Handstands In The Dark: A True Story of Growing Up and Survival

by Godley, Janey

  There were lots of children in the neighbourhood and soon we had a new dog too. It was at some drunken friend’s party that my Dad first saw a wee black German Alsatian which was being neglected by his owner. He felt sorry for the poor wee puppy, so picked it up and brought it home. The dog had smooth black and brown fur and big brown eyes with white dots above each eyebrow. Unfortunately, because he had been abused, he was a biting, vicious, angry dog and aggressive to everyone except me. My mother took to telling him: ‘Don’t play with Fenian dogs!’ We called him Major and he became my eternal hero, my pal and, sometimes, my protector because I had a secret that I couldn’t tell anyone else. I could only tell my dog friend, because Major would listen and not tell any human being the damning truth about me.

  I don’t really know when it started but I do know I feared my Mammy’s brother from when I was very small. He lived minutes away, one block from our house. His name was David Percy, named after his father, my Granda Davy Percy. Everyone commented on how good my Uncle David was with children and especially with me. At family parties, he would sing Baby face! You got the cutest little baby face! And he would call me Sweet Pea:

  ‘Sweet Pea, go an’ get me a glass for ma beer … Sweet Pea, c’mon here an’ jump up on ma knee …’

  He was around twelve years older than me and would wait for my Mammy and my Dad to go out, then take me into my bedroom. I kept my head down but I knew the drill. He sat me on the bed and I can still smell the cigarette smoke on his hands as he stroked my face. The long, brown-stained fingers would slowly pull up my skirt. My legs would go stiff. I tried my hardest to will them never to open again, never to spread my knees apart for him, but I did what he told me.

  ‘Lie down, Sweet Pea.’

  My body goes like a plank of wood. He leans over me and starts to open his trousers. I turn my head to the wall. I can hear the zip go down. He lifts the hem of my skirt and puts it right up to my chest. His smelly fingers hook inside the top of my knickers and he pulls them down. He digs those fingers inside me as his other big hand grabs my small hand and puts it inside his open flies. He rasps words through his smoky breath. I know how to rub him up and down. He has shown me. I keep my face away from him and stare at the wall. My sister Ann has stuck a picture of TV’s David Cassidy and The Partridge Family on the wall. I focus on the Partridge mother’s face, smiling and gentle, her arms around her family. I shut my brain down and pretend I am in Disneyland, that perfect place I have seen on TV with the big magic castle. When thinking of Disneyland does not distance me enough from the pain between my legs, I rub him harder and link letters to numbers in my head … a = 1 and b = 2 and c = 3 … I like codes and can think in numbers.

  ‘You like it when I touch ye?’ His fingernails scratch bits of my inner flesh I had not known were there.

  ‘495,’ I tell him quietly.

  ‘Whit?’ He looks confused. ‘Just keep rubbing it hard!’

  I know he will never get the code.

  2

  The girl who came to school

  I LOVED LEARNING and was eager to get to school. At home, Dad had always played competitive number and spelling games and anagrams with the family and had made no concession for the fact I was the youngest. He was always banging on about how education was important. So my first teacher Miss Cubie was amazed that, at the age of five, I could read and write long words from the school’s word boxes like

  ENTHUSIASM

  Some children are scared of big words but, at home, I was used to making words out of other words for anagrams, so I knew how to break words down in my head:

  EN – THU – SI – ASM

  As soon as I met any new teacher, I made an anagram of her name. I thought of Miss Cubie as Miss Bue-ic. Janice Malone was my pal and I made her surname into ‘a lemon’. Miss Cubie let me go round my class with the chalk board on which I had written ENTHUSIASM and she even took me into an older classroom.

  ‘Look at this wee girl,’ she said. ‘She’s only in the First Class but she can write a big word like this.’

  I loved the attention and I remember other teachers saying ‘Wow!’ and I thought Fantastic! Get me more of that attention!

