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

by Godley, Janey

  All the way along the road to the school, Mammy was puffing on her cigarette, muttering to herself: ‘Hit you, did she? … Fucking hit you, did she?’ and then she would mutter: ‘I’ll fucking show her what fucking hitting is.’

  Slowly, it dawned on me that my Mammy was walking so fast and her voice was getting so vicious that she was going to lose her temper completely. I stopped her halfway to the school and pleaded: ‘Mammy, please don’t get too upset. Don’t swear. Remember, I have to stay at the school. Just take it easy, Mammy.’

  She paused long enough to take one deep drag on her cigarette and to spit out the words: ‘No one hits my wee lassie. No one! I mean it! And she won’t hit you ever again!’

  By now, I was shit-scared of the whole thing and began to wish I had never told her about what had happened. But it was too late. We were already at the door of the school office and she was dragging me in behind her, demanding to speak to the headmistress. Out of the big brown door appeared my dragon headmistress, all long tweed outfit, coiffed blonde hair and polyester white scarf, strutting for a showdown. I stood there as this large woman eyed my wee Mammy. I followed the tweedy woman’s eyes down. Mammy had unkempt grey hair pulled to the side, no make-up on her lined face and wore a very shabby pale blue cotton coat, no tights and cheap brown plastic shoes which her toes had partly burst through. I realised at that moment what other people saw when they looked at my Mammy and for one awful second my Mammy saw the look of distaste in the headmistress’s eyes as well. I felt sad for my Mammy. One disdainful look from this figure of authority and she almost crumbled. Mammy had been about to launch into her big defence speech, but the tweedy woman’s nasty look momentarily floored her.

  After that fleeting second passed, though, she pulled herself up to her full height and asked matter-of-factly:

  ‘Why did you hit my daughter?’

  ‘She is a thief.’

  Both women then dived into a shouting match, accusations flying from Mammy, the headmistress drowning her out with her side of the story; Mammy eventually cornered the woman into a lame admission:

  ‘Yes, I pushed Janey.’

  Mammy took one step back and punched the woman hard in the middle of her face. My elegantly dressed headmistress went flying backwards, hitting and tumbling over a chair to land flat on the floor with her long tweed skirt right up over her chest revealing light brown tights with white knickers underneath. Mammy jumped on her and started delivering more punches into the woman’s head with her wee fists. I stood totally gobsmacked. The school office burst into wild activity and, as Mammy was dragged off the headmistress, the woman lay on the floor, gasping, with her hair pulled up and tufts of it on the floor. Mammy looked down at her snarling: ‘Charge me! Get the Polis! I hit an adult and you hit a child! You hit my daughter and she has a witness!’

  With that, Mammy turned on her heels, grabbed me by the hand and marched out of the school leaving everyone in the office in a state of shock. The police were never called. The girl whose cash had been ‘stolen’ admitted she spent the money on food because she was hungry and the headmistress told everyone at our school assembly that there had been no theft. I sat smugly as I was vindicated and my Mammy became a legend at Eastbank Academy. The aftermath was that the headmistress and my Mammy had another meeting. My Mammy came out and told me:

  ‘Look, she’s accepted that you never stole the money, but you dodged a class and I punched that cow, so you’re going to have to take six of the belt.’

  I was given six lashes with a leather strap on my right hand and the headmistress looked like a crazed animal when she was hitting me. Even the assistant head, who was present, looked unsettled when he saw her eyes. I stood there, aged 13, thinking How many other people are going to hit me? What is it about me?

  * * *

  After that, my Mammy just kept taking more Valium and lurching from one crisis to another. At least the State made sure the rent was covered and I now became eligible for free school meals. So, in a way, things were a bit easier on the cash front. She made sure we had electricity by getting a pal of hers to break into the central panel for our block and illegally connect us directly – so we never had to pay another bill except on one occasion when an Electricity man spotted the wire. She was prosecuted and ended up in Glasgow Central Court where she turned into Greta Garbo and Rita Hayworth for the day. Watching all those angst-ridden movies on Sunday afternoon TV had paid off. She wrung her hands and cried:

  ‘Ma own mammy left me in ma teens an now I’ve got ma own weans and I’ve had a nervous breakdown and I’m havin’ the change of life!’ She always mentioned her womb when she wanted to make people uncomfortable. ‘And here’s me,’ she wailed, ‘and ma man’s ran away and left us all and I’ve got a wee lassie at school!’ She held her hand to her forehead and gave them their full money’s worth.

