You are who you are

I was only nine and trying to protect my wee sister’s, now I’m the ‘bad yin’. I’d put a wee table thing over my wee month-old sibling and her four year old sister and cooried under it trying to block out his wrath. He was shouting and bawling as he usually did when he came home drunk but this time he seemed particularly furious. I never saw him actually hit my mother, and he never hit us or his son Dan who was the eldest (Dan, now twelve, was now old enough and wise enough to ensure he was out when these instances occurred) but he behaved as if he was on the very brink of violence. My mother was trying to keep him away from the bed but he seemed intent on reaching us for some reason, we seemed to be the focal point of his rage. How we’d dragged him down, ruined his life, the usual stuff but this time he was spitting and bright red with drink and fury.

He was, of course, too strong for my mother and he reached us and pulled our wee shelter away leaving us three wee lassies exposed to his anger, his voice loud and booming above us, pulling at the sheets around the wee new-born. I was the big sister and my only thought was that he was going to harm us, or one of us, in some way so I fled out the room, out the door and onto the lamp-lit Sauchihall Street. It would be about ten at night and quiet and I headed straight for the policeman’s box across the road. I didn't know what to call him except ‘Mister’ so I said the fateful words…

“Mister, my Dad’s gonnie hit us or kill us, please come and help..”

And that’s what made me the family scapegoat for the rest of time.

I was born in a castle in Bridge of Allan, Stirlingshire the same month the war started. It was also the week after my mother’s mother had died. I was the child of a grieving mother.

We were evacuated there from our home in Glasgow. Me, in my mother’s womb, and Dan my older brother. My dad had stayed behind to pursue his job as a car mechanic with Forsyth’s, a department store in Renfield Street.  It must have been an awful time for my mother, being away from a strange place and losing the woman who had been a rock in her life. It strikes me now though, sitting here in my mid-seventies being forced to re-collect all this stuff for my inquisitive son who seems to think it’s the stuff of books that maybe it was a welcome break away from an abusive husband but, thinking back, I’m not sure he was always like that. They had made a very bonnie couple, he tall and handsome with a fine head of dark hair, she quite petite with an alluring smile. I’m sure they’d been in love at the start but something had soured it, more than likely his fondness for the bevvie. I wonder if she’d counted on that at the start, or is love truly blind? Mind you, back in those days, most men ‘took a drink’ and it was pot-luck (or Russian-Roulette) which one’s were merry and could control it and which were violent beasts with it. My Father seemed to be among the latter category. Not uncommon in those days for what they now call ‘domestic violence’ to occur. A city like Glasgow was known for it. Some men would give their wives’ ‘a dig’ at the slightest provocation. If you got ‘a good man’ you were lucky. It was quite common to see women with bruised faces and black-eyes. With some you felt they held them as badges of honour, like they had a ‘real man’ or something.

Every time I go out now it’s without him. Every time I come home he’s not there. I hear him saying ‘hi doll!’ in my head but it’s just a remembrance of a voice. Took me near four years before I could bear to put out a photograph of him. It’s on the mantelpiece, I say hello to it when I come in to the front room. His palpable absence is endless and everywhere. Everywhere I go he’s there and yet; he’s not there at all…..ever!

Today they cry it patriarchy, but to women of my generation and before it was just a man’s world. If you had a good father it was good for you, a bad one? it could make your life hell. I was his first daughter and like any daughter I wanted to be his little princess. When he was sober he would be fine. He’d tease me and tell me stories but there was always ‘an elephant in the room’. You couldn't fully trust him for you knew that very likely that same night he’d be an absolute bastard of a man. So, you held yourself back as if, the niceness of him in the day would only make the opposite man at night more shocking and heart-breaking.