  I loved everything about school from Day One. It had an order and structure which contrasted with the chaos of my life at home. At school, you had a lunchtime when you actually got fed a proper lunch rather than just an Oxo cube. Before teatime I would sometimes go to Shettleston Public Library and look at the big books with maps of the world and imagine where I could go when I was older. The library smelled of polished oak and had a silent stillness – there were no dogs barking, no children with squinty-eyes fighting and screaming in the stairwell, no adults shouting at each other and you could sit and read books in complete silence.

  At school, I also found my gift was storytelling – I was the funny girl, the one who always managed to tell a story to deflect the pain I felt inside. I wanted to be the wee girl with the bright bows in her hair wearing clean socks and pants, but I wasn’t. There were kids in my class who did not live in poverty. They had lovely clean homes with a garden. They had mums and dads who smelled nice and did not shout. Sometimes I would walk up roads where my school-friends lived and see clean teddy bears sitting on clean window-sills; I used to imagine what it would be like to live in those houses, with clean sheets on my clean bed and lots of tasty food which I could eat off clean plates. I didn’t want to live in a smelly house with an uncle who did things to me.

  Sometimes one of my friends would invite me to her home and I would see the look on her mother’s face when she met her little girl’s best friend. The mother would smile yet flinch at this skinny, scruffy waif who was introduced to her, but I always won these mothers over by smiling happily and talking about school and homework and everything they wanted to hear. This also avoided any probing questions about my family. In reality, these people were just ordinary, hard-working Glasgow folk but, in my mind, they were very, very lucky, special people. I was more comfortable going round to little, blonde Sandra’s house which had that familiar, sweet, sickly smell of beds wet with children’s piss. I didn’t like girls’ dolls. I destroyed them quite a lot when they seemed to be too clean and pretty; I felt they needed to be dirtied. I broke dolls’ arms and legs and drew on their faces. I preferred playing football.

  I was a plucky child and one that – to the outside world – seemed to survive most situations but, in the middle of the freezing winter of 1966, I stripped down to my vest and underpants and stood beneath a gushing chilly gutter flood to enjoy a ‘wee shower’. Within hours I had collapsed on the living-room floor with a raging fever and became delirious. That week, I almost died of pneumonia and my Mammy had to be sedated as I drifted in and out of consciousness. They told her I was very close indeed to death but, slowly, I managed to pull through. Prior to that illness, I had had frequent urinary infections and kidney problems and, in light of the pneumonia and the bruises which they found on my body, I had more doctors’ attention from then on. I was only five years old. My GP suggested prescribing the drug Valium.

  ‘She has behavioural problems,’ he told my parents.

  It was around this time that I got the nickname ‘Shakey Cakey’ coz I trembled so much but no one ever thought to ask why such a small child would shake so much. I also had a tendency to harm myself. But no one ever thought to ask me why. After the illness, I just continued with my life as usual and getting back to my beloved school was very important to me although, by now, I seemed to annoy many of the teachers just by my very presence. They would ask me haughtily:

  ‘Does no one in your family own a hairbrush?’

  ‘Do you not own a single clean dress?’

  I annoyed them even more because, although I was right-handed, I had taken to using my left hand for writing. Several teachers tried to stop me continuing this strange ritual, but I could never truthfully explain to them why I did it: I hated the fact that my Uncle made me touch him with my right hand. In ar
t class – my favourite – I started drawing pictures with my left hand while trying to paint them in, at the same time, using my right hand.

  ‘Stop using both your hands!’ the teacher would tell me and hit me on the back of my knuckles with a ruler. ‘Just use your right hand!’

  I felt I needed to get everything done quickly. I used to paint at home and would not do anything else until I had completed the whole painting. At school, my teacher would say: ‘The lesson is over. You can come back next week to finish the painting,’ but I would scream and scream until I was allowed to finish it there and then.

