The Step Child (7 page)

My memories of that first day don’t really go past those few snippets – holding my Dad’s hand all the time, getting the layout of 31 Easter Road, feeling disappointed, but hoping – really hoping – that it would all be perfect. I do remember that Helen paid me very little attention; there was no sign that she had indeed been looking forward to my arrival, despite what my Dad had said earlier. That didn’t strike me as too odd – I would have liked a cuddle from her, but I knew she had Gordon and realised she would probably get round to me soon enough.

And she certainly did.

As the days and weeks went on, I realised that Helen was my day-to-day world, much more than my father. He worked while she stayed at home. He never seemed to be there, and I felt his absence. It was the long summer holiday and I was waiting to start school in late August. Some days she would let me out to play in the back green, but I had to make my own amusement.
She would never play with me, and I don’t recall ever having anything of my own. Five-year-olds hold it all in their heads though – I’d lie in the long grass and sing to myself, make up stories, and dream of the perfect world I still hoped for. Most of all, I thought of Tiny Tears dolls. I had seen these toys advertised; I had witnessed other girls playing with them when I went on trips with Barnardo’s – and my heart ached for one. I lay there on the grass and thought about how a Tiny Tears would make my life complete. A dolly of my own; a dolly who could cry ‘real’ tears, that I could dress and nurse and sing to. I could almost touch my Tiny Tears, I thought about her so much.

That first summer was, ironically, the best of my whole childhood. It may not have been much compared to other kids, but given what was waiting for me, I should have been deliriously happy. At times, Helen would take me out to visit her friends or go to the shops; looking back, I can see she was showing both me and herself off. I was the girl with the mother who had deserted her – I was unloved, abandoned and, through her goodness, Helen had rescued me from an orphanage. When we met with other people, I could see how she glowed as they praised her, and while I was part of that charade, she had a use for me.

I loved it when we did normal things, boring day-to-day chores which I had totally missed out on in Haldane House. I remember playing in the back green, with Gordon lying on a fluffy blanket decorated with a duck. Helen was there – she rarely left her golden boy – and there were other children around. The sun was shining and I was happy. I had a Daddy, an almost-Mummy, a baby and a home. I also remember holding on to the handle of the pram as Helen shopped in Easter Road. We went from one place to another. In the greengrocer’s, potatoes would be weighed then slid straight off the big chrome bowl into the tattie bag that Helen held open. In Laing’s the butcher’s, our mince, sausages, rissoles, chopped ham and pork would be weighed then wrapped in greaseproof paper. The Co-Op was a
delight with its shelves stacked high with staples, and Green Shield Stamps handed out for every purchase.

But something changed to take away even the few good times. I knew Helen had a temper, but it soon became clear to me that I couldn’t do anything to prevent her outbursts. As an adult, I can see that she was always upset by the fact that I was my father’s first child, and that I had created a lot of attention in his family when I was born, attention she desperately wanted for Gordon. As a child, I had no idea what was going on. She began to taunt me a lot, but I was still too young to know what was going on or even understand what she was saying.

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.

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 miserable, 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.