The Step Child (8 page)

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 into 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.

Combined with the clicky false teeth, the ‘Deirdre’ specs and the never-quite-right beehive was a fashion sense which always seemed a bit out of kilter as well. She loved miniskirts. In those days, it didn’t really matter if your legs were up to it or not; if fashion decreed you wore something that made you look awful, you just had to go along with things. Her favourites were checked and woolly, and she liked to pair them with skinny-fit nylon jumpers. I remember Helen’s legs a lot, presumably because I was so small, and I can vividly recall that, no matter how thick the American Tan tights she wore, you could still always see the mottled skin creeping through. We used to call it ‘fireside tartan’, where women’s legs took on a blotchy effect that showed they loved sitting too close to the fire even more than they loved the latest style.

While she was indoors, Helen always wore her ‘baffies’, or slippers, and I have this image of her from the feet up. She was tall, or seemed so to me, almost as tall as my Dad (although he was a bit of a shortie). The baffies – which smelled and were falling apart – led to the thick American Tan tights, which showed off her fireside tartan legs right up to her short woolly miniskirt, into which was tucked a nylon, static-filled jumper. Her hands would play host to lots of gold rings with big stones – she loved fake amber jewellery – and, above the blue eyeshadow and eyeliner she loved, it was all topped off with one of her hairdos, or a conglomeration of curlers with a satin headscarf on top, tied under her chin, if she had to nip out to the shops.

All of this, all of the physical presence of Helen, is still with me. I know what else there is – I know what she was planning, what she would eventually do, but sometimes it is only by picking it apart in small pieces that I can put it together again. What did my stepmother look like? What did she wear? All of this can be approached in a way that makes sense to me, in a way that I can’t really apply to the physical, mental and sexual cruelty which was already building up.