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

by Godley, Janey

  ‘This is the cow talking! You must all stop eating me or I will haunt you! MOOOO!’

  There were gasps of horror from all the women in the queue.

  My Mammy was embarrassed and angry. All the women shouted at me as she pulled me out of the cow. I was all greasy and bloodied. The butcher came and slapped me round the head, at which point my hungry dog Major, who was waiting outside for his weekly scraps, ran in snarling and took a bite at the butcher but missed. He then realised the cow was a better target – and tastier – bit into the carcass and hung onto its sides as everyone tried to remove both mad dog and child from the shop. The butcher yelled at my Mammy:

  ‘You’re barred, Annie! Get out! Don’t come back!’

  This was a big blow to her – in those days women sometimes cherished a good butcher more than their partners. Good sausages were to be revered and good men were rare.

  When we were clear of the shop, I thought Mammy would be absolutely livid, laden down with various bags of food, saddled with a dishevelled child and a barking dog, barred from her butcher’s. I thought she would slap me round the head. But, instead, she laughed all the way home. In all the fracas, the butcher had forgotten to charge her, so she knew he would let her back into the shop because she owed him money.

  On another cold, wet, windy day, she huddled me under her coat and pulled me into a particularly dirty shop. There were voices all around and, in the dark of my Mammy’s coat, I could hear men shout and swear, while the sound of a TV or radio blared in the background. The commentary was being done by a very fast-talking man; I couldn’t make out the words. The room smelled of smoke and wet coats. I looked down and saw piles of cigarette butts on the floor. My sandal shuffled them into neat little piles until all the strewn fags made perfect little squares. Suddenly my Mammy spat out: ‘Fuck it! Fucking shitty horse! Shoot the bastard!’ as she spun me round, took me out from under her coat, pulled me by my arm and swore all the way up the road. I wanted to hate horses too, just like my Mammy. ‘Fucking horses!’ I whispered under my breath into the driving rain.

  * * *

  My Mammy’s sister Rita was totally different. She came home from the Isle of Man aged about 30 to stay with her dad, my Granda Davy Percy – the father of Uncle David Percy, her brother and my abuser. Rita was very thin and always coughing, but she was good to all of us. My Dad was very fond of her and built her a radiogram – a long box, which housed a radio and a record player. On the inside lid of the radiogram, Rita pasted pictures of current pop stars: the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Gerry and the Pacemakers and lots more I didn’t recognise.

  Rita got married when I was around ten years old. Robert was his name and the only defining thing I can recall that made him different from us was that he was a Catholic. He lived with his dad and mentally handicapped brother just one street away and we kids treated their house like a big extension to ours; wherever Rita went we followed. After she married, Rita became a bit more like my Mammy – she had cash problems and was always living on her nerves. I loved to be with her when it was just the two of us, but I never felt that she was ever really happy. There were always problems for her to deal with: she had to look after Robert’s mentally handicapped brother and her own ageing father – my Granda Davy Percy – whom I used to like going to see coz he was full of stories about the Second World War which fascinated me at the time. He did seem a wee bit creepy, though.

  All this to-ing and fro-ing between homes was commonplace. My extended family always seemed to be coming and going through our house. Whenever he ran out of money – which was often – my Mammy’s younger brother Uncle James stayed in our home – he was the one who’d taken me to hospital after Mr McGregor’s dog had attacked me. Uncle James regularly came to stay in our two-bedroomed flat which already housed my Mammy and Dad, me, my sister Ann, my brothers Vid and Mij and Major the dog. It was a crowded home. Uncle James would arrive with his wife ‘Crazy Katie Wallace’ and their two kids Sammy and Jackie, who were virtually brought up alongside us. Our crowded home became an even noisier one filled with the sounds of raised human voices and Major’s distinctive bark: he always barked quickly in short, two-bark bursts – Woof-woof … bark-bark … woof-woof … woof-woof – like it was in a code. Major and I were best friends in a big throng of people.