  Eventually, I decided to tell my Mammy about what my Uncle was doing. I stood in our small, dirty kitchen with my eyes focused totally on the wallpaper with its pictures of onions and carrots. I felt dirty and bad as I explained to Mammy that my Uncle was ‘tickling’ me in a place I did not like. I can still see her watching me with eyes I had never seen before. This was the woman who had carried me inside herself for almost nine months, the woman who had held me as I was vomiting the week before with a stomach ache. My Mammy stood still, put both her hands firmly on my shoulders and looked me directly in my eyes as she hissed:

  ‘If you ever tell this to your Dad, he will kill my brother and then he will go to jail and you will have no daddy! Is that what you want, Janey? Are you sure you know what you are saying? Don’t you ever talk to me like that again!’

  I stood completely still and held my breath.

  The emotions I had been feeling before I told her were totally re-confirmed. It was entirely my fault – just mine – and that’s the way it would always be. I knew then that I had to live with the shame and shoulder the blame: a big responsibility for a child who could only draw well, play football and run fast but never fast enough.

  I had already begun to cut myself and pull chunks out of my hair. At first I would just scratch my arm with a piece of broken glass then, after doing that for a while, I would sometimes gouge a little deeper. My Mammy and Dad told me off when they found big scratches on my arms and tufts of hair under my bed; but I would always have some excuse to cover the truth.

  Soon, my Uncle David Percy took the abuse further by penetrating me. I was being raped regularly. There are no words or sentences or paragraphs which can describe the pain and feeling of suffocation. I would lie there stiff as a board and clench both my fists. I would push my fingernails into the palms of my hands, hear the blood rushing through my ears and feel my heart pounding with fear. His hands always smelled of tobacco smoke and, with his rough fingers, he would rapidly pull off my panties. I would turn my face to the side and focus on the multi-coloured swirly wallpaper. As he pushed himself into my body I would imagine I was melting into that patterned wall. The pain would become intense but the worst feeling was the suffocation as he lay completely on top of me, sometimes covering my face. I had started to try to look him in the eyes, as I knew he hated this, but sometimes he would put a pillow on my face as he raped me. I can clearly remember contemplating suicide at this age. I was six. I decided the best way to do it was to throw myself on the main road and get hit by a car.

  * * *

  I had short brown curly hair and everyone confused me with a boy. I did not want to be a girl. Girls had something men liked so men touched them there. I did not want to be a girl. I denied any of my gender traits for fear it would attract more abusers. I didn’t care what happened to me. I would be the one who would climb onto fast-moving lorries that left my street every day from the local creamery and trundled down the main road with me hanging on precariously. I would climb the creamery wall to find a metal bar or girder to tie a rope for a swing and leap down off a high wall. Nothing scared me except being with my Uncle. I was always nervous, constantly shaking, biting my nails, forever clinging to my Mammy, trying hard to follow her wherever she went. But, when I was among other kids, I was fearless.

  One hot summer day – so hot the black tarmac on the road was actually starting to melt – we were playing rounders. I stood with a baseball bat in my hand ready to whack the ball. Out of the corner of my eye I suddenly spotted a wee black mongrel dog that belonged to our neighbour Mr McGregor racing through the kids. I knew this dog was a tad loony. It was usually kept on a leash. But today it dodged and weaved through all the kids until it stopped stock-still and faced me. It snarled and barked and snarled, then took one giant leap forward and bit into my hands as I held the bat. I thought It’s got rabies! coz I had recently seen a rabid dog on TV. It was all blood and pain and saliva and bubbles and teeth and I dropped the bat and started screaming in terror as the blood pumped furiously out of my right hand which the dog was still biting into. The pain from his pointed teeth digging into the back and palm of my hand was unbelievable. I picked up the bat in my left hand and battered the dog on the head to force it to release its grip. The other kids were all shouting out:

  ‘Mr Currie! Mr Currie!’

