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

by Godley, Janey

  In my childhood, my nightmares never woke my parents. My sister Ann would waken, but not my parents. Major was my protector. Whenever Uncle David Percy came into our home, Major would attack him, snarling and biting, and get beaten for his aggression towards a close family member. He would be kicked under the kitchen table and I would crawl under with him, rubbing his kicked ribs and whispering, ‘Thanks, Major,’ into his black pointy Alsatian ears. He would look at me, blink and lick my face, then bury his head into my armpit and stay there for a while until his sore bits mended. For all the kickings he got, he never once gave up attacking David Percy. I would often sit with Major in my bedroom at home and plan a way to kill my Uncle but, of course, I knew it would not happen. Each time he demanded I obey him, I would comply in terror like a silent lamb to the slaughter. He would tell me I was a ‘bad girl’ and said I liked the things he did to me.

  ‘Say you like it.’

  I would be forced to put my head down and tell him to ‘do it’ because I ‘liked it’. When I was being physically held down or punched or raped or suffering extreme pain inside my body I would try to shut off my mind or focus on a ripped piece of wallpaper or, in my mind’s eye, still try to believe I was standing in Disneyland watching all the colours of the bright parade and those flying Dumbo elephants I had seen on television.

  * * *

  My brother Vid knew nothing about the abuse, but, one day, he tried to sell me to a wee man with a lame leg who was caretaker of the local Catholic chapel and who told Vid that he would pay him £1 if he brought him girls. To my brother, a pound was a fortune. Vid had never shown much interest in me – I was too young and silly to be in his gang – but, later that same day, he started brushing my hair and wiping my face because, obviously, he did not want to deliver shabby goods on his first day of trading. My eagle-eyed Mammy spotted Vid in mid-brush and asked him why he was getting me all dressed up. He, in all innocence, told her:

  ‘The wee limpy man at St Barnabas told me he would give me a pound for a girl.’

  This time, my Mammy saved me. Maybe she hated the thought of a Catholic touching me. Vid was promptly taken off to the local Police Office to tell them the tale of the paedophile who worked at the chapel. My brother sat in stony silence, frightened of the police but admitting nothing. They became more and more agitated at the whole sorry tale and eyed my Mammy as if she were lying. Annie, the queen of improvisation, grabbed the wire of the Anglepoise lamp, wrapped it around Vid’s wrist and told him:

  ‘This is a lie detector: every time you tell a lie you will get electrocuted!’

  Vid took a deep breath and did not stop talking, his face ashen with fear. The wee limpy man was questioned but let go with only a warning.

  Three weeks later, my Dad was standing in a queue at a bus stop, huddled against the driving snow, waiting to go to work, when someone with a walking stick shuffled by him. As he passed, my Dad recognised the caretaker and immediately bolted after him and punched and kicked him all over the street. The folk at the bus stop were horrified and tried to pull my Dad off him:

  ‘He’s a cripple! … What the fuck are you doing? … Get off him!’

  Dad did not even bother to explain; he was too busy kicking and kicking and kicking the old man in the head and body. The police were called and Dad was charged, taken to court and fined. No one ever spoke about it again but, for years afterwards, every time my Dad saw the crippled caretaker he would beat him up. There were never witnesses; he was never charged again; and the chapel paedophile eventually left the area.

  * * *

  By the time I left primary school aged eleven and started secondary school, my Dad was no longer spending much time with us. My brother Vid was almost leaving secondary school and my sister Ann was working while my eldest brother Mij was 19 and getting into all sorts of bother. We all still lived at home, but it was at this point I felt the most alone. My sister and brothers were growing up very quickly and developing their own lives away from me; and my Uncle was still raping me regularly. For me, puberty had still not happened. I had no breasts; I still looked like a boy. I was also the smallest girl at my new school, Eastbank Academy. Other kids would stop and look at me then ask:

  ‘What age are ye? Ye’re awfie wee!’