  * * *

  One rainy day, I scratched my name into the wall of the landing outside our flat’s front door. I carved:

  JANEY CURRIE – 1970

  ‘Janey, fucking stop it, ye wee bastard!’

  Mammy had just climbed the stairs and was dripping wet holding two plastic bags full of cans and butcher meat.

  ‘Ye cannae write yer name in the wall!’ she shouted.

  I wanted to be myself, yet I wanted to ‘belong’. I joined the Brownies, who used to hold their meetings in an old church in Shettleston, because I enjoyed all their reassuring rituals and games and I loved the code flags. My Mammy could not afford to buy me a uniform but I made do with a second-hand shirt and skirt. I would pore over my Brownie Rule Book and would vow to try hard to be a ‘good girl’. I studied hard for all my badges and one night, in the dark cold December of 1970, I was preparing for my Road Safety Badge. Such was my concentration reading the booklet and trying to remember all the rules for Road Safety that, as I crossed the road, I walked in front of a car. I can still feel the impact of the vehicle. It felt as if something sharp had just cut off my right leg and had crushed my thigh. I was unconscious for a couple of seconds, then sat at the side of the road staring down at my mangled leg. I was in total shock but could not feel any pain. I couldn’t understand why people around me kept telling me to lie back down.

  ‘I have to cross the road,’ I told them. ‘I don’t want to be late for the Brownies.’

  Fortunately for me, the speeding drunk who smashed his car into me was a doctor but, unfortunately for him, soon afterwards my Dad walked past going to his late shift. He spotted me lying on the pavement and asked the crowd calmly:

  ‘Who knocked down the wee girl?’

  ‘That man over there,’ he was told.

  My Dad beat the doctor up so badly at the scene of the accident that the police – the Polis – sent the drunken and battered man off to hospital in the same ambulance as me. I sat in my second-hand Brownie uniform and shouted at him for the whole journey to the casualty department:

  ‘Ye fucking bastard! You hit me with your car! Ye fucking bastard!’

  At the hospital, a nurse washed my legs and feet saying disdainfully: ‘Look at the dirt that came off you!’ as if it was my fault I came from a dirty home. It upset me. Worse still, the Brownies wouldn’t let me back into their club as I had to wear a big plaster cast on my leg for months because the hospital had not set my leg properly. The Brownies said I was a liability and there were insurance problems with me having a plaster cast on their premises; I had to attend Hospital Out-patients for a year – it took that long for me to learn to walk properly again, not helped by my frequent handstands.

  ‘Watch this!’ I’d tell my friends in the stone stairwell of our block. ‘I can go all the way upside-down with my plaster on!’

  ‘Yeeesaaah!’ they’d all yell.

  It felt great doing handstands. The plaster counter-balanced my body’s weight when I was upside-down, but coming down tended to crack the cast, so I would put water on it to soften the plaster and hide the crack. Eventually, after a year, I was back playing football and running around but, even then, the Brownies would not let me rejoin them.

  * * *

  When my Uncle was not sexually molesting and raping me, he kept himself busy by joining in and wanting to ‘belong’ just like me. He became a member of the local Orange Order, a very influential Protestant organisation; there were around 30 Orange lodges in Glasgow’s East End. Religion divided and defined communities in the city. Catholics supported Celtic Football Club – which flew the Irish Republic’s tri-colour flag over its stadium on Saturdays – and Protestants sup
ported Rangers Football Club – which flew the Union flag of the United Kingdom. I knew a young boy who was stabbed to death just for wearing a Celtic scarf and walking along our street. He was 18 years old, studying History at university and his mammy had bought him the scarf for his birthday. He died with 15 stab wounds underneath a parked car. The young guy who murdered him demanded he be put in a prison which held Protestant UDA terrorists because he claimed the killing was part of a political struggle against the Pope, the IRA and all Catholics.