We’d be quaking in our beds hearing him rollicking drunk outside the close. He’d be pretending to be all hale-and-hearty admonishing us for not getting up and joining-in his fun but there would be a sinister, sneering edge to his voice and you knew there was only one way this was leading. The air in the wee apartment would turn cold and we would all, my mother included, be as wary as deer near a wolf. We’d pathetically try to humour him but it never worked. Under the influence of booze every grievance in the world roared out of him. What we’d done to him; kept him back; he was so much better than this. One time he brought five live lobsters back with him that one of his drinking friends had sold him (he probably hadn't given my mother any house-keeping that week. God knows how the woman fed us?) then made us witness him boiling them alive. I can still hear the whines and screams to this day. He informed us very grandly that this was the sort of food he deserved and not the muck my mother doled out. He’d make us stay up for hours until he finally went to his drunken slumber.

As a child I had the strong impression that this was what men were like. I found it amazing that my future husband wasn't like this, although he was hard-work and controlling in many other ways. I married him within three months of meeting him, largely because I fell in love with him, but a big part of the swiftness of it was the huge opportunity it offered to get away from my family home.

A woman’s life back then was shaped very much by the men who were in it. A ‘good man’ was one who gave you your house-keeping regular and didn’t hit you. I’m not really sure if they were accorded the respect they were due for this as ‘bad men’ were feared much more, and fear was great currency. Certainly greater than ‘gentleness’ or what would now be called ‘sensitivity’. The world, certainly between men and women, is never black and white. Black and blue sometimes but not black and white.

My father disappeared into the army around nineteen forty-two, and I didn't find out why until years later. I think he was even a chauffeur to General Montgomery at one point during the African Campaign. Except for leave he didn't return until nineteen-forty-six, as if he’d deliberately stayed away as long as he possibly could. Typically, he brought us all gifts then resumed terrorising us of a night-time. Looking back, it was quite blissful when he was away, although my mother had to go out and work as he never sent home a penny.

After the ‘fetching a policeman’ affair which seemed to be far more shameful an event than the terrorisation of his family to my father (and, it seems, my mother) I found myself ‘in a home’ for reasons that were never fully explained to me. I just remember the terrible grief of it, like I was being punished for something; and just maybe I was.

My brother Dan made his escape at the earliest possible opportunity by joining the Merchant Navy at aged sixteen. I guess his young sisters looked upon him as a possible knight in shining armour which was unfair on him as he didn't have it in him to stand up to my Father, so he left us at his mercy. 

What growing up with my father did to my brother is something I never found out. It was never discussed. Sometimes, within families, it’s the most damaging things that are never discussed. You just never talked about them. It wasn't the ‘done thing’.

My mother eventually divorced my father in nineteen-sixty-eight. That wasn't really ‘the done thing’ either. Society seemed to demand that you stay within abusive relationships no matter what.

In sickness and in health.

In brutality and abuse.

‘Til death us do part.

My mother hated me for getting back in touch with the man in the late nineteen-eighties. He told me ‘you’re mother did me a great wrong’. I dismissed this as the expected arrogant misogynist speaking. He still couldn't speak to me for more than an hour without getting all fidgety to be out for a pint.

The sort of ‘emotional abuse’ that was going on in our family was very common. It was ‘common knowledge’ yet, the amazing thing was….nobody was allowed to acknowledge it. Not properly anyway. Maybe a nod and a wink and a bit of butcher-shop gossip, but nothing official. That’s why my policeman business was such an act of betrayal; I think even the policeman thought so. I’d put him in a very difficult position. I had him involved in a domestic.

One motivation that my father instilled in all of us, however inadvertently, was a desire to leave his presence at the soonest possible opportunity. Iain Duncan Smith and Norman Tebbitt would have loved him. We were only too happy to ‘get on our bike’s’ and make our own way in the world.

You never escape the scars of it though. None of us did.

Mary McWaw Mathews

I’m dictating this (as if any of you are interested) through my Grandson who is still alive (just!) and lives on the east coast of Scotland (for reasons known only to himself). One reason I cannot write it myself is that I am long dead, and also I cannot write very well. They taught reading and writing at the school I briefly attended but it didn’t quite catch with me. In fact, a good few of us managed to slip through the literacy net. If you were poor they didn’t really bother to ensure you were literate, they were just glad to get rid of you as quickly as possible (thirteen in my case and glad to be out of it).