  All the pals I had were exceptionally tall for their age which only made me look even smaller. I tried hard to fit in, but it was difficult looking as I did – dressed like a burst jumble sale on skinny legs. The local second-hand shops were where my clothes came from – and some clothes were hand-me-downs from Mammy’s pals’ kids, which became most embarrassing when my own pals pointed out I was wearing their old jumpers.

  * * *

  My Uncle David Percy did not attack me weekly, nor were there specific patterns. At times it was frequent; at times I almost believed it had stopped altogether. He did not molest me every time he came to my home, only when the circumstances suited his needs. He liked to scare me and would sometimes threaten to kill my Dad or my sister Ann. To reinforce his threats, he once brought into my bedroom a black handgun with a brown wooden handle. He was holding me in a corner of the room; I was being subjected to his usual form of playtime and feeling desperate and I had a horrible terror in the pit of my stomach. A gun means death. The only time I had seen a gun was on television: if someone fired a gun, the other person was dead. He’s going to kill me! My Uncle had left it lying on the bed while he molested me and, when he got up to pull on his trousers, I grabbed the gun and held it with both hands like I’d seen in the police series The Sweeney on TV. I held it up high, pointing it at his face and stood up, gripping the trigger with my right index finger. His face went ashen and his breath started to quicken. I guessed he must be figuring out if the gun would fire, just as I was. I held it steady and he kept eye contact with me:

  ‘It has no bullets in it,’ he whispered. ‘But I can go get them and come back.’

  I dropped my hand with the heavy metal in it, held out the gun to him and replied:

  ‘One day I will get you.’

  It was the first time he actually had to acknowledge that I hated him.

  I turned and walked out of the room. I felt for at least one second on that one day I had scared him. It was a small victory but I had not won the war.

  5

  The family

  BY THE AGE of twelve, I planned never to get married. I was going to go live in Australia and learn how to talk to Skippy the Bush Kangaroo so that I, too, could be the friend of TV’s talking marsupial. I was going to fly round the country in a hot-air balloon looking for other talking animals. I was going to hunt evil child-beating clowns (I knew they did exist) and burn them while the talking kangaroo shouted Burn, you evil clown!

  It was also when I was aged twelve that, one Friday night, my Dad disappeared. For a week, my Mammy phoned hospitals, the police and the steel factory, desperate to find him. After that week, he simply reappeared but never told her or us where he had been. It was clear, though, that he had finally given up the long struggle to keep his marriage together; he could not understand how he worked hard all week and we still could not afford to pay the electricity or rent. Other people seemed to manage, but not us. His salary would sometimes be ‘Wages Arrested’ (confiscated) by the sheriff’s officers and often we would be threatened with eviction. Dad moved out of our home. Maybe he just hung on until I was old enough; maybe he just could not cope with the cash problems; maybe he should have stayed and been a bigger man and sorted it all out. I don’t really know the reasons. But he went. He left but dutifully kept in touch every week. He came back and gave Mammy weekly cash to help out but, of course, it never really did help her. Nothing did.

  She took the separation terribly; she saw the collapse of their marriage as a huge personal failure. But her fear of being without my Dad soon turned into anger. She would rant and rave to us about his shortcomings and then spend the rest of the night crying because she had been abandoned. She would turn on all of us at the slight
est excuse. Some weeknights, when Mammy was either short of cash or – even worse – had run out of cigarettes, she would shout and bawl at us and run through the flat and slam doors and scream:

  ‘You’re all bastards!’

  I would suffer badly if I had been to see Dad and did not return with cash. I was torn and confused and hated the whole situation. I wished everything could go back to the way it had been.

  Mammy did have the good sense to go to Social Services and register as a lone parent which, in theory, worked out more financially viable as she was no longer responsible for the rent and upkeep of the family. She got State Support, but it did not amount to much and we did not notice any difference at all.

  The strangest part was that, when it came to Saturday nights and Dad got drunk as normal, his homing instinct would often lead him staggering back to our flat. Mammy would put him on our old battered sofa and wait for him to pass out from the alcohol, then would gingerly go through his pockets and empty each one in turn. I would stand there rooted with fear in case he woke up and they started fighting. In the morning, when he regained consciousness, he would never refer to her stealing his money and, later on, I realised this was, in part, his way of giving an extra pay-off to Mammy. Neither had other partners that I knew of. To me, it seemed like having a Dad who worked away from home during the week.

