The Step Child Read online

  One of her early outbursts happened one day when I was standing behind her in the pantry. There had never been any loving contact between us – she never hugged me or snuggled me in for stories – but the fact of her coldness hadn’t quite got through to me yet. When I first arrived I wanted so much for her to like me. I wanted it so much that I just didn’t know what to do. I’d look at her bouncing Gordon on her knee, singing him songs, kissing him, and I wanted some of that. I did like Gordon when he was little: it was only when he got older and Helen turned him into her ally, telling tales, making up stories that I realised we would never even be friends. I often hung around her, thinking that basic proximity would result in some of the affection she lavished on Gordon rubbing off on me. On this particular day, maybe I was standing too close, maybe I made her feel claustrophobic, but she wheeled round suddenly. ‘Get away,’ she hissed. ‘Get away from me, you snivelling little bastard.’ I stood stock still. I didn’t even know what the word meant. Her voice got higher and louder. ‘Didn’t you hear me? Are you deaf and thick as well as ugly? Get away, you bastard child! Get away from me.’ I may not have understood what the word stood for, but I knew enough to get away.

  From then on, the poky bedroom became a place where I was sent, not somewhere I would choose to go. After that first incidence of verbal abuse, it was as if the floodgates had opened. She rarely stopped. I had been naïve enough to think that the worst thing was being ignored – well, now I was getting plenty of attention and it was horrible. She didn’t taunt me when my Dad was there, and she made it quite clear that I wasn’t to mention it to him either. As soon as he came home from work, she would start making little comments about how difficult I was, how awkward, how unhelpful, what a saint she was for putting up with me – and, instead of being the good, lovely Daddy I was desperate for, he believed every word of it. He’d tell me to be good, to help Helen, to realise how lucky I was and not to make things difficult, but he never once asked me if it was true. I was so little that I couldn’t have made complicated arguments for and against our relative positions, but I knew right from wrong, and I knew when things were unjust.

  When Helen’s temper flared, she would scream at me to go to my room and then bark out some more orders. ‘Sit on the bed! Get your legs straight out! Put your arms straight down by your sides!’ I would have to stay like that for as long as she determined was appropriate. It was agony. My back ached; my limbs ached; I wasn’t allowed to cry; I wasn’t allowed to move. I honestly thought that if I even blinked too much, she would know and I would be punished even more. There were a few variations. Some days, there would be new additions: ‘Take off your clothes! Keep your vest and pants on! Face the wall! Don’t look at the wall! Look at the ceiling!’ The punishment was always for nothing; it was always for something she had decreed to be a flouting of the rules, even although they were rules of which I had never even been made aware.

  As time went on, more punishments for more unspoken rules emerged. I would be sent into the lobby where the brick recess was still standing unfinished. My Dad and Uncle Alex were allegedly making this space into a little room, but, like most of my Dad’s projects, it never really came to anything beyond the initial wrecking. It was so tiny and odd-shaped that I doubt he could have done anything to it with the best will in the world, so the rubble remained, the bricks stayed exposed and the stink of damp was there constantly. It became another focus of Helen’s increasing hatred of me. ‘Get in there, bastard child,’ she would snarl. ‘Get in there. Face the wall. Don’t move or I’ll know about it. Then you’ll have it coming. Ugly little bastard.’ I didn’t know what was ‘coming’ but it always seemed that what she implicitly threatened me with would be even worse than what I was enduring. Hours spent in a hole in the wall staring at nothing as I got colder and ached more, and felt the hunger rise through me until I shook, seemed preferable to Helen’s next stage of punishment, whatever it turned out to be.

