Handstands In The Dark: A True Story of Growing Up and Survival by Janey Godley Read Free Book Online Page A

tended to exaggerate, so I was never sure how true these stories were.
    Glasgow also had ‘Gadgies’ – travellers but not actual gypsies – who lived near Shettleston so, every summer and sometimes at Christmas, their fair would come up to us. The Gadgies were hard-working folk who made their living from carousel and big wheel rides and penny stalls; they sold hamburgers and candyfloss and ran dodgems and they captivated me. They lived in caravans and long trailers and wore beautiful, brightly coloured clothes; they were very well dressed, well spoken and well educated and they had crazy dogs – anyone who could keep a mad dog was OK with me. But when I went to a Gadgie fair once as a wee girl of about four or five, there had been a clown holding balloons with his big painted clown face going
hahahahaha
and it had terrified me. So, even when I grew older, I was a child who was frightened of clowns.
    In the summer, the Gadgies would offer us children threepence or sixpence to beat the bushes beside a pungent, dirty off-shoot burn of the River Clyde that ran through our local council housing scheme – scared rats would run out and the Gadgies would shoot them for fun. I loved watching the big Gadgie men using Diana rifles to shoot tiny silver steel shuttlecock-shaped pellets into the frightened, running rats. You didn’t see any blood: the rats just fell over as the pellets went into them. I swam regularly in the burn and there must have been so many diseases floating there among the dead rats and rusty broken prams that it was amazing I didn’t catch something fatal.
    Local adults had different entertainments. Every July, almost the whole of our adult community would converge on the streets, drunk, as they marched with the Orange Walk, the big annual Protestant parade where Orangemen would sing about someone called ‘King Billy’. My Uncle David Percy banged on about the perceived wrongdoings of the Catholics for many a night. In reality, he was a layabout who raped children and drank too much, something his King Billy might not have approved of. He used to try to make me sing Protestant songs, but my hatred of him instead made me learn Irish Catholic rebel songs from my pal’s dad and I would sing them really loud into his face.
    My defiance simply provoked him to be even more brutal when he played his ‘games’ and I started being very badly bruised by his punches as well as the rapes themselves. He had no conscience about hurting me and cleverly kept most of the bruising to my lower abdomen or legs, where it was hidden under my clothing or would seem natural because I was a rough tomboy and often covered in bruises from football and my own escapades. I did show all the signs of abuse by scratching and cutting my skin and by my hair-pulling habit, but that was overlooked very easily – my family continued to assume I was just a nervous child. At school, my teacher Miss Miller would sometimes take me aside and ask about the bald patches on my head but I would always tell her it was just me getting into fights and nothing to worry about. I did not like the other teachers who saw the cuts and bruises and bald patches and turned their eyes away. I wanted someone to notice the pain I was suffering. I craved the chance to speak out, even if I then hid the truth. I did not want my Dad to go to jail for killing my Uncle. And he
would
have killed him. My Dad never did like Uncle David Percy: as far as Dad was concerned, he was a lazy, workshy layabout.
    I loved my Dad: he was the big father figure that we were supposed to be scared of but I never was – he was a pussycat to me. My Mammy used him as a threat to keep us kids in line, but he never carried out the punishments she promised he would give us.
    Then, one day, my Dad told me he and I were going to play a game of hide and seek. I ran into the bathroom and locked the door tight. Dad called through the door:
    ‘Janey! Open the door – it’s your Dad! Unlock the