No More Silence. David Whelan
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from my life, along with my infantile memories of them and my parents.
It is a strange fact of my life that childhood memories elude me, especially those from my infancy. It is as if I have suppressed many of them. Perhaps the influence of my father, a man I effectively did not know, is stronger than I imagine. Whereas most children would enjoy fairly precise memories of their formative years – from about the age of three to four – I struggle to reclaim mine. Consequently, I have only the vaguest recollection of the two people who arrived at the children’s home one day and talked soothingly to me of becoming my new mummy and daddy – their words. I do not even remember their names. They will be written down somewhere, but I have no access to those records.
By the time I was ensconced with the two doctors in their big house in Newton Mearns, just outside Glasgow, I believed I was alone in the world. Nobody thought to tell me otherwise. Even behind the scenes, however, the mother I didn’t even know existed was manipulating my future. I learned later that the doctors wanted to adopt me, to give me their name and offer me a stable home and opportunities that someone from my background could only ever have dreamed of, but Ma refused to sign the adoption papers. God knows why. It was clear from her actions that she had not wanted me or any of her children. The doctors had treated me as their son for nearly two years, a period during which apparently they exhausted every avenue in an attempt to keep me, but ultimately, when it became clear that they could not be assured that I would be allowed to stay with them, they decided they could not live with that uncertainty.
On the day I left them, they were distraught. They stood by the door of that big house, watching me as I walked down the path flanked by two social workers.
Before I reached the garden gate and the waiting car, I pulled away and ran back to them. ‘Was it because I stole the food?’ I asked.
CHAPTER 2
Paradise Found
Paradise was 17 miles long by 13 miles wide. I took the measure of it on 6 August 1964. North Uist, in the Outer Hebrides, a place as remote as it is beautiful. My new home. I was seven years old, and an extended island family of 2,205 hardy souls who lived on the western fringe of Europe were waiting to welcome me to the next stage of my young and not uneventful life. Four of them would be the brothers and sisters who, until that momentous day, I did not know existed.
‘I have something to tell you, Davie,’ said the social worker, as we rode in a taxi from the tiny airport at Benbecula across an alien landscape beneath an endless sky.
I felt very small. The incredible excitement of the journey from Glasgow to the airport, and then the wonderful adventure of the flight, had subsumed any questions that had been forming in my mind. It had only been a few hours since I had left the doctors’ house. My innocent enquiry about the food had sent them fleeing indoors, with tears streaming down their faces. I was confused. As I was ushered into the car, I heard from behind me a terrible howl of anguish, which I could not understand. They wanted me to go away, didn’t they? There was no time to think about it now. I would think about it later. Now there was only space and wind and blue sky.
The social worker sensed that I had come back down to earth physically and metaphorically. It was time for answers. She placed her arm around my shoulder, drawing me closer to her in the back of the car, enveloping me in comforting warmth. I was too young and damaged to recognise such an action as intimacy, which had played little part in my life so far. However, I sensed she wanted to share something special with me.
‘Do you know you have brothers and sisters, Davie? Did you know that?’ she asked.
I was not sure what having brothers and sisters meant. The concept was unclear. My life had been a pretty solitary affair until that time, usually me and whichever adults had charge over my care. I looked for inspiration at the back of the silent driver’s head and beyond, to his view of the astonishing landscape spreading before us. Neither he nor the cloudless sky offered any explanation.
‘They went away when you were still a tiny baby,’ the social worker continued. ‘While you’ve been in one place, they’ve been in another – here,’ she added, her hand indicating what seemed like a vast plain beyond the safety and seclusion of the old car, which was now rattling along a rutted track. ‘But now,’ she said, ‘you’ll all be together.’ She looked towards the front, beyond the driver, to the ribbon of road lying ahead. ‘We’re nearly at Knockintorran – look!’ she said.
The blue ‘reek’ of peat smoke was a thin, almost transparent column leaking into the sky from the chimney of an isolated single-storey cottage that was dwarfed by the landscape. I could sense the rough texture of the grey walls, which, from this distance, looked as cold as the feeling in my stomach. I was still grappling with this brothers-and-sisters problem.
It would soon be resolved. They were lined up against the wall of the croft house, an honour guard for the new arrival. They would soon have names: Johnny, Jeanette, Jimmy and Irene. Ranging in age from 9 to 13, they, too, had spent a significant portion of their lives separated from me, but they had the advantage of memory. A man and woman were standing behind the children, a tentative smile playing on their kind and ruddy country faces. These were folk outwith my experience, dressed in rough-and-ready clothes, with a quiet stateliness that I would come to realise was the hallmark of those who live in wild places. It is hard to describe. They had a dignity that belied their appearance. Morag and Willie MacDonald were my new mother and father.
I learned later that I was here because my natural mother had refused to agree to me being adopted by two childless doctors in Glasgow, despite not being able to care for me herself. Unbeknown to me, while I had been in and out of children’s homes and foster care, my brothers and sisters had been staying with Willie and Morag. Ma’s demand, which reunited me with my siblings, was arguably the only true act of compassion she had ever shown her children. The social worker gently pushed me out of the car and into my new life. The woman behind the children waved my brothers and sisters forward. It was an awkward moment.
Someone, I can’t remember who, said, ‘Hello, Davie!’
I had come home.
I still do not know what possessed social workers to despatch a gaggle of poverty-bred street kids from Glasgow to an island where English was the second language, but I bless them still for it. I would discover that my brothers and sisters were much changed from the urchins who had left the city so many years before. They formed a circle round me, and standing in the centre I suddenly had the feeling that I was where I was meant to be. Maybe that was what this brothers-and-sisters thing meant.
They were clearly fascinated by me, this small stranger who had without ceremony been added to their number. They looked from me to my new parents, asking questions in an unfamiliar tongue; they had acquired Gaelic. Children learn by osmosis and it would not be long before that incomprehensible and musical language would morph into words and phrases that I could understand.
I brushed aside the clouds of insects that had formed around my head – midges. Those familiar with the west of Scotland will know the scourge of these minuscule and annoying creatures.
Morag and Willie MacDonald took me into the warmth of their home, warmth that was as emotional as it was physical. Heat emanated from a large open fire beside an Aga, upon which a great black kettle was coming to the boil. I would discover that this kettle boiled from dawn till bedtime. Morag walked into a wall of steam. To this day I remember her in a halo of cloud. She never strayed far from that cooker and its huge pots of potatoes and stew, which took two hands to carry to the wooden deal table in the middle of her kitchen. It was the heart of the home.
My first – and erroneous – impression of the croft house was that it seemed sparse and bleak, but it was soon lit up by the bright, if stern, Morag. In retrospect, I realise Morag had none of the vanities of the city women I had known. Her looks were unprepossessing. Make-up and hair-styling were dismissed as the work of the Devil. Morag was a devout Christian. Her uniform of shapeless dress, cross-over white pinny and men’s socks, rising out of sturdy shoes that would not have looked out of place on a man’s feet, was good enough, thank you very much.
Willie was her soul