Maggie & Me

by Damian Barr

  Praise for Maggie & Me:

  ‘This amazing book tells the story of an appalling childhood with truth and clarity unsmudged by self-pity. It grips from beginning to end and leaves the reader elated at the fact that such experiences can be overcome and produce a man who can write a book so vivid, so unsentimentally forgiving, and so memorable’ Diana Athill

  ‘Out of poverty, brutality and prejudice, Damian Barr builds something riveting, touching and painfully funny. His account of growing up under Thatcher’s regime defines the experience of a generation’ Maggie O’Farrell

  ‘The wonderful story of a remarkable man, Maggie & Me is heartbreaking and heartwarming. As gripping as a thriller, laugh-out-loud funny and deeply touching, this book will resonate long after you finish it. A triumph’ S J Watson

  ‘Imagine one of the sharper Mitford sisters cruelly reborn into the family from Shameless and you’ve an idea of the treat in store’ Patrick Gale

  ‘I have never wanted to pluck a character out of the pages of a book as passionately as I did while reading Maggie & Me ... To say I loved it doesn’t begin to convey the mixture of emotions – tears, laughter, anger – I felt while reading it. This book should be required reading’ Jojo Moyes

  ‘That Damian Barr survived his childhood is testament to his startling courage and determination. That he was then able to write about the experience with such wit, verve and candour is equally astonishing. Maggie & Me is a cause for celebration on all kinds of levels. Rejoice!’ Rupert Thomson

  ‘Maggie & Me is a perfect chip supper of a memoir: nostalgic, tart, crisp and seductive. It’s also sad, kind, witty, and sexy’ Louisa Young

  ‘Full to the brim with poignancy, humour, brutality and energetic and sometimes shimmering prose . . . It is hugely affecting’ Sunday Times

  ‘A nuanced, subtle and original account . . . a memoir which is both personally moving and a valuable historical document’ Literary Review

  ‘Maggie & Me by Damian Barr has a startling new take on the former PM’ Herald

  ‘Few writers can wind you with a word. But Damian Barr doesn’t just do that, he tickles and then floors you, delights only to devastate, within a single phrase . . . I won’t be happy until everyone reads this book’ Patrick Strudwick

  ‘An inspiring read’ Marie Claire

  ‘This book will break your heart and make you angry; then it will lift your heart and make you glad; because Damian Barr has transmuted a grim childhood into a work of art and brought forth beauty from ashes’ Richard Holloway

  ‘Witty, gritty and inspiring’ Glamour

  ‘Maggie & Me is a refreshing, affecting and ultimately triumphant account of growing up in the shadow of the Iron Lady’ Metro

  ‘I was dazzled by the energy and verve of Damian Barr’s memoir . . . I’ve been shoving copies into people’s hands all year’ Evening Standard Books of the Year

  ‘Admiringly deadpan . . . Barr captures very well how it is possible to learn and to love even in the most unpropitious environment. His book is the better for the strange loyalty it shows to the place he fled’ Charles Moore, Daily Telegraph

  ‘Brilliantly observed, searingly intimate and painfully truthful, Maggie & Me brought the eighties back to me at the same time as making me question my established views of the whole decade. In other words, like the very best books, it changed me a little’ Sathnam Sanghera

  ‘A gifted storyteller, weaving skilfully back and forth through time, and his unfussy prose flows delightfully . . . This vibrant language roots his story firmly in a west of Scotland . . . Splendid’ Independent on Sunday

  ‘This memoir of deprivation and survival is shrewdly constructed and written with a winning dry humour’ Guardian

  ‘Fond, funny, involving and at times emotionally wrenching’ Sunday Times

  ‘Easily my favourite book of 2013 . . . Of all the biographies and memoirs of the great woman this is the most unusual and the most profound . . . There isn’t a trace of bitterness in the beautiful book. Only the radiant eloquence of a man whose courage and humanity shine from its pages’ Alan Johnson, New Statesman Books of the Year

  For Mike

  ‘Of course it’s the same old story. Truth usually is the same old story.’

  Margaret Thatcher, Prime Minister’s Questions, 1990

  Contents

  Introduction

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  A Note on Milk Snatching

  A Note on the Author

  By the Same Author

  Introduction

  ‘Britain needs an Iron Lady.’

