to rejoice in the close as a dozen burly policemen bounced him down every stair and off every wall to the ‘paddywagon’. Neighbours cheered and jeered. Women hung out of the windows on every floor, resting on their big, beefy arms, enjoying the spectacle of their hated neighbour being ‘huckled’. No one enjoyed it more than the police, who knew him for the monster he was. He had picked up the woman in a pub and raped her in an alleyway.
I was a babe in arms and too young to be aware of this momentous event in our lives. It was October 1958 and Da was about to be sent to jail for eight years. He was gone – it would only be a matter of weeks before Ma was gone, too. If she had the strength of character of a normal mother, she would have used this respite to take us far away from my monster of a father. Instead, she deserted us, leaving us to heaven knows what fate.
Jeanette vividly remembers the day she left. My sister was sitting in the street outside the tenement, watching the trams trundle past. She heard Ma’s high heels clattering down the stairs. Jeanette looked up and Ma appeared, all dressed up. Her hair was carefully coiffed, piled high in an elaborate beehive. Her lips were a gash of pillarbox-red lipstick, which exactly matched the colour of her coat. She wore black patent-leather stilettos – a sure sign that she was going somewhere special.
‘Where you going all dolled up, Ma?’ Jeanette asked.
‘Mind your own business,’ Ma said sharply. She tottered off on her high heels, looking over her shoulder long enough to say, ‘Look after the children for a while.’
My sister tried to follow Ma, but she boarded a tram heading into the city centre. Even at such a young age, Jeanette knew she couldn’t leave us alone long enough to establish where Ma was going. None of us would see her again for eight years, until the family was brought together in a short-lived and ill-advised reunion. I would learn years later that she had gone to Banstead, in Surrey. God knows why she went there. I can only reason that she wanted to put as much distance as possible between herself and our monstrous father, or perhaps she just didn’t want to bring up five children on her own.
When Ma left, I was still in a pram, Johnny was seven, Jeanette was six, Jimmy was four, and Irene was barely two. Under normal circumstances, one might have expected Johnny to take the lead because he was oldest. It was, however, Jeanette who kept us alive when Ma left. Picture this child, knocking on neighbours’ doors, begging for pennies to feed us. Even at that age, she covered up the fact that Ma was gone.
‘Where’s
