David Whelan - No More Silence

If I’ve learned one thing, it is that one should not cling to a notion of what might have been but deal only with what is. However, today, I am haunted still by the pain caused to Morag and Willie by our departure from their care. They had taken us into their lives and the heart of their community. What might have been had we stayed? Even before Morag and Willie, there had been the two doctors who had wanted to adopt me. What might have been then? Alas, you play with the cards you are dealt, and right now we were dealing with life at 34 Katewell Avenue. Let the heartache begin …

* * *

The Dansette record player throbbed to the sound of Long John Baldry singing that very song. I can’t think of a time in my childhood when Ma’s Valium-fuelled taste in music did not reflect the reality of our lives. It was bizarre, as if we had been conjoined to a weird country-and-western parallel universe. From the safety of adulthood, there are moments when it makes me almost laugh out loud. If I could release the laughter, there would be no joy in it. It would be the sound of someone witnessing the blackest of black comedy. Ma lived in a world of her own, where social workers and any figure of authority were the enemy. A knock at the door froze us, like gazelles sensing the approach of a stalking lion. The most feared visitor was the ‘tally man’ – a Glasgow term for an illegal money lender. ‘Tally’ is vernacular for counting money – for example, ‘Tally up what I owe you.’ Ma loved new things, but she was too impatient and profligate to save for what she wanted; she wanted everything immediately. The tally man was only too happy to oblige – at a massive rate of interest. He also had no scruples about breaking your legs if you didn’t pay in time, even if the legs belonged to a woman. In those days, normal kids were driven behind the sofa by the monsters on Dr Who . In our case it was a big man with cropped hair, a scarred face and a brass knuckle-duster, and you thought Daleks were tough?

The result of Ma’s profligacy was that she was constantly in debt. Hiding from money lenders, the rent man and even the little man who ran the corner shop became a way of life. Ma owed everyone. We would be sent on errands with no money to pay for her cigarettes or other ‘messages’. Ma reckoned shopkeepers would feel uncomfortable turning a child away. She was often correct in that assertion, but when they refused you turned away with a sense of embarrassment that gnawed at you all the way home.

Perhaps my sense of embarrassment indicated my growing isolation from those around me. I don’t know why, but I was never part of what psychologists would now describe as my peer group. I never became ‘pure Drumchapel’. I remained a novice in terms of street-smarts. It was arguably caused by the time I spent with the middle-class doctors, followed by the otherworldliness of Uist, which had left me with the aptitude of a much younger child. This was exemplified one day by a visit from the dreaded tally man. I was in the kitchen when I heard a knock at the door. This was an angry knock, an attempt to remove the door from its hinges rather the signal for the arrival of a visitor. The rest of the family scattered as I walked into the hall and opened the front door.

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