  I sat in court thinking Fucking hell, Mammy! Where did you get that voice from? She did everything short of looking up to the skies to see her sons flying off to die in the Second World War.

  She was given a warning and was told never to reconnect her own supply of electricity ever again. All the way back from the court to the bus stop, the two of us laughed.

  ‘What a performance I did there, eh, Janey?’ she said with some pride. ‘They all had to feel sorry for me when they saw me fallin’ apart.’

  ‘Yes, Mammy.’

  It was only a few steps later that I realised everything she’d said (apart from the ‘change of life’) was true. She’d performed the tragic role of someone who was exactly who she was.

  After this, Mammy fell into an even deeper depression; she started really going mad with the drugs and accumulated even more ‘Valium Pals’ around her: other women who were equally doped up all day on tablets. Sometimes I would come home from school and find them all in our dirty living room with the graffiti on the walls, huddled around our wee fire talking gibberish.

  ‘There’s a snake sliding up that wall, Janey! Hit the spider off! There’s a spider on it … There’s spiders! … There’s spiders everywhere!!’

  I kept to myself more and more, sharing my thoughts only with Major. We would go on long walks as I poured it all out to him; he must have been fed up listening to my shit life. Even dogs have their limits. Some mornings, when Mammy let him out for a while on his own, he would try to follow me to school. This worried me a lot, as he was always hungry and did bite people at random. I often had to chase him back up the street, hoping he could make it home without snarling at someone.

  * * *

  By this time, I had a sort of boyfriend. He was my Mammy’s pal’s son and we would hang out together but I avoided the contact side of the relationship as I felt I was not worthy of having affection given to me and I was scared that the sex situation might arise. I really liked and was very physically attracted to some of the boys at my school, but would never have had the nerve to ask them out. I had absolutely no self-confidence. I did not believe I could be worthy of anyone’s attention at all.

  My sister Ann already had a steady boyfriend and was working as a sewing machinist in a factory; she was 18 and in love. In that one year, she and Jay got engaged, she got pregnant and they got married.

  Dad was now living with Aunt Rita and Uncle Robert at Redcar, a small seaside town in North Yorkshire. He came up to Glasgow for Ann’s wedding and it was so good to see him, just as it was great to see Ann happy with Jay, but there was a problem. Jay was a Catholic. It was not such a big deal, but enough to create some tension in the family: his Catholicism hung in the air like a bad smell. When she gave birth to her son Jay Junior in July that year, I was ecstatic: he was so tiny and beautiful. I loved him on sight and would spend hours just looking at his face.

  My Uncle David Percy also got married that year. His wife Margaret was also a pregnant bride. She had a son around the same time as Ann. I liked Margaret: she was really just a teenager like Ann trying to make the best of her life. My Uncle David Percy and Marga
ret lived next door to his father – my grandfather – Granda Davy Percy. I would visit Margaret when Uncle David was out of the house – this was easy to do as Granda Davy would tell me if his son was at home or not. We both kept up the façade of happy families; he would make a point of being nice to me in front of his wife. When we were accidentally alone for a moment, he would mostly give me a silent, sinister stare; sometimes he would look out the side of his eyes and snigger at me. I never thought once of telling Margaret about the abuse, I just carried on as if it was all in the past and part of a big bad dream.

  On one occasion, Margaret asked me to stay the night with her; my Uncle David was away and would not be coming home. She did not like staying there alone so I agreed. They only had one bed in their flat. That night, while I was asleep, my Uncle David Percy did come home; he crept into bed beside his wife and me. I awoke in the early hours of that morning to feel fingers creeping into my knickers. I thought it was his wife; I could not believe it. I sat upright to see my abuser’s face staring at me in the early morning light. His wife was asleep beside him. He did not care and carried on trying to pull me towards him. His new baby was in a cot in the same room. I jumped out of the bed and shouted:

  ‘Margaret! Wake up!’