  Margaret Thatcher, Speech to Conservative Rally, Birmingham, 19 April 1979

  It’s the 12th of October 1984. I am just eight years old. Me and my mum are stuck to the BBC Nine O’Clock News in this strange new flat. We sit cross-legged on bare floorboards with coats for cushions and watch ambulances, police cars and fire engines mee-maw, mee-maw in black-and-white on the portable balancing on top of a tea chest. A flurry of dusty black bits fluttered out when I helped my mum turn it upside down. I thought tea only came in bags until this morning when the removal van came to take us to Flat 1, 1 Magdalene Drive, Carfin. My dad is back at 25 Ardgour Place, Newarthill with the big colour telly. My wee sister, Teenie, has cried herself to sleep in my mum’s lap. Our old life is crammed in the cardboard boxes bursting all around us. It’s way past my bedtime but rules are already being broken.

  My mum lifts an arm so I can snuggle in. She lights a Regal cigarette and shakes her head at the telly, tutting and pulling me closer. I can’t get close enough. Blue smoke cloaks us.

  ‘Luck o’ the devil,’ she huffs, puffing away at the telly where this blonde woman rises from rubble again and again like a Cyberman off Doctor Who.

  All around her the hotel is collapsing as bloody bodies are pulled out but she stays calm. She’s talking to the BBC with a man’s voice and even the police stop to listen. ‘Life must go on as usual,’ she insists, as if life will do exactly what she tells it.

  ‘Shit disnae burn, Maggie won’t,’ says my mum, smoking at the portable, puffing extra fast, super deep like it’s a race. I look up at her with questioning eyes. We shouldn’t be here. ‘He disnae like them, “cancer sticks”, he calls them,’ she confides, smoothing Teenie’s blonde bobbed hair with her free hand, her nails chewed to nothing.

  He is Logan and according to all the arguments I’ve overheard, he’s the man my mum is leaving my dad for. Right now he’s asleep in the next room because plumbers start early. We’re not to wake him. He was waiting for us in the empty flat when we arrived with all our boxes. Not as tall as my dad but not as short as my mum, he stood totally still filling every room so we could hardly breathe. Without a word he handed her a key then pushed his face into hers.

  ‘The weans,’ she whispered, blushing and shuffling.

  He looked down at Teenie then me, his mouth open, lips red like inside a cut. I held her hand tight and all the lines round everything sharpened. I breathed right in.

  ‘So ah see,’ he said slowly, before whipping a Stanley knife from the pocket of his blue boiler suit and slashing the top of a box. ‘Ah’m Logan.’

  The telly was first to get unpacked. The News was already on when Logan plugged it in. He thumped it hard just once and the picture cleared t
o show Maggie walking away from the bombed hotel. He shook his head and changed the channel but there she was again. Nine hours of unpacking later and the News is still on and Maggie’s still not dead. He can’t believe it. Neither can my mum. They hate her and they say she hates Scotland, hates us. But all the people on the BBC seem glad she made it. Secretly, I am too. I don’t want to see her dead. I don’t know why – maybe just because everybody else does. She’s not done anything to me. I’d like to brush the dust from her big blonde hair like she’s a Girl’s World and tell her it’ll all be all right. Of course, I can’t admit this.

  ‘Bitch,’ I say, the worst word I know, and flinch for a skelp.

  But my mum says nothing, not even a ‘God forgive you’. So I’m allowed to swear about Maggie. That’s how bad she is.

  My mum takes one last puff. I don’t want her to go and sleep in that bed with him. I close my eyes as she drops her cigarette hissing into the dregs of a cuppa and imagine celebrating Maggie’s miraculous escape with the shiny rich-looking people on the telly.

  The Grand Hotel survives. So does Maggie. So will I.

  Chapter 1

  ‘There are individual men and women and there are families and no government can do anything except through people and people look to themselves first. It is our duty to look after ourselves and then also to help look after our neighbour . . . There is no such thing as society.’

  Margaret Thatcher, Woman’s Own,

  23 September 1987

  ‘It’s time to play the music, it’s time to light the lights,’ sings the big colour telly from downstairs at 25 Ardgour Place, Newarthill.

