Where There is Evil Read Online Free PDF Page B

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