  The baby screamed.

  My abuser hissed at me to be quiet and looked shit-scared.

  ‘Shut up!’ he whispered at me. ‘Shush! Shush!’

  Margaret sat up in bed and I saw her eyes. She knew. She knew.

  ‘Are you all right?’ she asked me.

  I stood in their cold flat and pulled on my jeans. I had the words of my Guidance Teacher, Mr Burgess, swirling in my head. Go to the police. Don’t let anybody hurt you. Always go to the police. I told Margaret that I just wanted to go home now; she tried to reason with me to stay as it was about 5.00 a.m. I turned to my Uncle and shouted at him:

  ‘If you ever touch me again, I’ll go to the fucking Polis, ye bastard!’ I turned to Margaret. ‘He was touching me,’ I said and pointed at him.

  Margaret looked at him with cold eyes; I walked out of the flat and ran all the way home. I will never know what he told her but, the next time I saw Margaret, nothing more was said. Nothing more was ever said about it. She never asked me why I left that early to run back to my Mammy. It was as if it had never happened.

  * * *

  In the winter of that same year, I took a really bad attack of the mumps. They went away, but complications followed and I was petrified I was going to be put in hospital; I was scared of nurses touching me and doctors probing my body. I started being sick and sick and sick and lost too much weight and this, together with the after-effects of the infection, left me very weak. I would lie on a pull-down sofabed in the living room watching television; I loved The Sweeney because bad people always got caught and I would try to keep myself from vomiting all the way through the show so I could follow the plot. My Mammy was really concerned and I had many visits from our GP who gave me some health drink which I never managed to keep down.

  On one particular night, I lay in the darkened living room with the smell of vomit on my bed and all I could see were Major’s eyes silently watching me as I tried to make it to the toilet. I could not stand up – it was as if my legs were too thin and shaky to support me – so I crawled on all fours until I made it to the bathroom door. Major slowly walked beside me all the way. I sat at the door and passed out for a moment. When I came round, I was dizzy and scared, but Major sat curled around me on the cold floor. I thought I was going to die. I didn’t care if I died or not, but I felt so desperately weak and ill. I made it to the toilet and crawled back to bed, with Major sitting there all night watching me and whimpering as I hung over the bed to vomit into a white plastic bucket. Occasionally, he would put his paw up onto the grubby candlewick bedspread and get me to rub his head as I lay there waiting for the illness to slowly work itself out of my body. I had always loved Major but never before needed him that much. He was there for me. He knew that I was ill and would hardly leave my bedside.

  * * *

  My brother Mij came to visit my sick-bed with his new, live-in girlfriend Cathy, and my Aunt Rita and Mammy’s Valium pals all came along to make comments about how skinny I was, how sickly I looked and what form of cure I should take.

  ‘Castor oil is what you need …’

  ‘Black treacle will cure you …’

  ‘You should get some good Irish stew down you …’

  Dad also came to see me, as he was now back living in Glasgow and, during my time ensconced in the living-room pull-down bed, I was privy to most of the adult conversations that took place while they thought I was asleep. That was how I heard that Mij’s girlfriend Cathy was pregnant. Was no one safe from the dreaded teenage mother syndrome? The pregnancy caused more antagonism between Mammy and Mij. He was determined to make this relationship work, but he did not bank on Cathy being as headstrong and bad-tempered as he was. Their fights were just beginning when I started to come through the illness.

  We now had Cathy staying, pregnant and feeling stifled in our dirty, overcrowded flat. There were seven of us living in two bedrooms and a living room. Then along came my Uncle James – Mammy’s younger brother – with his wife ‘Crazy Katie Wallace’ and their two kids Sammy and Jackie – and then we also had my Dad’s brother Uncle John on a temporary stay in our flat.