My Grandson seems to be the only one of my line that is at all interested in the life of someone like me. (Only he knows why).  I spent an entire lifetime trying to keep myself to myself in the accepted west coast of Scotland manner and now this arsehole wants to come along and expose it all by demanding my narrative.

My legacy has had a bit of a bad press if truth be known. The word ‘nutter’ has been bandied about a lot as well as ‘mentally ill’. I never saw myself that way and I was never really bothered what even those close to me thought. I had aspirations which I walked through walls to achieve. I notice though that those doing me down have not done half as well as I did in life (this big sap for instance, still lives in rented accommodation and falls fail to the drink at the slightest provocation). He’s not half the man his Grandpa was, which is the same opinion I had of his father, my poor deluded son, Robert who is now with me, his Dad and his Brother in the spirit plane.

I was born in the shipyard town of Greenock in 1905 the youngest of thirteen children (and no we weren't Catholics, thank you very much, although I had a sister who married a Fenian bookie but we don’t speak of her). I’ll fill you in on what happened to my siblings as we go along, some of them died young, some of them didn't, and I eventually left all of them behind as I strove my way out of the social mire. I was born twenty four years after my parents were married, and I was to become a mother myself for the second time at the ripe old age of thirty nine, but more of that later. We moved to Shettleston in the east end of Glasgow when I was only two, and I lived in an over-crowded tenement until I was to become married to my husband, Alan at the age of twenty-eight. He was the first man I’d met who could help deliver me from my poor surroundings.

My father was a puffer-boat captain or so he said. He may well have been once, but in my opinion the nearest he got to sailing would have been the Govan ferry. He liked to portray himself as Para Handy but I only ever knew him to be claiming the dole and it was my mother who earned our keep. She was a French Polisher, a trade she was to pass on to yours truly, and it served me well.

Glasgow, certainly in the part I grew up in, was a dark and dirty place. The Parkhead Forge spewed industrial filth into the air and you could stand outside its walls if you needed a heat. I don’t want to portray myself as a wee female Fagin but I learned early on how to scrounge a ha’penny or a farthing out of folk. I didn't mind begging; found no shame in it at all. In fact, I was still getting off on the thrill of a ‘freebie’ in my mid-seventies living as a not-too-badly-off widow in the coastal town of Ayr.

This would be in a time when my literary Grandson actually knew me. I’d have been fifty-five when he was born but I’d been an auld yin for quite a few years by then. People turned to old folk in their forties back then, as everything was done according to social rote. Your kids had their own kids and you were a grandparent quite young. I’d started the whole marriage thing quite late so I lagged behind a wee bit. There’s a reason for this that I may come to later, if I can be arsed. Suffice for now to say that I was five years older than my husband which was quite an oddity at the time, but then, haven’t I always been quite the oddity? You should never let such a thing stand in the way of what you want. Never let what people think of you get in your way, I never did.

There are and were some who say that I was very selfish as a person. There may be some truth in this. Maybe I wasn't driven to succeed only for myself though. Or maybe I was, I really couldn't tell you. Maybe their perception of me is faulty. Maybe they didn't grow up the youngest of thirteen in a slum in Shettleston. If that experience doesn't drive you to better things then maybe it is you who are the loser. Life is dog eat dog, isn't that how it works?

Money makes the world go around, and money, every last farthing of it, became an obsession with me.

It is true that when I took my grandson out walking with me, when his mother was laid up having her second child, people would give the little blonde-haired lad money in the Glasgow custom – two bob, a couple of silver sixpence’s – and I would keep them.

It is true that when my wasteful son, Robert would bring his bus conductors takings home in his leather satchel from the nightshift that I would steal a good few coppers out of it.

