Where There is Evil

by Sandra Brown

  While my grandfather accepted this state of affairs with equanimity, I recall the bitter tone in my father’s voice when the subject came up. He brooded over it, and certainly felt cheated. He always laughed when Grandpa related that the ultimate irony for Murray was that he had ended up working for the Bairds, cleaning out the blast furnaces, and indeed, his end was, perhaps, fitting in that, in a drunken stupor, he fell asleep in a furnace and was cremated accidentally.

  Perhaps it was this reversal in family fortunes that led to my father growing up with a chip on his shoulder. My granny’s sister, Aunt May, said of him that he seemed to think the world owed him a living: his truanting was a way of flouting authority. Beaten frequently for running off, he shrugged off physical punishment until he stood over six feet tall and could no longer be walloped easily. Aunt May also noticed that my father could slip with extraordinary ease into a fantasy world where he told lies so smoothly that it was only when people checked things out that he was caught. Yet he could charm women effortlessly – but was regarded with some suspicion by most men.

  I was the apple of his eye. Long before seat belts were invented, I am told that he would tie me with scarves into the passenger seat of the butcher’s van in which he delivered meat. Maybe he did this because I was, perhaps, doubly precious to my mother: she had undergone a major operation to have children, then had conceived, only to have Catherine, her first-born child, survive just six days.

  Like many other newly-weds, at the end of the Second World War, my parents had to stay with their parents Katie and Norman, occupying one of their three bedrooms. After my birth, they were given a room and kitchen at 26 Partick Street in the Greenend area of Coatbridge. Here, Norman was born in July 1952, then the youngest of the family, Ian Alexander. I recall his appearance in January 1955 very well, as I was entrusted with many tasks involving the new baby. A photo of Norman and me holding our tiny brother on the settee is one of the few that was taken in that home.

  Chapter Four

  The house in Partick Street, long since knocked down, was a tenement building typical of many in Coatbridge. There was communal housing on stair landings, drying greens, which were the hub of all activity for the squads of children, and the wash houses, in which the women chatted as they stretchered out row after row of clothes to flap in the wind. To own a little Acme wringer with two rollers, which you could tighten over your own sink by turning little wing nuts, was the greatest thing my mother could imagine.

  All the women were allocated different days to have their ‘stretch’ of the greens, but everyone coveted Monday as a wash day – it was traditionally thought the best. Certainly no one would have dared hang out the tiniest amount of washing on a Sunday – not even a cloth over the rope many had suspended across their landings. This would have been regarded as scandalous, blasphemous even!

  We children were seen and not heard and play was indulged as long as it did not interfere with the Sabbath. I looked enviously at the Catholic children who seemed not only to have more freedom, but did mysterious things with candles and were allowed to have pierced ears. As for the beautiful white Communion dresses the girls I knew got to wear . . . it just was too much to bear! The closest I got to one was as a train bearer at my aunt Jean’s wedding, where I endured having my blonde curls put into long ringlets purely to gain ownership of a miniature bride’s dress in sparkling white. As for earrings, they were a lost cause as far as my mother was concerned: she classed them as items only gypsies or ‘bad women’ wore.

  Those Catholic girls fascinated me and their religion was kept secret: teachers would not answer your questions about it at school. I was allowed to run for messages to the Co-op and there my friend Nessie and I would encounter a little group of them. We occasionally followed them across the road to the swing park in Elm Street, which is still there, though modernized. They were nine or ten years old, and happy to teach younger ones the skills of street play. Two have stayed in my mind, but for different reasons. One, called Jeannie, could twirl with all the dexterity of a trapeze artist, and showed us how to ‘tummle yir wulkies’, which involved placing your body next to the iron rail at the park entrance, then tumbling over it head first. She loved all animals but her looks were spoiled by an Alsatian someone had tied up outside the Co-op. That incident taught me to be a wary of dogs I did not know, and although Jeannie assured me I should only worry about strays, I knew differently.

  The other Catholic girl lived just opposite the Co-op, at 218 Calder Street, and was one of a big family, which I envied. She was called Rena, and her dad, Eddie Costello, worked in the scrap yard and knew my father. Our homes were a stone’s throw apart, and she and her pals taught us wee ones to play ‘Truth, Dare or Promise’, but they only bothered with us if they were bored, and certainly not if any lads were about.

  When I was seven, we moved house and lost contact with most of our Partick and Calder Street neighbours, but years later when I was living in Whifflet, next door to Granny Frew, I encountered Rena. It was 1963, I think. I was in my navy High School blazer standing at the bus stop at the top of Ashgrove. A woman with a wee baby was already there waiting for the bus up town, and just before it appeared over the brow of the brae, I felt she was vaguely familiar. As we boarded both of us exchanged greetings with the conductress, and although I sat a few seats forward, when I heard the words, ‘Hello, Rena,’ I turned my head to look. It was her, chatting away as she perched the wee one on her knee. She still had such a nice smile, though now the make-up was very Dusty Springfield, her blonde hair sprayed stiff with Belair, eyeliner black and tilted up noticeably at the corners, Egyptian-style. She must have been about nineteen, but still looked younger than her age, despite all the Max Factor. I could not catch her eye and was too shy to move near her. Over the brief journey of just two or three stops, the two women exchanged pleasantries, and I learned that our families were once again living close to each other. Her baby was lovely, and beautifully dressed, but while the clippie was cooing at her, Rena was observing the reactions of others to the colour of the little one’s skin.