  As a child, as far as I knew, Catholics went to chapel and were at least taught about their religion but most Protestant adults did not attend church. We kids all went to Sunday School groups, sometimes in the local church, sometimes in the local Shiloh Hall or Tabernacle Hall. It was somewhere to go in those days before computer games, videos, DVDs or even high street amusement arcades arrived. There were not many community activities for kids, so most of us piled into a Sunday School, collecting our penny candy on the way in and on the way out. But I did not really take to religion. The preacher – he wore no religious dog collar, just ordinary clothes – would stick figures depicting Bible characters onto a big red fuzzy felt board at the front of the hall and talk about the Lord’s divine love. Every week, I used to listen to a sermon about opening my heart and letting Jesus in and, every week, I prayed for Him to stop my Uncle raping me. But it never stopped. I thought Jesus did not like me or maybe I was not important enough to be saved.

  My Uncle David Percy played flute for the local Orange Lodge; he also taught Orange children the flute. I hoped he never hurt any other child there. But I knew he had abused at least one other child. I had found this out three years before when, one night, my big sister Ann sat with me in the toilet at home in Kenmore Street and I had started to cry. Ann sat me on her knee to comfort me while I stared at the swirly orange and red linoleum pattern on the floor.

  ‘Why are you crying, Janey?’ Ann asked. ‘Are ye sore?’

  I crouched on her knee with both my hands jammed between my legs.

  ‘Aye, I’m sore,’ I told her. For the last two years I had had a burning pain whenever I peed. The swirly orange and red pattern on the floor blurred out of focus as tears magnified the colours.

  ‘Where are ye sore?’ she whispered to me.

  I pointed to my lower abdomen, then pulled up my skirt and pointed at my knickers: ‘My pee pee hurts all the time and Uncle David Percy tickles me there an’ I hate it!’ I sat still, scared to breathe. I could feel Ann’s arms tighten around my waist as she balanced on the toilet pan.

  ‘Oh Janey! No, no, no! I thought if I let him touch me he widnae touch you!’ She pulled me round and hugged me; my legs went round her waist and she sobbed into my neck. ‘If we never let him get us on wur own he willnae do it again, so let’s just stick together when he is here, eh?’ She hugged me tighter.

  But that had been three years before; the abuse had continued, had turned into regular rape and Jesus had not stopped it.

  4

  The gangs, the Gadgies and a gun

  I USED TO read newspapers in the toilet because it was one of the few places in our crowded flat where you could get peace and quiet. By reading the papers, I knew Glasgow in the 1960s was a crime-ridden city. It was notorious for its razor gangs – they used open, cut-throat razors as weapons. I read that the ageing pop singer Frankie Vaughan had gone to the rough Easterhouse area and tried to get the gangs to give up their weapons but failed; I read about Jimmy Boyle being put in prison for killing people and my Mammy had told me she had gone to the Barrowland Ballroom and must have danced with ‘Bible John’, a red-haired serial killer who attacked women who were having their periods and who quoted from the Bible before strangling them and kicking their faces in.

  There was a gang in Shettleston called The Tigers and my brother Mij would tell me tales of how they would go into nearby Tollcross Park at night and fight with machetes, but Mij tended to exaggerate, so I was never sure how true these stories were.

  Glasgow also had ‘Gadgies’ – travellers but not actual gypsies – who lived near Shettleston so, every summer and sometimes at Christmas, their fair would come up to us. The Gadgies were hard-working folk who made their living from carousel and big wheel rides and penny stalls; they sold hamburgers and candyfloss and ran dodgems and they captivated me. They lived in caravans and long trailers and wore beautiful, brightly coloured clothes; they were very well dressed, well spoken and well educated and they had crazy dogs – anyone who could keep a mad dog was OK with me. But when I went to a Gadgie fair once as a wee girl of about four or five, there had been a clown holding balloons with his big painted clown face going hahahahaha and it had terrified me. So, even when I grew older, I was a child who was frightened of clowns.

