David Whelan - No More Silence

‘Lass, I have something to tell you,’ he said in a faltering voice. ‘This is the hardest thing for me, but I have to tell you.’

‘What?’ said Jeanette, alarmed.

Willie took a deep breath. ‘You’re all going back to Glasgow.’

Jeanette was dumbfounded. Tears sprang into her eyes. ‘Why?’ she whispered in a voice that was not her own. ‘We’re all so happy here. Why do we need to go back?’ she pleaded. ‘Don’t you want us?’

Willie had promised himself he would be brave, but he was lost. It was his turn to plead. ‘No, no, no, lass! We love you like you are our own. You know that, don’t you? We’ve never made any difference between any of you. I hope you know that?’

Jeanette was blinded by tears. ‘Is it because we were bad?’ she asked, falling into the trap that has snared unloved children from the beginning of time – believing it’s your fault when things go wrong. My sister grabbed Willie’s hand and said, ‘Please, Willie, it was just a joke. We were only having fun.’ Jeanette’s mind was swimming. She believed that it was the recent prank she and Jimmy had played on Willie and one of our neighbours.

The two of them had found a tin of paint in the shed and had deemed it a great jape to paint the lambs all over – in blue! They hadn’t realised that colour patches were daubed on the animals so each crofter could identify his own beasts. Willie had been really angry with Jimmy and Jeanette and had berated them, but he hadn’t realised I had been watching, and when they were out of sight he’d laughed out loud to himself.

‘No, lass! This isn’t about the sheep,’ he told Jeanette.

She wrung her hands. ‘It’s about the postie’s van, then, isn’t it?’ Another jape. Johnny and Jimmy had seen the post-office van parked in a lane with the keys inside. The postman had been having a cup of tea with a crofter and hadn’t reckoned on the arrival of two unmitigated scallywags. They took the van for a joy ride and crashed it into a hedge, by virtue of losing control of the vehicle because Johnny’s feet didn’t quite reach the pedals. No harm had been done to the vehicle or its drivers, but Morag had been incandescent with rage. She’d bellowed at them, ‘You’ve black affronted me, you two. How can I hold my head up in church with everyone knowing I can’t control you boys?’

Willie reassured Jeanette, ‘It’s not about the postie’s van. That was just a bit of nonsense.’ For a few moments, Willie was lost for words, and when he found his voice, he said, ‘This is something we can’t fix. Your mum has demanded the social workers take you all back to Glasgow, to be a family again. We’ve tried arguing with them, but they say your mum has rights. We’ve loved you all from the moment you came. We’ve tried to give you everything we would have given our own children if God had granted us the blessing of having any. No matter what happens now, we’ll still always love you, no matter where you are. I’m so sorry.’ The cruelty of the moment was heightened when Willie revealed the worst of it: ‘They’ve told us that we can’t even stay in touch with you – no birthday cards, no Christmas cards, nothing.’

Jeanette was inconsolable.

Willie added, ‘You have to promise me not to tell the others. Not yet. It would only upset everyone more. We’re waiting to hear when the social worker is coming to collect you. We just want your last days here to be happy. We want you all to have good memories of us.’

Willie recovered a dog-eared letter from the pocket of his dungarees and handed it to Jeanette. It had come from Jenny, our mother’s sister. Jeanette told me later that Jenny had written to Willie and Morag, telling them she was sorry that we were all being taken away from the only loving home we had ever known. She apparently thanked the MacDonalds for looking after us all so well, far more than her sister had ever done for her own children.

My sister’s face was ashen when she came out of the barn and suddenly I lost interest in throwing the ball for Tidy. From that moment, everything in the croft changed. Heaven knows how Jeanette kept the secret and endured that deeply troubled period.

A few days later, the beginning of the end was heralded by a perfect early summer’s day – 25 May 1966, a date etched in my memory. People who have led normal lives recall the good days in their lives. The disadvantaged and abused remember 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.