  I loved Uncle John – a quiet, funny man with a sparkly character though he had always been a drifter and no one knew much about him. He would look after me and stop Mij from hitting Mammy; I think Mij realised Uncle John was not someone you messed with. He had spent some time in prison when he was younger but, unlike most of the people we knew who had been Inside, he never talked about it at all. He encouraged me to go to school, would listen to all my homework projects and discussed all my written stories. In return, I would steal cigarettes for him from my Mammy. She and Uncle John had a strained relationship. They would circle each other like vicious cats. Mammy would shout at him and accuse him of eating too much or getting in her way; he would never argue back; she would throw cups at him to get a reaction; he would just smile at her and amble away into his bedroom to read his books. This unnerved my Mammy, because she was used to – and liked – a man who fought back. We all lived alongside each other in a cramped, disjointed, dysfunctional kind of harmony.

  Major enjoyed snarling at all the new legs as they came and went through our home; he would sniff round the new baby when Ann visited and she would panic in case he took a bite. But poor Major was getting old – he must have been about twelve years old by now and his limbs were getting stiff. One morning, he went out as usual around 6.00 a.m. but, this time, he returned limping. As the week went on, his hindquarters seemed to be getting more painful so my brother Vid took him to the RSPCA vet. Vid loved Major as much as I did and was distraught when he was told the dog had been bitten by a rat. It seemed Major had been fighting with vermin down at the burn where the Gadgies used to shoot rats. The vet advised that ‘The dog should be put to sleep,’ but Vid was determined to keep Major alive. Two nights later, I was lying in the living-room bed when Major came in all limpy and sore. I climbed out of the covers and hugged him. He looked at me as I stroked his hot, matted hair. He put his head on my knees and died, right there on my legs.

  I screamed at the top of my voice.

  Vid came running in and held Major with me. We both kept trying to rub him and make him alive again. We could not believe he was dead. Mammy even shed a tear as we stood round his dead body. I could not be consoled. I had to help Vid lift Major and we both took him to the old burn bridge and buried him in the mud. I spent months after his death looking at the one photo I had of him, missing him so much that it was a physical ache in my chest. He had been my only true pal, my protector, and now he was gone for ever. He haunted my dreams. In sleep, we would run together over the football fields; I would laugh as he pulled his leash from the door handle and swipe it at me. But the nightmares were still
there, too. I would dream I was being buried under the floor of a cellar beneath a castle. It was dark and then I would be in a prisoner-of-war tunnel as if I were trying to escape from Colditz and I would get stuck in the tunnel. Always underground. I am trapped underground. I try to escape by going through a door, but the door is too small to get through and the tiny passage is too narrow to get through and I can’t escape.

  * * *

  By now, Mij had returned to his old ways. He would hit his girlfriend Cathy; my Mammy would batter Mij for hitting Cathy; Mij would then batter my Mammy for hitting him; and Cathy would hit Mij for battering my Mammy; so Mij would hit Cathy again; and it became a circus. Mij’s wee baby Debbie would sit there looking at everyone hitting everyone else and not even scream. Just look silently. Taking it all in behind her baby eyes.

  During the week, Mij worked as a porter at Glasgow Royal Infirmary, so that gave us all some respite from his temper tantrums. He was still a fantasist. He boasted he had performed brain surgery on a patient; the man lived and was cured. And, one night, he brought home some equipment from the surgical wards. One of these items was a very sharp and scary scalpel. Mij wielded it, for fun, as if he were some homicidal heart specialist. A few nights later, in the midst of a heated argument with Mammy in our kitchen, he held the blade right up to her face, almost touching her cheek. I was so terrified he would cut her that I put up my left hand to stop him. He accidentally sliced through my wrist, just missing the artery, but blood spurted onto his face, onto the wall and down onto my Mammy’s jumper. As I turned my wrist, some blood spurted upwards and hit clothes hanging from the ceiling pulley. I had to be rushed to the Royal Infirmary with a dirty, very smelly pillowcase wrapped tightly round my wrist, which I’d done myself. Mij was frantic, Mammy was panicking and I just bled. I had to have the slash on my wrist sealed with butterfly straps and I still carry the scar.