the bad times. We were told we were ‘going on a trip’. In any other child’s mind, embarking on trips would be anticipated with fun, a sense of adventure, but I wasn’t like any other child and this was going to be like no other trip I had ever been on. Morag told us to get washed and to dress in our Sunday best. I kept asking why. We were only going to school, weren’t we?
She was distraught, struggling to appear as if it was just another day, exhorting us to get ready quickly. ‘Because I told you, Davie – and remember to wash behind those ears!’ The woman could not see for tears.
The household was silent, except for her sobs. I was crushed on her behalf. I had never seen her like this before. She was the sort of woman who would have faced up to the Devil. We were soon all ready and had to endure a silent inspection by Morag and Willie. Even in their grief, they were privately determined that if this was the last time anyone saw us, we would at least be looking our best.
We left the house and trooped down to the school. We didn’t know it yet, but we were going to say goodbye. When we arrived, our classmates were subdued. They knew what was happening. The headmaster and our beloved Corky could not speak. We were each presented with a white leather-bound Bible with embossed gold script. Our names had been carefully inscribed inside the cover in precise copperplate writing. It felt cold in my hand. One associates the Bible with spiritual and emotional comfort. There was no solace in this sad, if beautiful, little edition of the Good Book.
Our school chums shifted uneasily, unable to make eye contact with us. They had been told they would not be allowed to know where we were going, so friendships formed and the bonds created were being severed for ever. We suddenly realised what was happening. We were going. Everything we had known, everything that had seemed so safe and permanent, was being removed.
It was a long, silent walk on leaden feet back to the croft house. We plucked at the hedgerows, as if we could keep a tiny bit of Uist alive in our hearts and minds by gathering these tawdry little souvenirs of the times when we were happy and safe from harm. The taxi was waiting for us. Like condemned men being rushed from a death cell to the gallows room, we were ushered towards the vehicle by the social worker. We all suffered the same moment of panic, looking for a way out, like prisoners confronted by bars who attempt to make a final bid for freedom.
Jeanette was trying but failing to keep us calm, promising us we were safe, that we were together and she would look after us. Irene, poor Irene was howling like a wounded animal. I had only heard such anguish in a human voice once before – when I left the doctors’ house in Glasgow. Irene had to be prised physically from Morag’s bosom.
We left our island life with the clothes we stood in. Our toys and other belongings remained inside the croft, where Morag would turn them into a shrine to the children she loved and lost. I started to cry and I did not stop.
Normality is a majority concept. I thought my life was normal because it was my experience and that of those I knew and loved. Only later, when I was able to make comparisons, did I realise how abnormal our lives were. When people who live normal lives are on the threshold of something new, they describe it as looking forward. Up until that juncture in my short and troubled life, I had never been conscious of looking forward to anything. Such an emotion implies that there is hope, the promise of something, anything. Peace? Contentment? Love? I had never entertained the possibility of finding anything other than the next episode of uncertainty. My time on Uist had taken the edge off that emotion, but it was ever present. My view of the world had never truly been elevated above ground zero and the horizon was an alien, unreachable destination. It did not, however, prevent me from yearning. My dilemma was that I wasn’t sure what to yearn for. I knew, somehow, that I wanted, needed something that had not yet visited me, but without having a means of comparisons or terms of reference by which to judge, it remained an imponderable mystery.
I had been on Uist for less than two years, but such was the influence it had on me that even when I thought very hard about it I could not conjure up a vision of what had gone before. The past was a film running in my mind, but it was an old movie, sepia-toned, blurred and moving far too quickly to make any sense.
By now, I knew that we were being reunited with Ma, a mythical creature, with her long, lustrous hair, dark eyes and faded glamour. I knew her only through what I had been told. If the knowledge that I had brothers and sisters had been a surprise, the fact that I had a mother was a revelation. I had thought I was an orphan. For as long as I could remember I had no real sense of having a mother, merely a succession of female figures who, to a greater or lesser degree, offered me security and care. Morag had come closest to fulfilling the role. However, very soon, I, and my brothers and sisters, would be reunited with the woman who, in spite of her manifold problems, clung to some notion of keeping a family together. I am still not sure why, and I don’t think she was either. I don’t believe she could have articulated her reasons, but I cling to the belief that there existed within her some degree of mothering instinct that would not allow her, no matter how bad things were, to relinquish her brood.
On that day, in the aircraft, when the sun sat high above the clouds in a place that is for ever summer, I could not know how bad things were going to get. I was travelling towards yet more uncertainty, an uncertainty that would characterise my life until the blessed moment when, many years hence, I would escape the horrors that it bred. As the aircraft made its descent through the white clouds and back into the more familiar grey world of my experience, a scintilla of hope began to form in my mind. It would, as always, be extinguished before too long, but in that moment I was comforted by the knowledge that she was waiting for us. Our mother. And from somewhere deep inside me a kind of love for her was dragged to the surface. Can one ever not love one’s mother, no matter how neglectful or remote or cruel? Many good women had looked after me, but this woman was my mother, and my mother wanted me.
It was 1966, and many of the inhabitants of the great industrial metropolis of Glasgow had been transplanted from their deprived and dirty inner-city ghettos into the vast new council housing estates on the periphery of the old city. The city’s fathers had burst with pride when they created the housing schemes in the countryside, into which a beleaguered population could escape, with the promise of a new life far from the slums. It was a time of hope. Who was I to swim against the tide? I ran forward to meet my mother. I should have known that hope always comes with an expiry date.
CHAPTER 5
‘Give Your Ma a Kiss’
‘It would seem that Mrs Whelan is basically a weak, inadequate individual almost wholly unable to cope … There has been a serious and consistent deterioration in the already weak family structure’
SOCIAL WORK REPORT
‘Davie, give your ma a kiss.’ The dark, exotic stranger, with her red lips and raven-black hair piled on her head in a beehive, offered me a pale powdered cheek. Morag’s condemnation of cosmetics as the wiles of the Devil flew into my mind. ‘I’ve been waiting for this moment for a long, long time,’ she said in an accent that was pure Glasgow but underscored by the softer tone of Middle England, where she had apparently been living for several years.
She had come back to the city with an impractical and naïve dream of reuniting her family. I would learn soon that the novelty of being reunited with that family would last little more than a few weeks, presumably far less time than her anticipation of this reunion.
From somewhere behind her, the strains of ‘Nobody’s Child’ were emanating from one of the as yet unknown rooms in this strange and too modern dwelling to which we had been brought. The song is a mawkishly sentimental ditty that began life as a country-and-western song. It had been espoused by a much-loved Scottish singing duo known as the Alexander Brothers. Ma was of a maudlin disposition. As an adult, the irony of that particular song playing is not lost on me. She favoured these sad songs by performers such as Jim Reeves about tribulation, heartache and the odd dog dying. In Glasgow, they are described as songs that ‘make the blood run oot the record player!’
‘I’ve never stopped thinking about you all,’ said this creature I had no memory of. ‘We’ll be one big, happy family now. We’ll muck in together. It’s all going to be all right, you’ll see.’ She was