No More Silence - David Whelan

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– and she wore black leather stilettos.

      Where are her wellies? I thought.

      As she bent low to cuddle me, it felt so awkward, angular and unnatural. The mask of white powder and rouge seemed to hide more than her face. My thoughts returned, as they would do for some time, to Morag, until the months and years eventually distanced me from her. When Morag clasped you in one of her fierce embraces, there was warmth in it. This woman, who smelled of smoke curling from the burning Senior Service cigarette in her hand, had no maternal love in her. I kissed a stranger.

      We were all awkward with her, but especially Irene. She refused to go near Ma and hid behind Jeanette. Irene had been devastated by leaving Uist. I would learn her resentment towards Ma was all-encompassing. To her dying day she blamed our mother for us being put in care. Irene could not and would not bond with Ma. She would also blame Ma for the cruelty and abuse we suffered at Quarriers. They had a difficult and fractured relationship, which would endure until Ma’s death, in 1980, when she was just 49.

      When Irene set eyes on Ma and our new home, she began wailing loudly, burying her face in Jeanette’s skirt, resisting all attempts by our mother to comfort her. Johnny and Jimmy, who were older and had clearer memories of Ma, were less awkward and hid behind bravado.

      The social worker, who had escorted us from Glasgow Airport, broke the tension. ‘Right, I’ll put the kettle on,’ she said. ‘This has been a big journey for you all.’ It was an under-statement of massive proportions.

      Ma gave up on Irene and took Jeanette, with Irene still clinging to her, into the bedroom where the two sisters were to share a double bed. Johnny, Jimmy and I were to sleep in a second bedroom. As the oldest, Johnny had the privilege of a single bed, while Jimmy and I would share a double.

      Our address was 34 Katewell Avenue, Drumchapel, Glasgow. This was the neighbourhood of the young Billy Connolly, who would go on to make a living from his ability to translate the barren existence of life on estates such as these into a hugely successful comedy career. The Hollywood actor James McAvoy, a star of such films as Atonement, The Last King of Scotland and The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, had yet to be born into this often troubled place. The comedian and the actor represent nuggets of gold in a mountain of dross. The vast majority of the rest of us would be shovelled through lives characterised by want and unfulfilled potential. There would be few escapees. Good people lived here, but good chances were few. Kinship and community spirit were their armour.

      We had four rooms on the top floor of a three-storey tenement overlooking green fields and fresh hopes. Ma showed us around the flat. There were no carpets on the floors. Patched linoleum struggled to cover bare wooden boards. The furniture was utilitarian and mismatched, all of it second-hand, courtesy of the Social Work Department. The living room was crowded with a hard nylon-covered three-piece suite, which left marks on your legs if you sat on it for too long. By the window were a table and four chairs. The only heat source in the entire house was a minuscule coal fire in the living room, which heated the water in a back-boiler. Ask any child of their memories of growing up in such a house and they will tell you about awakening on winter mornings and scraping ice from the windows on the inside of the glass.

      The kitchen was equally sparse. A large white ceramic sink perched on cast-iron legs. The larder – a food cupboard – stood floor to ceiling, dominating a small Formica-topped table in a corner. A four-ring electric cooker completed the ensemble. Refrigerators were still a distant dream from such houses. You kept milk fresh by standing the bottle in a sink half filled with cold water.

      Ma’s brothers, Charlie and Davie, had provided us with a temperamental old television set that worked only when it had a mind to. Often it sat dormant in the corner, mocking us, usually because Ma had not put enough shillings in the coin-operated electricity meter. The world being plunged into darkness was a common feature of childhood in such places. It was inevitable when a finite supply of shillings competed with an infinite appetite for cigarettes. Ma would put Senior Service on the mantelpiece before she put food on the table.

      So this was what poverty looked like? I’m reminded of a line from one of Billy Connolly’s performances when he said that he didn’t know he was deprived until a social worker told him so. I know exactly what he meant by that. However, my life would be characterised by more than mere poverty. You can be poor but emotionally stable. You can have little but be rich in love. There may be material things you cannot have, but there is often that bedrock of emotional security that protects you. This was the way of life enjoyed by the vast majority of our neighbours. We lived somewhere else entirely. Abuse comes in many forms and we would be victims of it. It was a different kind of abuse from that which I would suffer in Quarriers. It wasn’t governed by malice or sexual deviance. This abuse would be born of ignorance and living in an emotional vacuum.

      My mother was not morally reprehensible. It is an overused phrase, but she, too, was a victim. Her notion of love, her sense of compassion and the mothering instinct had long since been beaten out of her by her monster of a husband. Even today, far removed from that time, I find it difficult to allude to him as ‘my father’. However, the combination of conditioning and weakness conspired to make my mother anything but a mother in the sense that most people would understand. This is, of course, the analysis of an adult looking back on the past, which someone once famously and accurately described as a foreign country.

      As a child, when I first saw the empty shell of 34 Katewell Avenue – and the rouged face of a woman I didn’t know – I was encompassed by a sudden and inexplicable sense of loss. It went beyond leaving Uist. It was more than losing Morag. It was a different emotion from leaving behind the life I had known. I know now that it was the loss of me. That sense of loss, hidden from me in any intellectual sense, would manifest in many ways. I developed what they describe today as ‘behavioural problems’. Doctors have since found a name for it – encopresis – an indicator of the effects of extreme stress and emotional abuse. The medical profession demand that the words they use carry a certain gravitas. It wouldn’t do to describe a situation merely as a nightmare, which would be my interpretation of encopresis.

      My only comfort was acquiring ‘gold stars’. They were my prize for showing signs of ‘recovery’. How I longed for those gold stars. People of a certain age will remember how, when they were at school, their efforts were rewarded with such stars. If you were competent at reading, arithmetic or whatever, you received a small paper star, which was attached to the work. It was something to run home and show Mum and Dad, a badge of honour. I did get gold stars, but not for academic achievement. They were for not shitting in my pants. One of the many manifestations of my encopresis was what they described delicately as a ‘hygiene problem’. I soiled myself, frequently. Perhaps some of you may be able to dredge up a memory of a kid like me – isolated, alone, looking out with dead eyes on the others, who view him with a mixture of pity and disgust. It is the loneliest corner in the landscape of childhood. To her credit, my teacher did not condemn, but worked out an incentive scheme to encourage me to combat this problem. I was given a book. My underpants were checked regularly, and if I was clean I received stars of varying colours. I coveted the gold stars above all others and took to ‘wearing’ my pants in my jacket. I took them off and hid them in my pocket. That way, they remained clean. The teacher would applaud me and fix another star in my book. I was inordinately proud of them. I craved the attention, the applause, if you will, of achieving something, anything. More than anything I craved love.

      Ma was not big on love. Where Morag had been a homemaker, Ma was the opposite. Cooking, cleaning and washing could have been cities in China as far as Ma was concerned. She was so wrapped up in her own troubled mind there was little hope of that changing. The role of a mother would be assumed by Jeanette, who was by now 14.

      However, with the blissful ignorance of those who do not know any better, we were all getting on with what approximated to a life. Johnny, my oldest brother, was 15 and had just left school. He was supposed to get a job, but there was too much of Ma in him. It isn’t a surprise that Johnny was Ma’s favourite. ‘I only ever wanted Johnny. I didn’t want the rest of you,’ she used to say.

      Johnny favoured drinking and betting over industry. That being said, he was

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