  ‘What are you calling her?’ she was asked.

  ‘Mary, after my mother,’ Rena replied, ‘and she’s being christened in St Mary’s.’

  Before I could smile at her the clippie had helped her off, and they waved a cheery farewell to each other.

  I never saw Rena and her child again and never thought of her until one day in the spring of 1994, when the grim events that had occurred in Gloucester, England, began to unfold on the front page of every newspaper. With mounting horror, I realized who Catherine West, Fred West’s first wife, had been.

  I telephoned my mother and we asked each other how a local girl like that could have lost all contact with her large family. The other news item that had stunned me was that Rena Costello’s first little girl was also missing, and suspected dead. But the police were searching for the remains of a child called Charmaine, which couldn’t have been the same one. Sadly, it turned out that Rena had named her baby Charmaine Carol Mary.

  But I have happy memories of Partick Street, where I became, like Moira Anderson, an incorrigible tomboy. I played from morning till night both in our building – out of sight of my mother – and outside, climbing the dykes that separated Partick Street from Kelvin Street. I whined for baseball boots like the boys and, in despair, my mother relented. I thought nothing of running over the roofs of the wash houses and lowering myself off walls nine or ten feet high. I practically lived in an overflowing neighbouring scrap yard, which belonged to Martin and Black’s, the factory renowned for huge wire ropes that were sent round the world to hold up steel suspension bridges. This was our playground, and we thrived on danger. It was all the mothers could do to drag us in after hours of play, especially in the long daylight of Scottish summer evenings. For me, surrender to my mother’s yells to come in preceded a thorough scrub at our kitchen sink, but many others were just thrown into a shared bed with two or three other siblings, all
equally filthy. Perhaps given a jam ‘piece’ or sandwich if they were lucky, they had old coats or sacking over them instead of a quilt. These circumstances were quite normal and caused no raised eyebrows in a neighbourhood where no one had a bath or an inside toilet, but instead shared communal outdoor ‘cludgies’ to which each family had a key.

  Despite my bravado in front of the boys I played with, I was terrified to venture to that outside toilet at night. I was petrified by the spiders that scuttled along the white-washed step when you were sitting there, frozen to the spot by the draught blasting under the door and round your bare legs.

  In our special playground, a troop of us played hide ’n’ seek, kick the can, dodgie ball (a variation on rounders) or devised gang huts of whatever we could find lying around. Long grass and purple-coloured weeds helped with the camouflage needed for games like Tarzan, and also discouraged adults from hunting for us. Sometimes we went on the scrounge for discarded Tizer and Irn-Bru bottles left by workmen from their lunch. We were cute enough to take them to the corner shop for the deposit pennies, which would buy us liquorice or sherbet in a small bag. When we were really feeling adventurous, we went further into the railway yards in the Meadows, where rows and rows of wagons had been shunted on to railway sidings to await goods for transport all over Britain. We would scramble over pyramids of coal in the wagons or slide open their doors to gaze fearfully into gloomy, mysterious interiors, but the real frisson of excitement came from the knowledge that at any moment we could be caught by the railway police for trespassing. As five- and six-year-olds, we didn’t know what this word meant, but everyone ran for their lives as soon as an adult was spotted in the distance.

  In the street behind our house, I manoeuvred Cherry Blossom boot-polish tins round hopscotch squares, because cars were few and far between. The milk was delivered by horse and cart and the Co-op man had to be given yellow tokens in exchange for the two daily pints of milk. My father’s delivery van was one of the rare vehicles parked by the kerb. The only other I remember belonged to the baker, who came a few times a week and to whom I was sometimes sent for bread, scones and pancakes. In the post-war years, women still regarded it as shaming not to produce their own home baking of Victoria sponges, fairy cakes and Scottish shortbread for guests, and it was unusual to eat bought cakes. I saw it as a treat to be sent for cakes from the van.

  Children were not given regular pocket money so if someone was getting married, we hung round the entrance to their close or gate. When the bride emerged, we knew her dad would throw a shower of coppers for luck. With no heed for danger we would all yell, ‘Scramble!’ and launch ourselves almost under the taxi’s back wheels to compete for the spoils. If you met a family taking a baby to its christening, you might have the good fortune to be given a christening ‘piece’, which was something like a home-baked biscuit with a glinting threepenny bit hidden inside. Granny Katie hid coins in her famous clootie dumplings at Christmas, but as she had twenty grandchildren and not much money, it was a real stroke of luck to get one. ‘Finder’s keepers!’ we would yell triumphantly.

  Soap was my mother’s solution for everything in an environment where hygiene was poor. It was not uncommon to see a ‘rats’ flitting’, or mass evacuation of the rodents who would abandon housing about to be knocked down, as if some benefactor had tipped them off. My mother’s practices with the carbolic did not stop me picking up, to her great shame, ringworm and, later, impetigo. All my long hair was shorn, and lurid gentian violet was painted on my face.