  If the damp recess wasn’t to my stepmother’s liking, and the bedroom had lost its attraction, then the bathroom always came in useful. It was a very long, narrow room with a bath, toilet and sink. There was a pulley above the bath, and I remember having to let it down on its squeaky runners to hang up wet washing. There was a high ceiling and it was always freezing. Helen would decide which of her favourite options would be chosen that day. ‘Stand in the bath,’ she told me the first time I was sent to that room. ‘Take all your things off apart from your vest and knickers and stand there, bastard, just stand there.’ I did as I was told. She pushed her face close up to mine. ‘You’ll stand there until you learn your lesson. Don’t move. Don’t breathe. Don’t sing or talk to yourself. Just stand there.’ And I did. Other times, I’d be told to stand by the toilet, but the same routine held. No moving. No sound. No indication that it was anything other than what I deserved.

  That was my life. I was five years old. I had a father who saw nothing. I had a stepmother who hated me. I had a stepbrother who was turning into a pawn for his mother. There was no sign that my half-brother and half-sister were going to be arriving any time soon. I was always cold, always hungry. I was never hugged, never loved. I was already learning degradation and meaningless punishment for imaginary transgressions that were never explained.

  I was home.

  Chapter Four

  THE LITTLE WITCH

  1964–1965

  DESPITE THE AWFUL THINGS Helen was already doing to me, that first summer at Easter Road is one of the few times I remember having happy moments. A lot of the early days – before the recess, before the beatings – were spent being introduced to other members of the family, particularly on my Dad’s side. These family visits were the only time I ever saw him properly – the rest of our moments together were fleeting, when he was rushing out to work, or listening to Helen’s criticisms of me. However, when we went to see his family, I got to be with him for much longer. I was carted around, shown off, and that seemed much more in line with what I had expected to happen when I first left Barnardo’s.

  I don’t know what to make of those relatives now. There were lots of them – the Fords were a sprawling bunch – but for all their friendliness, they were never really there for me. They saw me come back into the family, they knew my history – and that was enough. These people flit through my memory now as characters in a play, a play that is my life, but they’re just walk-on parts – and perhaps that’s how I appeared to them as well. I was just wee Donna, Don’s daughter, the one who should be so very grateful to that nice young lassie Helen for taking her back in when my own evil mother had deserted her.

  Uncle George and Auntie Valerie were two of the first I met. They lived in a ‘nice house’ in Clermiston, on the north-west side of the city. Edinburgh, like all other places I suppose, was very clear in its delineation of what constituted ‘nice’ people and ‘nice’ places. Cleanliness and not bothering others had a lot to do with it, but your address and the proximity of green spaces and fewer pubs really got a family up a few notches. George was one of my Dad’s brothers. I remember he was older and greyer than Don. He wore glasses and always had a very serious air about him, as if he was permanently worried about something he couldn’t voice. He and his wife had two children – Gordon and little Valerie – and, to me, they ticked all the boxes: a proper family with Mum, Dad and kids who weren’t sent to a home.

  Uncle Alex was very different. My main memory of him is of a man who had a great sense of fun and an air of mischief about him. He was married and had children too, but it is Alex himself – not as a Dad or a husband but as an individual – who is burned in my mind. He was one of those people who makes everyone smile just by being there, a real joker. Others were always happy to see him, always laughing when he was around. Most surprisingly for me, my Dad changed when he was with that brother. From always seeming weary, and carrying the burdens of the world, he became a happy young man who would go out and enjoy a beer, have a joke, be normal. Our home life made my Dad m
iserable, even I could see that. Helen was always shouting at him or narking about me. We never had enough money, so she wanted him to do as much overtime or shift work as possible – of course, that also helped her in that he wasn’t around to see how she treated me. She moaned that she couldn’t afford to buy the things she wanted, that we had less nice stuff in the house than other people, that she didn’t have the clothes all her friends could parade about in. This confused me because Helen did always seem to get what she wanted. When we went to the local shops, she generally had enough money for a lipstick or something sparkly, but, to my Dad, she constantly pleaded poverty. He must have been tired, and home offered no respite. She was at him when he left for work, and she was waiting for him when he got back. He was immediately given a list of things I had done during the day – most of them created and based around being ‘evil’ or looking at Helen ‘funny’ – and berated for bringing me back into their lives. Helen would shout at him to work on the alcove, to do things around the house, to help out with neighbours she had promised his assistance to. The man never got a moment’s peace. But when we went on visits he changed, and I felt the benefit as much as anyone.