  ‘Mum, it’s The Muppet Show!’ I jiggle as she stretches the towel between her arms ready to wrap me up tight before carrying me downstairs, a ritual I am ‘getting too big and too old for’ but which is still allowed if my dad’s out at work. ‘We’ll miss Kermit!’ I squeal, bursting through the brown-and-orange towel like a finishing line, across the cork floor towards the stairs.

  ‘Damian Leighton Barr, what have I told you about running in the house!’ The dreaded middle name only ever used when I’m in trouble.

  Her words wrap around me with the towel as she scoops me up, carrying me down into the living room where the curtain is going up on our most favourite programme in the whole world ever.

  ‘It’s time to put on make-up, it’s time to dress up right, it’s time to get things started!’ We sing along. I’m sitting on her lap cocooned in the towel, part of the set she boil-washes in Acdo every Sunday morning in the thundering twin-tub that she pulls out from under the scullery sink. They were a wedding present, she warns whenever I drop one on the floor. It’s my job to hand her the big wooden tongs for fishing things out when it’s stopped spinning.

  Kermit announces that this week’s special guest is Superman! Christopher Reeve’s kiss curl smooches his forehead and me and my mum gasp.

  ‘You love that Superman, don’t you, son?’

  I nod and leap off her lap and fly round naked, the towel is my cape. ‘D-D-D DA DA DAH! D-D-D DA DA DAH!’ I do the theme and land in her lap just in time to hear a key in the back door. Can it be? Is that my dad home early from the Craig? Are all the best things in the world happening at once? My head spins as my mum picks me up by the shoulders and stands me on the carpet, eyeing the sunburst clock that ticks over the electric fire where both bars burn because it’s bath night and she knows I like it roasty-toasty.

  ‘Daaaaaaaaaad!’ I zoom at him Superman-style, one arm out front, the other by my side, hitting the cold air he brings in from outside. My dad is always minerals. The whites of his eyes and his smiling falsers sparkle out from the coal-black rest of him.

  My mum chunters, ‘Ocht, Glenn, the wean’s just had his bath!’ but she’s too late to stop me getting dirty and I don’t really think she wants to anyway.

  I’m flying up in the sky, dipping and diving and soaring and swooping, the living-room carpet swirling brown and orange far below me. My dad has superpowers.

  ‘How’s ma Superboy?’ he asks, grizzling in to kiss the back of my neck.

  The stubble that’s grown in on his twelve-hour shift tickles and he nuzzles me harder and I squeal and he doesn’t stop and suddenly I can’t feel his hands holding me any more and I’m hurtling towards the couch hundreds of miles below and then . . . ‘Got ye!’ I’m back in his gigantic hands. He’d planned it all along!

  My mum stands, hands on her narrow hips, and pretends to disapprove when he produces two Strawberry Mivvis from the pocket of his donkey jacket. She is five foot nothing. He is six foot everything. She buzzes like a bee in a jar.

  ‘Yous’ll have tae brush yer teeth again!’ He laughs, popping his false teeth out and rolling his eyes. We shriek like we always do.

  Mum smile-tuts at my dad. ‘An’ you,’ she says pointing upstairs. ‘Time for yer bath.’

  My pram is parked in the corner of the living room and I know it was mine because I remember lying in it looking out through the frothy lace fringe at faces smiling in. I remember bouncing along the pavement.

  ‘Yer daddy wis the only man that pushed a pram in the whole village,’ my mum boasts. ‘He took you round and round the scheme. He wis that proud.’

  I wasn’t the first one in the pram. There was someone in it before me. A girl.

  ‘Heaven,’ says Granny Mac when I ask where she went, turning her head away from me with chopping-onions eyes. ‘Wit’s fur yae disnae go by yae.’

  This is her favourite expression along with ‘Least said, soonest mended’, ‘Fly wi the craws ye get shot wi the craws’, ‘Hell mend yae’, ‘Jesus, Mary and Joseph’, ‘Aw fur coat and nae knickers’, and ‘Don’t come runnin’ tae me’ as in ‘Damian Leighton Barr, if you fall off that wall and break your leg don’t come runnin’ tae me!’ So I don’t ask again.

  Soon the navy-blue Silver Cross pram with its prim white wheels will be rolling out again. Not with me because I’m getting to be a big boy now, already taking after my dad and only four. Nearly five! I tug on my blue-leather reins trying to get ahead.