  In the summer, the Gadgies would offer us children threepence or sixpence to beat the bushes beside a pungent, dirty off-shoot burn of the River Clyde that ran through our local council housing scheme – scared rats would run out and the Gadgies would shoot them for fun. I loved watching the big Gadgie men using Diana rifles to shoot tiny silver steel shuttlecock-shaped pellets into the frightened, running rats. You didn’t see any blood: the rats just fell over as the pellets went into them. I swam regularly in the burn and there must have been so many diseases floating there among the dead rats and rusty broken prams that it was amazing I didn’t catch something fatal.

  Local adults had different entertainments. Every July, almost the whole of our adult community would converge on the streets, drunk, as they marched with the Orange Walk, the big annual Protestant parade where Orangemen would sing about someone called ‘King Billy’. My Uncle David Percy banged on about the perceived wrongdoings of the Catholics for many a night. In reality, he was a layabout who raped children and drank too much, something his King Billy might not have approved of. He used to try to make me sing Protestant songs, but my hatred of him instead made me learn Irish Catholic rebel songs from my pal’s dad and I would sing them really loud into his face.

  My defiance simply provoked him to be even more brutal when he played his ‘games’ and I started being very badly bruised by his punches as well as the rapes themselves. He had no conscience about hurting me and cleverly kept most of the bruising to my lower abdomen or legs, where it was hidden under my clothing or would seem natural because I was a rough tomboy and often covered in bruises from football and my own escapades. I did show all the signs of abuse by scratching and cutting my skin and by my hair-pulling habit, but that was overlooked very easily – my family continued to assume I was just a nervous child. At school, my teacher Miss Miller would sometimes take me aside and ask about the bald patches on my head but I would always tell her it was just me getting into fights and nothing to worry about. I did not like the other teachers who saw the cuts and bruises and bald patches and turned their eyes away. I wanted someone to notice the pain I was suffering. I craved the chance to speak out, even if I then hid the truth. I did not want my Dad to go to jail for killing my Uncle. And he would have killed him. My Dad never did like Uncle David Percy: as far as Dad was concerned, he was a lazy, workshy layabout.

  I loved my Dad: he was the big father figure that we were supposed to be scared of but I never was – he was a pussycat to me. My Mammy used him as a threat to keep us kids in line, but he never carried out the punishments she promised he would give us.

  Then, one day, my Dad told me he and I were going to play a game of hide and seek. I ran into the bathroom and locked the door tight. Dad called through the door:

  ‘Janey! Open the door – it’s your Dad! Unlock the door and let me in!’

  I just sat there, frozen in fear, saying: ‘No, no. No!’

  No amount of reassurance could get me to open the door. I sat there, crying, terrified. I sat tight.

  ‘What is it you’re afraid of, Janey?’ he asked. He was getting angry because he couldn’t understand why I would be scared of him. His voice was starting to have an edge: ‘Janey! It’s me �
�� yer Dad! Open the door!’

  He eventually had to borrow a ladder, come up the side of the house and climb in through the bathroom window. I sat staring at the floor as he tried patiently to coax me out of my terror. I was relieved when he just sat on the floor and held me for what seemed like hours. I was clinging to him like a life raft. Somewhere inside of me he felt my fear but could not rationalise it. I sat thinking: I should have known my Dad would never hurt me.

  He only frightened me slightly when he was drunk, not because he was violent but because I was convinced he would fall over, bang his head on something sharp and die. In some of my nightmares, he fell and cracked his head open. In others, I was chased down dark streets by demons, I screamed as I ran with dead legs dragging me through invisible toffee that slowed me down; I would stop struggling, turn round, face the demons and shout: ‘I know this is a dream! I can wake up!’

  Then one dark demon’s mouth would stop snarling and smile. The jaws would open and, slowly, it would taunt me: ‘Wake up, then!’

  The conscious part of my brain struggles to awaken:

  ‘Please, please wake up, please wake up, please wake up!’

  But nothing happens

  I turn and face the dark demon.

  It sniggers, reaches over and grabs me by the throat.

  I can hardly breathe.

  I can feel my life drain out of me.

  Blood pulses behind my eyes.

  I scream so loudly.

  Eventually my own screams wake me up.