  Mammy was not good at disciplining the family on her own and the flat soon developed graffiti on the inside. My brother Mij and his friends used knives to carve names like JOE-D and CHAS TINNY on the wooden window frames and used pens to scrawl words on the walls. Mammy never cleaned them off or covered them up. Everything seemed not quite under control and our home began filling up with strangers who would sit with Mammy and take tablets and pills and drinks and would get freaked out of their heads and lie back on the floor and talk bollocks. Mammy had now started drinking alcohol. I hated all her stupid pals coming into our house with their even dafter boyfriends who just hung on because they knew eventually they’d get to fuck women who were full of tablets. None of them were bad people; it was just that we had enough problems of our own to be dealing with. I missed Dad so much it hurt. I felt abandoned. He had not just left her – he had left me. He knew how chaotic it was – that was why he’d left – but he’d left me, at twelve years old, to cope with it.

  In Dad’s absence, my eldest brother Mij tried to fill his place as the big man of the house, but he was a mixture of spoilt first-born and petulant mummy’s boy. He had grown from a sensitive child into an insecure teenager and now, as a young man, he was vastly overweight and had become a big, violent bully. He would argue with Mammy and punch her; she would punch him; she would take her shoe off and hit him; he would chase her and punch her full-force in the head; and the two of them would roll about on the floor hitting each other. I had never seen Dad physically hit Mammy like this. It was terrifying. My other brother Vid and I would try to butt in and stop the violence but nothing on this earth could stop the two of them antagonising each other.

  ‘C’mon, then,’ Mammy would spit out at Mij. ‘Hit me – go on – hit me!’

  ‘I will!’ he’d say. ‘If you don’t shut up, I’ll hit ye!’

  ‘Go fuckin’ on – hit yer own Mammy! Does everybody know ye hit yer mammy, ye big fat bastard!’

  Mij would hit Mammy so hard she would be bruised; she would fight back so fiercely he would be scratched all over his face. My sister Ann would mostly avoid it all but, when Mij got too close, she would lash out at him too; she would fight back as hard as my Mammy and took no prisoners. When the fighting got very violent, my dog Major would join in and one or more of the brawling humans would get bitten. I was never sure if the fighting scared Major or excited him or if he was just hungry. The house was like an asylum; it would never have happened if my Dad had been there but, of course, Dad was told nothing about it because Mammy loved Mij dearly and would always protect him. At times, I wondered if Mammy did it just to get attention. If everything was quiet, she would create a drama. But, if Mij gave her a black eye or a cut arm or a badly bruised leg, she’d say: ‘Aye, but he’s ma son! I love ma son!’ and then she would cry and so would he.

  ‘I’m sorry, Mammy!’ Mij would sob to her and they’d hug and be sorry and sad together.

  He was truly lovable when he was good, but Mij was insecure and was having problems outside the home too. He was easily led, broke into a shop with some friends and was sent to a local Borstal home with a monkey-puzzle tree outside. Mammy was grief-stricken and visited him weekly for about a year until he came home. The only real effect Borstal had on him was that, afterwards, he started putting on even more weight.

  My other brother Vid, despite having tried to sell me to the paedophile caretaker, was bright at school but not really interested in education. He tried his best to keep the family together and would help by going out and stealing food and money for Mammy if Mij had been particularly nasty to her.

  In all this madness, my schoolwork began to suffer. I started missing two or three days a week – sometimes because I had no lunch money or because Mammy asked me to run errands instead of going to school – and eventually my Guidance Teacher, Mr Burgess, started to ask questions about my home life. I sat with him in a bare office containing only a desk and two chairs. He offered me a cigarette, but I told him I didn’t smoke and, for the first time in my life, I told someone something about myself.

  ‘There’s trouble in the house and I don’t think I can cope with it any more,’ I told him.

  I fell apart and cried.

  ‘You have bruises,’ he said gently.