  My Dad was on a night-shift that day, so he was lying in his bed with the window open because it was so hot and he heard and recognised my screams amid all the other kids who were shouting. He ran barefoot down the hot sticky-tar street, swept me up and carried me running back to our house as Mr McGregor arrived and leashed the dog. My Dad ran down to the Waverley pub where my Mammy’s younger brother was drinking and Uncle James took me to hospital in his lorry to have the wounds all over my hand stitched. I still have the scars.

  I was heartbroken when I heard the wee dog had had to be destroyed by the vet, but my Dad had caused such a scene with poor Mr McGregor who had been tending his garden when the dog ran out into the street. Mr McGregor apologised profusely but Dad was ready to kill the dog himself. It all seemed a bit strange and unexpected to me because our dog Major – always hungry and angry – had bitten at least four people in Kenmore Street and nothing had been done about it. I never wanted that wee black mongrel to be killed on my account and I felt guilty every time I saw old McGregor in the street after that. I was responsible for getting his wee pet killed. But the good thing was that he was so embarrassed he let me help him in his beautiful, well-tended garden and even allowed me to play in his back court – something that was normally sacrilege, as he hated kids in his back court.

  Each of the blockhouses in the street had a back courtyard area. During the summer months, all the mothers would come round the back courts puffing on their cigarettes and the kids would put on a show for them, using washing lines draped with sheets as stage curtains. I could not really sing so I would impersonate some of the local women, dressing up in my Mammy’s clothes and talking like a wee Glasgow housewife, a floral headscarf tied tight with a big bow under my chin and a big brown handbag with one strap swinging on my arm. I would sing drunken songs and swagger about knocking kids over as I shouted out husbands’ names. I remembered all the recent titbits of gossip and would blurt them all out and my Mammy would gasp and hold her face in shame. But I loved to shock. I could tell my words had hit home when some of the women burst into fits of laughter and others just silently smiled. My performances would infuriate the mothers whom I chose to ape, but would get claps of delight from the mothers I had left out of my comedy sketches. I loved those days of complete innocence, playing outside in the streets or working at school, especially when I could draw or paint.

  At that time, the Sunday Post newspaper ran a weekly competition: every week, a child would have a drawing published and their school would be awarded an encyclopaedia. My new teacher Miss Miller had encouraged me to draw a picture of the dark winter mornings in which Scottish children had to walk to school – some kids had recently been knocked down by cars in the gloom. I drew a good picture with my right hand and Miss Miller was so pleased she sent it off to the Sunday Post. It won the competition and our headmaster invited me into his office. I was so excited at the prospect of bringing something good to the school and, when I was led into the headmaster’s office by slightly built Miss Miller with her round-rimmed glasses, I was deeply impressed. The ro
om was very imposing; very official-looking and the walls were covered in big bookshelves. The headmaster Mr Maitland stood by his desk and welcomed me in. He looked down at me with an air of grave authority and explained that the prize encyclopaedia was to be presented to the school at a special end-of-term ceremony but, as I did not have a proper uniform, the head boy would present the prize to the school instead of me.

  I stood and looked down, ashamed at my dress, humiliated, yet I felt no real disappointment: I was used to that feeling of worthlessness. Miss Miller tried to protest, but was quickly put down. She took me out of the office trying to mask her anger, but I could tell she was annoyed. She bent down, held me close and told me:

  ‘Forget about the school, Janey. One day, you will be on stage and everyone will see you and clap.’

  I felt better as Miss Miller walked me all the way back to class holding my hand tightly, like she was willing me to stay afloat in this shit world she was forced to have a part in. At the special end-of-term ceremony, I watched our shiny, well-dressed head boy in his smart blazer hand over my prize to a smiling headmaster as the school cheered on. I did not feel too bad after the event. I already had no self-esteem. Why should they let a girl like me be up there? I sometimes imagined other people could see the bad girl inside me. Those were the words that my Uncle spat out as he raped me.