The Step Child (4 page)

Frances, Simon and I were ‘duly returned’ to my Dad, who must have specifically requested this, given that I was the only one biologically linked to him. Frances went to school; Simon and I went to a day nursery. It all seems relatively straightforward.

Then comes the line that chills me to the bone.

In the middle of a page, in the middle of our story, come 12 words that I know alter everything.

‘
Ford engaged a young girl, aged 17, to look after the home
.’

That’s her.

That’s Helen.

She’s in my life. She’s sneaked in without me noticing.

I want to scream at those words as soon as I read them. Get out! Get her out now and maybe, just maybe, it can all work out fine. They’re just words, but they are condemning me as I read them. I know what’s going to come. I know what’s going to happen. Where was I when my father asked a teenage neighbour to help out? Was I playing at nursery? Was I in his arms? Did she see me? Did she hate me straight away?

Whatever my Dad asked her to do didn’t really work out. He tried for a few months to raise us all before deciding it was too much. I can’t help thinking that a woman on her own in those days, without the same ability to work and earn, would have struggled on for longer, so why couldn’t a man keep trying, keep the family together, such as it was? When did my Dad decide the cutoff point had been reached? Maybe he had a date in mind, maybe we pushed him to breaking point. Whatever happened, whatever prompted him, we were going to be packed off to a home.

Haldane House had opened in 1946 as a home for boys of school age, and by 1957 it was a mixed home. It finally closed its doors 23 years later when children were moved to The Tower in Edinburgh. The notion of a children’s home probably conjures
up particular images for people, images of cruelty and neglect, or of orphans desperately seeking a family. My experience was a quite different matter. My time at Haldane House was happy, and I was never mistreated or ill-used. The place was quite anonymous – it didn’t necessarily indulge children or treat them as precious little individuals – but I was safe. Soon I would have changed my life for the one I had at Haldane House at any price.

The very fact that I was taken in by Barnardo’s may confuse some people – I wasn’t an orphan, I wasn’t destitute, but my father clearly felt he could no longer cope. I have often wondered how things would have turned out if only one part of the jigsaw had been put in a different place. What if Don Ford had just been looking after me, not my half-siblings? What if he had moved from Edinburgh to start afresh when Breda left? What if he had never asked Helen to ‘help’? What if Barnardo’s had refused to take us, or refused to accept me, and encouraged my father to keep trying, to keep plodding along and doing the best he could?

But Haldane House did take me and my story went on.

My mother was gone but she had left debts of hundreds of pounds, which Don Ford was paying off on her behalf. He paid £2.12s.6d for a fireplace, sink unit and other furniture, with a total of £300 still to clear. She had also managed to run up debts with five different clothing clubs, with about £120 of arrears. On top of that, my father also had outstanding gas, electricity, plumbing and tradesmen’s bills to pay – and everything had to come from the £8.9s he made each week as a bus driver, and the 18s of family allowance for all three children.

Barnardo’s records show that officials thought well of my father trying to cope with such a financial and familial burden. Haldane House representatives contacted members of my family when they could, but Breda’s mother, Mary, made it clear that she was unwilling to help, given that she believed her own daughter to be a lost cause – ‘beyond redemption’ as the records
state. Clearly, if the mother was such a loss, the children were believed to be tainted as well.

From what I can gather, the decision to place us in Haldane House was a joint one between my father and the RSSPCC, represented by a Mr Smith. On the original application, it is emphasised that, although Breda was a lapsed Catholic, none of her three children had been baptised. Rectifying that became a condition of our acceptance.

Before we were finally accepted into the home, officials interviewed the matron at Pilrig Nursery to determine what sort of children Simon and myself were. The report glows with references to my father. ‘Miss Robertson has a great admiration for the father whom she has watched rushing home in between shifts, doing without breakfast sometimes to take the children to the nursery, and who seems devoted to the children.’ Miss Robertson clearly approved of my father and his efforts – and she was the only person who noticed that things were not quite right. Helen – the girl who was ‘helping out’ – was not to her liking. ‘The girl who sometimes brings them does not appeal to Miss Robertson who thought her unsuitable and rather unstable. On one occasion, the girl brought the children to the Nursery at 7.30am and left them in the charge of the cleaners until the opening time of 8.50am.’ But Miss Robertson’s words would never be heard, and it would be a long time before anyone would ever pay any heed to the ‘instability’ of the 17-year-old girl who was to become so trusted with our little lives.

