David Whelan - No More Silence

DAVID WHELAN

WITH MARION SCOTT AND JIM MCBETH

No MoreSilence

He thought he’d got away with it. But one day

little David would find the strength to speak out.

To ‘Robbie’ for unswerving commitment, and to my

brothers and sisters, Johnny, Jeanette, Jimmy and Irene.

You are always in my heart.

Contents

Cover

Title Page DAVID WHELAN WITH MARION SCOTT AND JIM MCBETH No MoreSilence He thought he’d got away with it. But one day little David would find the strength to speak out.

Prologue

CHAPTER 1: Born Into a World Beyond Poverty

CHAPTER 2: Paradise Found

CHAPTER 3: Of Long Summer Days and Billy the Ram

CHAPTER 4: Paradise Lost

CHAPTER 5: ‘Give Your Ma a Kiss’

CHAPTER 6: ‘Where’s Yer Whore of a Mother?’

CHAPTER 7: A Very Special Place

CHAPTER 8: Who Was William Quarrier?

CHAPTER 9: The Intimate Stranger

CHAPTER 10: I Lose My Shield

CHAPTER 11: ‘Are You Clean, David?’

CHAPTER 12: The Strange World of the Beast

CHAPTER 13: The Beast of the Bell Tower

CHAPTER 14: Public Applause, Private Degradation

CHAPTER 15: Hope and Awakening

CHAPTER 16: Escape

CHAPTER 17: Climbing the Ladder

CHAPTER 18: A Family of Strangers

CHAPTER 19: Return to the Lair of the Beast

CHAPTER 20: The First Cracks

CHAPTER 21: A Single Tear for Ma

CHAPTER 22: Finding Morag

CHAPTER 23: Dining With Diana

CHAPTER 24: Success on a Plate

CHAPTER 25: Three Phone Calls Change My Life

CHAPTER 26: Pandora’s Box

CHAPTER 27: Telling Irene

CHAPTER 28: The Others

CHAPTER 29: Accused

CHAPTER 30: The Yellow Bird Café

CHAPTER 31: Witness for the Prosecution

CHAPTER 32: Roll of Shame

CHAPTER 33: Falling Apart

CHAPTER 34: Finding Da

CHAPTER 35: Fighting Back

CHAPTER 36: No More Silence

Help and Support for Victims of Abuse

Acknowledgements

Copyright

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Prologue

We had arrived. I had fallen asleep on the journey to a new life that promised peace, security and safety. I awoke with a start, in time to see the words spelled out in flowers – ‘Suffer the little children.’ My first sight of and welcome to Quarriers Children’s Village. I did not realise then that the ancient words, spoken by Jesus in the New Testament, which were displayed so beautifully in a floral arrangement by the entrance, would be corrupted before I was much older. Nestling in the Renfrewshire countryside, this was a place far from the grime and unpredictability of life in an inner-city slum.

My sister Irene sat next to me in the back of the social worker’s car, her eyes luminous with uncertainty. I shrugged off sleep and wiped moisture from the car window. My first sight of the bell tower. It rose high above what I would later learn was known as the Children’s Cathedral. I had never seen anything so breathtaking. My world had been the drab, monotonous, utilitarian architecture of a sink housing estate, where no one looked up. Heaven was such a hard place to find. Structures such as the Children’s Cathedral dominated only places where there was hope. The soaring steeple pointed to Heaven, but I would soon find it was pointing the way to Hell. He would see to that. The bell tower was where he took me, its impenetrable walls stifling my screams as he stole my innocence and planted the seeds of my own destruction, which would come many years later, when I was an adult and believed that I had left the past behind.

His name was John Porteous. He is at the heart of this story, but there will be few mentions of his given name. I once called him ‘Uncle John’, but I was a child then and trusting. I had yet to be betrayed by the man whose duty it was to protect me, to keep me safe. Therefore he is for ever the Beast – it is how I have referred to him in my mind ever since. For three decades it took all of my strength to block out the unspeakable things he did to me over my time at the children’s home. A single phone call, 30 years after I escaped his clutches, proved to me that my entire existence was an edifice built on sand. In a matter of a few seconds, the façade that masked the pain of a lost childhood and a misguided sense of shame was torn away. I was forced to stop running in a race that I could not win, a race away from my past. This time, this time justice had to prevail and I had to play my part. The phone call placed me at the centre of Operation Orbona, the biggest police investigation into systematic sexual and physical abuse at a children’s home. Eight of the abusers would be convicted, and I would witness the Beast going to jail.

I thought then it was over. I was wrong. It was just the beginning. Before I could reach the light, everything in my life would be taken from me. I would lose my successful career, the millionaire lifestyle and everything I had so carefully created as a shield against my secret pain. This is the story of how I fought back.

CHAPTER 1

Born Into a World Beyond Poverty

I am searching for memories. I am four years old. I think I am alone. I am still hungry, but I force myself to save some food, the remains of lunch. Mother, a tall, fragrant woman with a kind face and a ready smile, is in another room. Father, big, bluff, reassuring, is out of the house, but I don’t know where. He left with a cheery wave, ruffling my hair with large, clean hands.

I am in the drawing room, a generously proportioned space that is little used. The ceiling, with its ornate, elaborate cornicing, seems very high above me. Light floods in through the tall window, which looks out onto a broad expanse of lawn, running into the distance towards a destination that is as yet unknown to me. Mother’s dog – a Cairn terrier? Misty? – is trying desperately to attract my attention, begging for what I have in my hand. The dog dances at my feet, but I reject the animal’s overture. This is about survival.

I glance around the room, searching for prying eyes, before I unwrap the food from the napkin in which it is hidden. I am safe. I can hear the sound of clinking crockery coming from the kitchen. Dishes are being washed in a sink. Margaret, the middle-aged woman who seems to be part of the family while simultaneously distant from us, does the washing and cleaning for Mother.

Mother is elsewhere, entertaining two of her friends, regular visitors to the salubrious detached Victorian villa in one of the most exclusive suburbs on the Southside of Glasgow. I have already been wheeled out to be touched and poked affectionately by my mother’s companions.

‘Such a lovely boy,’ says one.

‘Such big eyes,’ says the other, in a voice that tinkles like glass.

They smell so nice, better than the women in the place where I was before, a crowded, noisy, dismal barracks inhabited by a legion of nobody’s children, all of them like me, all clamouring for attention. This strange new world is very different. I have not inhabited it for long. I don’t know precisely how long. Time has yet to develop any meaning.