  I recall being severely punished once by my mother, who ran the household pretty much single-handedly after my father obtained his PSV licence and started with Baxter’s Buses, the local family-run bus company that served Airdrie and Coatbridge. We entertained a number of visitors to afternoon tea one day, and I set the table. I took enormous care with the china dishes and teapot, then filled the sugar bowl. People stirred it into their tea, sipped and suddenly there were grimaces all round the table. It was salt! My mother, last to sit down, had been wondering why there was an awkward silence with no one drinking and was ‘black affronted’ when she was told why. I got such a row from her, but no wallop as she knew it had been unintentional. I seem to remember that I made amends with a spirited rendition of a then popular song, ‘Where Will The Baby’s Dimple Be?’ in which I did a cutesy Shirley Temple routine.

  ‘Doing a turn,’ as it was called, held no problems for me: few people had television and we made our own entertainment. In the large family from which my mother came, everyone performed at family parties. Even the youngest grandchild was expected to dance or say a poem, or tell a little joke. Only my dad never took part, but was always a figure on the sidelines. In photographs, he is always right in the background, mainly because of his height, which rendered him head and shoulders above everyone else. If one word summed him up, it was ‘watchful’. He was affable, and went out of his way to be pleasant to his wife’s clan, but there was something about him that made me feel he was on his guard, and which set him apart from my jolly uncles. Even before I started school, I sensed this, and as my highly vocal uncles formed a chorus line, and belted out songs like ‘Moonlight Bay’, I knew that they disliked him. I was too young to realize that this was because of his infidelity to my mother.

  My feelings about my father were becoming confused: I loved being twirled upside down by him until I was about five, and started to feel uncomfortable when he flipped me over. When I finally refused to run to him and greet him like this, he was angry with me and found subtle ways to punish me. He thought it funny, if I was ‘uppity’, to dip a teaspoon in freshly made tea and hold it, red-hot, against my bare arm or leg as I passed him. The blisters, he told my mother, had been caused by me splashing myself with hot tea, I was so careless. I looked at him wordlessly when he made statements like this: it didn’t seem possible that my own father could be so mean. When he had me in tears after he had burst a paper bag he had blown up at the back of my head, or when he insisted one Christmas that I got nothing from Santa because I had been naughty, my mother accepted what he said, and did not question his punishments. The culture in which she had always lived did not encourage women to overturn the views of their menfolk. Although she made sure I got some presents later, that particular Christmas morning I found a lump of coal at the end of my bed.

  But these punishments were only the start. Later I dreaded the signal that he was really annoyed about something: his hands would go to the large leather belt round his waist, a relic from his Army days, and he would unbuckle it so that the end swung from his hand and the huge brass buckle dangled, to be lashed over bare legs, back and buttocks. Anywhere not easily seen once the victim was dressed.

  Chapter Five

  Before we had left Partick Street, in late 1955, I had begun to notice how my father took every opportunity to joke coarsely with young adult women, which had them flushing in embarrassment. Then, to my distress, he would pounce, squeezing at knees and grabbing at suspenders. If they were unable to resist this onslaught, he would grope at their breasts. He might start playfully, holding something they needed just out of reach, and they would end up involved in what seemed harmless horseplay – at first. His physique, of course, ensured that he was the victor unless other men were around or his victim was unusually spirited. It worried me that he would not stop running his hands all over them. He would pin the person to the ground, rubbing his face hard against their skin and declaring loudly that he was just playing a game. Couldn’t they take it then? All women liked this game, he said – he called it ‘Beardie’ – and the yells of outrage from those on whom he inflicted it were often because their chins were left raw. His sheer brute strength ensured that often the woman only put up token resistance or squealed hysterically, which normally brought him to his senses.

  This behaviour never occurred around my mother or other men, and he chose his victims with care, making sure that if the woman was married her husband was half his size. In one or two
cases, I noticed he did not meet much resistance, and later I realized that he chalked up these conquests as affairs. My mother had had to contend with this from early in their marriage. In her seventies she told me that the first one she had discovered had been the most painful: when she had given birth to the little girl she lost and was still in hospital, my father had taken a nurse to the pictures and then dancing. She confronted him about all the clean underwear and shirts he had gone through in record time and told him that he had been seen, but he denied it. My mother, though, had challenged the nurse, who had admitted it. ‘It hit me then what he was like,’ my mother said. ‘I couldn’t believe someone could do that after his wife had gone through a big operation to carry his child. Then I made the mistake of thinking he might change, if he was given responsibilities.’

  In Partick Street, however, he went to great lengths to be accepted as a family man. He was at the memorable street party held for Queen Elizabeth’s Coronation, where people packed like sardines into our next-door neighbour’s house to get a glimpse of the ceremony on a flickering black and white TV set. Afterwards, we ate outside on the drying greens where red, white and blue tables were set under clothes lines draped with streamers. In the weeks before, my father had spent considerable time with hardboard, a hacksaw and nails. He stencilled ‘E.R.’ and ‘1953’ on the board and adorned it with crêpe paper, surprising my mother with the trouble he had taken.