  Uncle Alex and his family lived in Burntisland, a coastal town on the Firth of Forth. They lived near the ‘Bin’ – a law, or a hill that sits in the centre of the town, and which you can see from the other side of the Firth of Forth. I can remember always visiting them in summer, and only ever for the day. In those days, kids were generally sent out to play while the adults stayed in the house. Burntisland was a small place when I was little, and everyone seemed to know everyone else. Even today it has a population of only about six thousand, and people from Edinburgh still see it as an ideal place for a day trip. To me, it was a place of fun – I loved the trip there; I loved going to the beach and the parks; I loved the fairground even though we didn’t have the money to do any of the things other families were enjoying.

  When I got a couple of years older and Simon and Frances had been staying with us for a while, we could pretend to be famous in Burntisland. My cousin, one of Uncle Alex’s daughters, was going out with one of the sons of the man who owned Macari’s, the ice-cream shop – and in that convoluted relationship, we saw our claim to fame. Whenever we passed the shop, whenever we threw a few words at any other kids playing outside, we’d loudly declare that we were ‘related’ to them. And didn’t it make us feel grand! By the end of any visit, we had completely convinced ourselves – but no one else – that we owned the entire shop and café. The irony was that we couldn’t even afford a single cone between the three of us.

  My Dad also had a younger sister whom we would visit regularly. Auntie Madge was the baby of the whole family. Helen always referred to her as ‘the spinster’, although it was a long time before I found out what that meant. It always sounded like an insult coming from Helen, but I don’t think Madge would have seen it as such. She always liked things just right, and was quite set in her ways, despite being younger than her siblings. She was particularly neat and tidy, and had quite precise manners. Appearance was everything to Auntie Madge and I remember her clothes very clearly. She wore smart, woollen, Chanel-type suits, with nylon turtle-neck sweaters, flat patent leather sensible shoes with matching handbag, and a hat pinned ‘just so’. Madge always had perfectly coiffed permed curls, a bit in the Irish mammy style, and delicate glasses. Her pearls were a permanent fixture, and I can still see her pulling on her gloves one finger at a time. She had a sickly sweet smell of foundation and perfume, combined with the air of being extremely prim and proper. Madge went to church regularly and was a Girl Guide leader. Whenever we went to visit her, I had a sense of something different, a different way of being that was very correct and absolutely unwavering. All of this made her so different from her brothers that it was hard to place them all in the same family.

  Until you met Granny Ford.

  Granny Ford was the original family matriarch. She ruled the Fords, and no one would ever dare dispute anything she said to her face. Of course, Helen would have the last laugh in that department, but to her children, Granny Ford was the woman who mattered. She was tiny with a smiley face and grey curly hair. Round and warm, she often cuddled us when we went to visit. I clearly remember the smell of her cooking, and the way she always had something to be getting on with in the kitchen. She was always busy and ready to be working, with a floral apron tied around her, hankie in one pocket, sweetie in the other. Whenever I think about her now, I can hear the ticking of her cuckoo clock. Her bedroom smelled of lavender and the living room of coal. She was the kind of granny I would like to have known better, but she died when I was still very young, and Auntie Madge stepped into her shoes as the head female in the family. I often wonder whether I would have been able to go to my Granny when things got really bad. When Helen started to abuse me to the extent that I could see no end to it, would I have found an ally, even an escape route, if Granny Ford had been alive? All of that is just dreaming, wondering ‘what if?’, but I do think that she was a woman who would have laid down the law, and expected others to abide by it – perhaps she would have changed my life if she had lived longer.

