No More Silence. David Whelan
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Jimmy was 12, but the family dynamic demanded that he act a lot older than his years. He was a different personality from Johnny, less good-natured and, God love him, a thief who regularly stole money from Ma’s purse and watched as others were blamed. Irene, who was 10, once took a terrible smacking from Ma, who accused her of stealing a 10-shilling note, a huge amount of money then, the difference between eating or going hungry. Irene had seen Jimmy take the money, but he was such an accomplished liar that he brazened it out. Ma looked for any excuse to condemn Irene – she had never forgiven her for rejecting her – and Irene was blamed.
In his defence, Jimmy was the family clown and made us laugh. When he was in trouble, he turned on the charm and swam out of hot water. Jimmy was once on the hook for some infraction and he escaped censure in the most remarkable way – he became Shirley Bassey! She was one of Ma’s favourite singers and when Jimmy appeared dressed as the diva, wearing Ma’s make-up, with two oranges stuffed down the front of her good frock and singing ‘Hey, Big Spender’, it diverted her wrath.
Jimmy wasn’t always so lucky, but his escapades were redeemed by a hilarious sense of the bizarre. He once shop-lifted a can of lager and was soon to be found in the close half drunk and loudly singing a Sandie Shaw pop song: ‘I wonder if one day that you’ll say that you care.’
When he sneaked into the house, Ma was waiting behind the door. She thumped him round the ear and sang back, ‘I wonder if one day that you’ll do what you’re bloody well told!’
Jimmy and Johnny were a handful, but they endeared themselves to Ma – unlike Irene, who never forgave her for taking her away from Morag. Jeanette, as always, was the rock. We were a troubled crew. It was apparent to those around us that the Whelans were different. It was often the mundane that brought those differences so sharply into focus. I can still laugh at one episode when I brought a pal home from school. We were in the kitchen and I had just poured milk into the tea and raised the drink to my lips.
‘Why are you drinking out of a jam jar?’ he asked.
‘What?’ I replied.
‘A jam jar. That’s a jam jar!’ My companion, a boy from the other end of the street, was sitting opposite me at the table.
‘What?’ I repeated.
‘It’s a jam jar. You keep jam in it. Where’re your cups?’
‘Don’t have any. They’re broken,’ I said.
‘Can’t you get new ones?’
I shrugged. Explaining the vagaries of day-to-day existence in the Whelan household was becoming part of life in this brave new world of Drumchapel, where those around us seemed to have things we did not – like proper cups.
My pal extrapolated the theme. ‘You don’t have many clothes either.’
I shrugged again. As a nine-year-old, I was unsure of the point he was trying to make. By now, we were developing a reputation – the children of the mother who seemed to spend most of her time sleeping, the family with too few clothes.
‘You don’t have much,’ said my companion, looking around the spartan interior of our home. ‘Why don’t you have carpets?’ he asked.
‘We do!’ I said.
‘No, you don’t. Those are doormats.’
I looked down at the disparate collection of mats on the floor, laid together in the impression of a carpet. Johnny had been busy. He stole them from the front doors of our neighbours. My companion was rendered silent by this strange household he had entered. He took another broken biscuit from the plate. They were Woolies’ finest. We would all wander to the nearest shops and ended up pinching broken biscuits from Woolworths. We were hungry.
Drumchapel was the antithesis of Uist. The only legacy of that idyllic place, the memory of which was diminishing rapidly, was that the Whelan children who were still at school had developed an oddball reputation as the only family in Drumchapel who could sing in Gaelic. Soon after our arrival we were invited to an open day at the local Kingsridge Secondary School, where we performed like a bizarre, deprived version of the von Trapp family from The Sound of Music. Jimmy and Jeanette were at the school, while Irene and I attended Cleddens Primary School. The teacher’s attempt to make us feel special by exhibiting our language skills may have been with the best of intentions, but it backfired. In the world of a poor Glasgow childhood, anything that sets you apart from the herd presents you as a potential victim. We took more than a few beatings for being different.
The school Irene and I went to was opposite the flat and we could see it from the windows. Being so close to home gave me a certain sense of security. I felt that when things were at their worst I was never far from safety, whatever that meant in my case. Home at least was a place of refuge.
In those days, Drumchapel was not a community. It was a collection of tribes gathered from all over the city, who brought with them their religious and social prejudices, as well as a territorial imperative harking back to where they came from. The rigidly designed new streets with their Eastern European aspect became mere extensions of the city districts lately deserted by their new inhabitants. Tribalism brought conflict, particularly of a sectarian nature. In the Glasgow of those days, you were a ‘Billy’ or a ‘Tim’ – a Protestant or a Catholic, a supporter of Rangers or of Celtic. It was not an option not to pick a side. We were Billies – Protestants. The religious divide in Glasgow, while wide, is nowhere near as lunatic as that of Northern Ireland, where the conflict had originated and been transferred to Scotland in the late 19th and early 20th century by an influx of immigrants. In the main, apart from a hard-core minority, it took the form of friendly rivalry rather than enmity.
Whatever tensions existed, however, were exacerbated by the great flaw of the Glasgow housing schemes of the mid-1950s and early 1960s – a lack of basic services. They had the atmosphere of internment camps as opposed to communities. The bus service was almost non-existent, and there were too few shops. Residents couldn’t call ‘the scheme’ home because it had no high street, no heart. If you asked someone where they came from, they did not reply Drumchapel. They said Partick or Govan or Dennistoun, or whichever part of the inner city from which they had originated. In spite of it all, there was still a sense of newness, the beginnings of hope, but the newly planted trees would have to grow much higher before there was any true sense of community.
The day-to-day problems of the Whelan family were less philosophical than actual. The cracks were beginning to show in Ma’s resolve. Her ambition to be a family once more was foundering on the rocks of reality. Her first words to us – ‘We’ll be one big, happy family now. We’ll muck in together’ – had not come to pass. Within weeks of our arrival she had begun to take handfuls of pills. Ma spent a lot of time in bed, leaving us to fend for ourselves in a hand-to-mouth existence. A mother’s duty fell to Jeanette, and it was she who tried to hold us together. Ma didn’t even dress us or put shoes on our feet. That was the role of social workers, who would trail us to Glasgow city centre for new clothes. The use of the word ‘new’ is a misnomer: I never owned an item of new clothing during childhood, apart from a school uniform. The Welfare dressed me as a child. Our ‘department store’ was a vast warehouse in John Street, where the clothes racks marched in serried ranks to apparent infinity. For some reason, I was always excited by the place. I still don’t know why. The smell was the first thing you noticed, a mixture of mothballs and sweat. It was the smell of poverty. You carried it everywhere you went. It singled you out.
In the so-called working classes of Scotland there exists a pecking order. We were technically working class, but we were physically and culturally separated from families where dads worked and mothers acted as homemakers. To my knowledge, the man I hesitate to call my father never worked a day in his life. He was a wastrel who lived by his wits and thievery. Proper working-class Scottish families are, in English terms, lower middle class – hard-working, if unskilled to any degree. Below that stratum was the ‘poor folk’ – families in which the dad might not work and the mum might be less than house-proud. Somewhere several levels beneath were families like mine – dysfunctional, deprived hostages to a different kind