  ‘Damy, ye’ll pull me over,’ my mum warns.

  Women stop her in the Fine Fayre and ask if she puts me to bed in a Grobag. I’m nearly at her waist already.

  ‘You’ll have a wee sister soon,’ my mum says when I ask her why she looks so fat. ‘She’s in here,’ she explains, patting her moon belly, letting me in on the secret as usual.

  I wonder how she got in there and how she’ll get out and what will happen to me when she does.

  Technically bedtime is 7 p.m. But if my dad is still at the Craig I am allowed to stay up. Even if I’m tired – which I never am – my mum snuggles me next to her on the couch ‘for the company’. Sometimes she reads out loud from her Mills & Boons, sounding out all the words, even the ones I don’t understand. She cuts out the headlines from the Daily Record and we turn the letters into words and the words into stories. I learn that nurses always fancy doctors and a broken heart always heals. If she’s too tired to read we watch the telly.

  Our telly has fancy faux teak trimmings and it smells burny when you clunk it on because the stour that gathers beyond my mum’s duster in the vents at the back singes as the valves warm up. She wrinkles her tiny freckled nose at the smell, every time. Thanks to my dad’s bulging Friday pay packet from the Craig we’ve got the only colour telly on Ardgour Place. We can watch three channels in a thousand colours. Two men from the Cooperative Department Store in Motherwell carry it in just in time for the Royal Wedding, which is taking attention away from my birthday.

  ‘Wit a meringue!’ says my mum when she sees Lady Di’s dress.

  ‘You’d no fill the front,’ laughs Auntie Louisa, my mum’s only sister in a band of six brothers.

  She gets a look from Granny Mac who sounds out her name ‘Lou-eez-a’ while fingering her rosary.

  My dad looks bored. St Paul’s Cathedral looks like a giant Tunnock’s Tea Cake. It’s bigger than the church and the cha
pel put together and Granny Mac nods approvingly. It’s full of hats.

  ‘Oh look at the state of her,’ says my mum, pointing.

  Auntie Louisa and Granny Mac tut as one. Even my dad sits up a bit.

  ‘That Maggie’s dressed fer a funeral. Black, at a weddin’.’

  Me and my mum have a strict telly diet of hot sweet tea, a Tunnock’s Tea Cake or two, salt and vinegar crisps and Hart to Hart. Like all Americans, Mr and Mrs Hart look rich. Every week they fight crime with big hair and wall-to-wall teeth even whiter than my dad’s falsers. The Harts speed along seaside roads in a wee red car that my dad knows the name of and never mess a hair on their heads. They’re always at glittering parties where sparkling drinks are brought in tall glasses on silver trays by black men. Ahmed, whose parents own the Paki shop, is the closest thing to black round here. Mr Hart is always polite, even to the black men, and flame-haired Mrs Hart has a flirty smile for everybody. They even have a servant: Max. Mr Hart made all his millions himself, which makes them even better. Mrs Hart is a fiery redhead journalist. Max says she’s ‘goy-jus’. She is. Right there and then I decide to be a journalist when I grow up: solving mysteries, meeting famous people and occasionally tapping at a typewriter before walking into the sunset laughing with my own Mr Hart.

  My mum wants to be Mrs Hart and I do too but she can’t grow her hair out because it goes too curly. ‘At least mine’s natural,’ she says. That’s how my dad knew she was a Catholic. She was leaving school with no O levels and he was already working at the Craig. ‘He was that handsome, yer daddy,’ she says. ‘Handsomer than Mr Hart. Still is. But yer Granny Mac was not happy and neither was yer Granny Barr.’ She looks at the rings on her fingers.

  ‘Jet-setters,’ says my mum wistfully, carefully unwrapping a Tea Cake so she doesn’t dent or crack the perfect chocolate dome beneath. ‘Money folk.’

  It’s 1981. No one in my family has been on a plane. My mum went to ‘that Belgium’ for Kitty Smith’s wedding to a Flemish man called Pieter. She went on a train and a ferry ‘without yer daddy’ and ate ‘moules – “worse than whelks’’ ’ and laughed at a statue of a wee boy peeing and bought an ornament of an old man selling balloons which I’ve got to mind when I am playing. None of the rest of us has been further than Glasgow.