No More Silence. David Whelan
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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.
I am alone, though, with the food from lunch, which I push down under the cushions on the huge sofa. Even if someone sits down, they won’t be able to see it. My hidden treasure now lies beside what remained of breakfast. I ensure once again that no one has discovered my secret place. If they don’t give me any more food, I won’t starve.
I was born into a world beyond poverty, the youngest of five children – the son of a brutish father, who was a drunkard and a rapist, and a mother who was emotionally and mentally unhinged. Naturally, I have no recollection of the period. I rely on my eldest sister, Jeanette, for information, and on the sparse notations in my social-work file, which record the time before I awakened to the world and was able to remember. This document, the story of my life, runs to just two typewritten pages.
My first true memories are of these recently acquired ‘parents’ – two Glasgow doctors who fostered me from a children’s home. I cannot even remember now which children’s home it was. I was in so many homes that my memory of them is fragmented. They have merged in my mind as little more than a vague recollection. That day, when I hid the food – was it in 1961? – represents my first clear memory. Whatever instincts of survival I had acquired clearly still prevailed. I would learn later that it is commonplace for children who spend their first years in care to secrete food. It is also accepted that such children tend to steal the food of others. It’s a survival mechanism – who knows when you will be fed again? Here, in this privileged place of sweet-smelling women and benign men, there appeared to be no shortages. What little experience I had gained, however, had taught me to hedge my bets.
The history of my family in so far as I know it stretches back no further than my natural parents – John Whelan and Evelyn Wolfries. I know nothing of my grandparents or great-grandparents. If they were anything like my parents, perhaps it is just as well I don’t know. My birth certificate records that I was born in Stobhill Hospital, Glasgow, at 8.45 p.m. on 27 September 1957. My mother was 26 years old and already had four children. My father was 34 and is described as a builder’s labourer. I doubt whether, in the course of his 75 years, he ever undertook any work as honourable as honest labouring. He was a drunken hoodlum, a man who employed casual violence to take what he wanted, when he wanted. In the incestuous netherworld that he inhabited, in the environs of 22 Kennedy Street, in the Townhead area of the city, my father was notorious. He considered himself a street fighter, but he couldn’t compete with the real hard men, who fought each other on equal terms and disdained any man who lifted his hand to a woman or a child. My father had no such compunction. He was a monster who beat his wife and children, with the exception of me.
By the time of my birth, he already had 24 convictions and had been jailed for crimes of dishonesty and violence and neglecting his children. I escaped being abused only because I was too young. I don’t believe I hate my father. That would require emotion. I have none for him. As for my mother – Ma – I recognise her now for what she was, a poor soul, weak and ineffectual, and every bit as much a victim as I would become.
The bottom line, however, is that for whatever reason they failed their children miserably, setting in motion a set of circumstances that would lead to the premature deaths of three of my siblings. The oldest, Johnny, took his own life at the age of 27. Jimmy, the third oldest, was tortured by mental illness until his death at the age of 46. My sister Irene died a broken woman, deeply traumatised by abuse in childhood, and passed away just after her 49th birthday. The banners proclaiming ‘Happy Birthday!’ were taken down only a few weeks before she died.
Ma also died young. The years of chain-smoking Senior Service cigarettes and swallowing the handfuls of pills that dulled the pain of her existence caught up with her before she was 50.
Only Jeanette and I survive. Thank God for Jeanette. In the course of this story, she will emerge as the rock upon which my life was built. My father lies un-mourned by us in a pauper’s grave somewhere in London, in an untended, nameless plot of ground, as far as I am aware. There is an old saying where I come from that your life may be measured by the number of people who shed tears at your funeral. I don’t know how many people cried at his. I wasn’t there. None of us were.
My parents abnegated their responsibility for their children. My mother, this weak and irresponsible individual with no real notion of the concept of care, deserted my brothers and sisters even before I was born. It was in effect an act of self-defence. She was escaping the brutality of what we might mockingly describe as a challenging home life. My father beat her. He also beat his children. John Whelan had a perverse sadistic streak. One of his favourite pastimes was to sit his oldest two sons at the table and place a pile of pennies in front of them. If they failed to grab the coins before he did, they were punched. If they grabbed the pennies before he did, they were punched. It was a game with only one winner.
As my brothers grew up, they were challenged to fight. ‘Are you as tough as your old da?’ he would demand, flecking their faces with his spittle, preening himself over his street name, the ‘Little Bull’, earned because of his pugnacious nature. ‘Put ’em up,’ he would say, ordering Johnny and Jimmy to raise their fists. Da was usually drunk, swaying back and forward, as he adopted the same pugilistic stance. ‘Show your old man what you’ve got,’ he would shout, adding, ‘Hit me!’ When my brothers, who were little more than skin and bone, did hit him, they were pummelled into submission and thrown against the walls of the one-room flat in which we lived.
My mother was incapable of protecting them. She had long since been cowed into submission herself. All she could do was hide the bruises on their malnourished bodies from the neighbours. Da ensured Ma’s compliance by trying to father a child during each year of their marriage. However, my mother would eventually seek to escape and ran away in January 1956. It was that year the family first came to the attention of social workers. Within days my father had put us into care. He could not be bothered to assume responsibility for his own children.
Like most battered wives, my mother returned, in November 1956. My brothers and sisters came home, and I was the inevitable result of Ma and Da’s ill-fated reconciliation. Ma was not equipped to look after herself, never mind the rest of us, in such an atmosphere of fear and brutality. Explaining my mother’s fractured state of mind is probably beyond my descriptive powers. Ma was an enigma. She apparently rarely spoke of her own childhood, hence my ignorance of my fore-bears. It appears that she had been badly injured as a child in a bizarre accident – a horse, which belonged to a rag-and-bone man, kicked her on the head. It could explain a lot – for example, why Ma spent long spells in a mental hospital and why she never had a proper education. She could barely read or write. I have long suspected that she was mildly brain-damaged, which could have led to her deteriorating mental state and the bouts of debilitating depression. It was a combination that made her easy prey for my brutish father. He ‘owned’ her. There were, mercifully, moments of respite from his drunken and abusive rages; he spent a lot of time in jail.
Ma had two brothers, Charlie and Davie, who would appear occasionally to threaten my father with violence if he laid a hand on their sister. Davie had lost one of his legs in a childhood accident. Generations of children played a game known as ‘taking a hudgie’. I don’t know where the word ‘hudgie’ comes from, but the game involved hitching a ride on the back of a moving vehicle, an extremely dangerous escapade. Davie had fallen from the tailgate of a municipal dustcart and been dragged under its wheels. The absence of one of his limbs did not, however, diminish his fighting skills. Ma and my siblings would apparently cower in the corner while he and my father swapped blows. My father was subdued by such encounters, but there was a dreadful inevitability about what would happen when Davie left; my mother would take another beating.
If Ma’s brothers had really wanted to help, they would have physically removed her from Kennedy Street, which would have given her the chance to break free from my father’s tyranny. This was