  ‘My brother is hitting my Mammy,’ I explained to him, speaking slowly. As I spoke, the frustration started to spill out of me; it was like a wall of grief coming down. I stuttered out about Dad leaving and Mij hitting us all and then, just I was just about to open the floodgates to reveal what my Uncle was doing to me, I took a breath and stopped. I felt this kind, caring man, Mr Burgess, could sort it all out for me, but fear held me back. I had already told my own Mammy years ago and she had been angry with me. Mr Burgess looked at me with the saddest eyes I had ever seen in an adult. He held onto my hands and tried to wipe away my tears at the same time. He told me:

  ‘If someone hits you or attacks you, Janey, go to the police. Don’t let anybody hurt you. Always go to the police.’

  I sat there knowing this was not an option: Mammy would go mad at me if I ‘told’ on Mij, but I pretended to accept Mr Burgess’s advice. I promised to try and get more schooling in. He promised to keep an eye on me. I begged him not to get social workers involved. By this time, both my brothers had social workers coming to the house. I didn’t want to give my Mammy another problem.

  * * *

  I had no school blazer, but I finally got an anorak and sewed the school badge on the breast of the lurid blue quilted material to make sure Mammy could not pawn it. Even so, it was in the pawnshop four weeks after the summer holidays began – with the badge still on. Mammy must have persuaded the pawnbroker he could sell it to someone else from the same school for some other poor kid.

  On one of my twice-a-month visits to my Dad during that winter, he asked me:

  ‘Where’s yer coat? It’s freezing cold.’

  ‘I don’t have a coat, Dad.’

  ‘And why are ye wearing open plastic beach sandals?’

  I was 13 and all the other girls were wearing fashionable high platform wedges. He took me into Glasgow city centre and bought me a coat, some new jumpers and shoes. He was puzzled when he saw me immediately scuff the shoes and tear the labels out of the woollens. It soon dawned on him that I was damaging the goods so that they could not be taken back to the store for a cash refund. We kissed goodbye and I hopped on the bus home, blissful in the knowledge that Mammy would shout at me for not getting cash, but that the clothes would stay mine. That weekend, when Dad came round to our home, he must have had a showdown with her, because she went berserk at me when he left:

/>   ‘Tell yer Daddy everything! Go on! Tell yer Daddy everything, will ye? Tell yer fucking wonderful Daddy that cares so much aboot ye! Yer Daddy that fucked off and left you! Yer Daddy that leaves ye here!’

  And she slapped me round the head a few times. I was left feeling torn by the whole thing, I was mad at my Dad for leaving me with all this shit; angry at Mammy for not being able to cope.

  * * *

  One week shortly afterwards, the school organised a sponsored swim in aid of a charity. The kids had to collect sponsorship cash, swim the lengths promised, then hand the cash over to the school. On the day of the swim, a friend and I decided to skip English class and just fool around under the pretence we were going to see the gym teacher – we just hung around the toilets laughing and running about. We thought we had got off scot-free but, later, the headmistress came stropping into my biology class and demanded that the friend and I come outside into the corridor. Once there, the headmistress grabbed me roughly by the neck of my shirt, pulled me up to her face and said:

  ‘You are a thief, Currie. You are nothing but a common thief!’

  She marched the other girl and me up to the school office and told us that, when we had skipped English class, another girl’s sponsorship money had been stolen.

  ‘You lied about your reasons for leaving class. You did not go to see Miss Stewart in the gym. So I know you are thieves!’

  I protested my innocence: ‘But I wa—’

  The headmistress slapped me hard on the right cheek and the pain rang through my head. ‘You’re a thief!’ she screamed right into my face. ‘You’re nothing but a common thief! That girl collected money for charity and you stole it!’

  I turned and ran from the school and belted all the way home. I was in tears when I got there and blurted the whole story out to my Mammy. She looked me straight in the eyes and asked: ‘Did you take the money, Janey?’

  ‘No, Mammy, I never took it.’ I felt my own anger rise at the same rate as my Mammy’s. She lit a cigarette, grabbed her coat and marched me back to confront the headmistress. At last my Mammy was my hero! She would save the day!