  I still think back to her tiny house, so warm and comforting, nestled under the railway bridge at Ashley Terrace. I never went there with Helen, only with my Dad on the number 44 bus. I didn’t pay many visits as she died before I was eight or nine, and I can’t remember her ever visiting our house, but what I do remember of Granny Ford is all nice – and those memories mean a lot in a childhood with precious little niceness. I recall when she died my father telling me she had fallen over and bumped her head. I never went to the funeral, and the only time I spoke to my Dad about Granny Ford was on the days when he’d been told by Helen to take the kids out. Sometimes, when my Dad wasn’t at work, Helen would go on at him to take us all on a day’s outing: this would often be to Holyrood Park or around the streets right up to Princes Street, the Mound, down the Bridges and along Forrest Road. He’d tell us stories of Greyfriars Bobby and show us his own postal route as he was now working as a postman. Often I’d be stopped from going, but on the times I did, I hung on to his every word as we’d walk around the streets and he’d point things out en route. On the very rare occasions when I would get time on my own with Dad, I would try to talk to him. When he wasn’t around Helen he was a much kinder man. He’d talk a bit about Granny Ford and about his own father.

  On trip days, Helen would claim she needed to ‘get on with things’ in peace. I remember a few of the occasions I was made to stay back as, according to Helen, I’d been bad. I was then made to clean the house, scrubbing the floors with a wooden brush and carbolic soap, and sweeping the carpets with the broom. I would have been only five or six years old at the time. Helen would get me to trample the blankets in the bath then wring them out, twisting to get the excess water out, then hanging them out on the washing rope in the back green. Helen also loved to get me to clean the bathroom, making sure I stuck my hand right down the toilet and cleaned and scrubbed every part of it around the rim and down the back, whacking my head on the toilet rim if I didn’t do it to her satisfaction.

  No matter how many trips or visits we went on, no matter how many relatives I was reintroduced to, there remained one harsh reality. I always had to go back ‘home’. And in that ‘home’ was the one character who is etched in my mind, to this day, more vividly than all the others put together.

  Helen.

  Physically, she was a product of her times. Although I have seen her recently in court looking like a nondescript middle-aged woman, it is the Helen of the 1960s who still haunts my dreams and takes me back to Easter Road. Her shoulder-length hair was a characterless brown. During the day, if she was just going about her business with no visitors, she would scrape it back off her face in a greasy ponytail. But when it was a day of note – a party, a night out or friends coming round – she would spend hours getting it just right. I would watch her as she curled it, or teased it in
to a beehive, or backcombed it until it couldn’t move. Every few seconds, more hairspray would be applied – her favourites were Bel-Air and Elnett – strong, overpowering, noxious goo which would fill the room and signify that Helen was Going Out. Sometimes, she would tell me that I could help. When I was just starting my time with her at Easter Road, this was presented to me almost as a treat and, equally, I tried to accept it as such. She’d pass me the spindly comb and I’d try so hard to mould her hair into something attractive. I didn’t mind to begin with because she was quiet and still throughout the charade. However, as time went on, I couldn’t bear to be so close to her, and the travesty of doing such a normal task for a woman who made my life hell was just another slap on the face. In the early days, I would stand on an upturned washing basket or pile of old newspapers and brush and brush and brush and brush. I would take big, round, prickly rollers from a basket and carefully place them in her straggly locks, or I would try my hardest to curl the ends and flick them up in the latest fashion.

  However, there was only so much you could do to make Helen look good. Her attempts at a hairdo were the start of the ritual, but she was always going to be dragged down by her specs and her teeth. The glasses were similar to the ones Deirdre in Coronation Street used to wear – great lumps of plastic on a pearlised frame with a silver flash on each arm. They dominated her face, and made any attempt at glamour quite ridiculous. Mind you, they were nothing compared to her teeth. Helen’s ‘falsies’ would click as she talked, and it always seemed to me that she had a constant fight on her hands keeping them in. I used to be convinced that they were trying to escape, and I was mesmerised by her mouth, by the clicking, and by the hope that, one day, they would simply fly out of her mouth and she would have to shut up.