I couldn’t help it. It all added to the drive for what came to be called ‘upward mobility’ but what we just called ‘getting on’. Hey, I was the youngest child.  Sure, I was going to be competitive. Competitive and highly manipulative.

I was both a scrimper and a saver, and a petty thief if I had to be.

No hot water for the dishes, hand-me-down clothes for the boys (I used to patch Roberts trousers with bits of carpet). All frugal.  All for a final goal in mind.

I worked though. By God I worked. Long hours and all hours. I worked from when I was nine years old, going to school only when absolutely necessary, when the truant officers poked their noses in. I would be cleaning fancy houses, a sort of freelance domestic servant never stuck to one place. I was learning my trade as a French Polisher with my dear old mother. My father was a kindly man but completely useless in all other ways, though I loved him for his warmth but tried not to let it infect me.

I collected jam jars and ginger bottles and took them to the grocer’s for their return value. I didn’t spend money on frivolities like going to the pictures or buying sweeties. I saved it all up for a rainy day.

I learned early on that there’s money to be made from the well off. I’d clean their houses, and from this I knew I wanted what I could get of their life-style. Somehow, however inconceivable it might be, I would get a nice home of my own. By whatever means necessary.

My early life knew tragedy all too well. I lost two brothers in the Great War, and I lost another brother who ended up under a stack of fallen wood on the docks. I lost my mother when I was fourteen years old. Thirteen children and a feckless, if loving, husband had worn her out by her late fifties and she died in her sleep one night. That woman was my inspiration. My old Dad lived well into his eighties puffing on his pipe and telling tall-tales.

I wasn't what you’d call a good-looking child. For a girl I had a masculine look. Wavy, mousey hair and a biggish nose. I was both dumpy and frumpy-looking. Big-boned. No boys ever chased around me and girls didn’t want to be seen with me. Like I say, I was an oddity, left to my own devices. On the plus side, I was free to be whatever I wanted to be, as long as it didn’t require good looks to do it.

My family were a hard, feral bunch; my father would be away up the western isles on his puffer boat (I lie at the drop of a hat, as you can see) and my brothers and sisters, or those that remained, were free to fight and fornicate all they wanted. Had to be tough in a tough world.

There stands a lady on the mountain,

Who she is I do not know,

All she wants is gold and silver,

All she wants is a nice young man.

His final days in that hospice were just awful. He didn't want me there, then asked my son ‘where’s your mum?’ accusatively. It was a red-hot summer, the trains were off, and the replacement bus service took hours. I didn't know what to do for the best. It was often that way with him. My sons told me that as he was dying, thunder and lightning crackled and roared in the sky. That was him alright!

Mary Michie

Mary Michie edged along an unknown road in the dark. She couldn't see three feet in front of her but even if she could, her tears would have blinded her.

“Awkward sod would have to die during the bloody black-out”

Her heart was broken.

They’d not even offered her a bed at the hospital even though it was the middle of the night. Just sent her on her way, a grieving woman just widowed.

She wouldn't have taken them up on such an offer anyway, she was too upset to sleep. The seventeen mile walk from the hospital in Erskine to Bridgeton in the east end of Glasgow was actually good for her in a way. It gave her time to think about her predicament, terrifying though it may be. Though, she could have done without the black, bleak darkness.

Gangrene they’d said, from an old wound suffered in the last fiasco. Lost the lower part of a leg. Her lovely man had let her children and nieces play with his wooden leg – made a big joke out of it. Finally succumbed to an injury from the first war in the midst of a second. She’d held his hand as he died. Said ‘goodbye my lovely man’. Now she had to harden her heart and look after their children.

How lonely life can be sometimes. Lonely and so, so tough. Experiences either shape you or destroy you, she thought. She had no option but to adapt.

She was glad he was out of his pain; the agonies and indignities at the end. She was also glad she could at least be with him at the end. They’d meant so much to each other.

She stumbled home to her children in the darkness. She had much to suffer yet, and she could only hope that out of darkness came some shred of light.