By the beginning of January 1961, everything was in place for our move to Haldane House. I was 18 months old and, apparently, a responsive child ‘with a happy smile’, placid, able to get on with everyone. In other words, I was normal.

Certainly, I was acceptable to Dr Barnardo’s Homes, and on 3 January 1961, they wrote: ‘We feel that we would be justified in taking over the care of these three children.’ For their help, my father would have to pay eight shillings per week each for
Frances and Simon, ten shillings per week for me, and agree to our immediate baptism. He signed a contract to say that we would be raised Protestant, that Barnardo’s could place us in any occupation it deemed proper, and that he would take us back at any time if asked to do so. The Scottish Chief Executive Officer then wrote to a Mr Roberts at Haldane House. The letter reads like a formal note of introduction, and the details provided are scant – our names and dates of birth are virtually all that identify us. Mr Roberts is told that my mother has ‘deserted’ and that Don Ford cannot – ‘of course’ – care for us. ‘This little family’, as he calls us in his communications, will be arriving within two days.

My life then continues within pages and pages of documentation. Rarely is my middle name spelled correctly; never is my mother referred to as Breda. But the same words are always applied to me:
good
;
happy
;
affectionate
;
warm
;
normal
;
friendly
;
plays well with her dolly
;
steady in her mood
;
lovable child
;
very popular
. These are words I would soon have difficulty applying to my life – and to read them, even now, feels alien. Was that really me? In some ways, it would be easier to see me marked by records from the past. If the foolscap sheets said I was
ugly
;
miserable
;
awkward
;
difficult
then I could at least understand, partially, what Helen would soon see to hate in me. But a happy, affectionate toddler? Why did she want to break that child? When did she decide that was going to be her project?

It is clear that while we were in Haldane House, my father’s relationship with Helen went from strength to strength. No longer did he have three young children to worry about, nor the daily logistics of ferrying them to and from school and nursery. Helen, who had been asked to help out while we were all living at Easter Road, soon became part of his life, even without us. By
November 1961, she was writing to Barnardo’s on my father’s behalf when there were queries about maintenance payments. Notes from ‘Miss Helen Gourlay of 31 Easter Road’ made it clear that she was my Dad’s new co-habitee. One month later, on 11 December 1961, they were married. One letter from my files states that my father and new stepmother were visited by a Barnardo’s representative. She was pregnant by that time with their first child, and it is clear that financial problems were already causing trouble between them.

Over the next year or so, many letters and reports showed that money was tight, even more so after my father became unwell. At one point, Barnardo’s grew concerned that my father had not been visiting us in Haldane House. The Chief Executive Officer then asked a caseworker to go to the Easter Road flat where my father lived and see ‘if there was any trouble’. The follow-up letter from this visit states: ‘Father was ill and had a major operation when he was off work for three months. This, together with much debt left by the children’s mother, caused him to fall behind with his payments to us.’ The report goes on: ‘He apologised for causing us trouble and was sorry not to have visited the children and hopes to do so again. Although he is happily married, he is rather disappointed that his wife has never suggested having the three children home for good.’

This letter tells me a lot. I’m not sure exactly how the authorities worked out that Don and Helen were ‘happily married’ – they probably simply assumed that a recently-wed couple expecting their first baby fell into that category – but there is obviously tension building up, even at this early stage. As far back as I can remember, Helen always complained about money. Given how much she would prove to hate my mother, the continuing existence of debts left behind by my father’s ex-partner would have, no doubt, enraged her. I wonder whether my father’s decreased visits to see us all were truly down to his unspecified illness, or whether Helen was already applying
pressure for him to cut back on contact with me and my two half-siblings. It was a strange and complicated setup from the outset. I’m sure she wanted nothing to do with us, no reminders of our mother, yet she was living in a flat which, technically, belonged to her now-departed rival. My father must have said something, on the quiet, to the Barnardo’s representative when they visited Easter Road. He must have found the space, the privacy, to mention that his new 19-year-old wife wasn’t quite so forthcoming about restoring the whole family as he had hoped.

A hand-scrawled note from the caseworker on a Barnardo’s letter in November 1962 says: ‘I think we should keep in touch in the hope that restoration might follow, although one can understand a wife not being anxious to take on 3 children all by different fathers and she only 19. I wonder if she knows the real facts.’ Again, Helen is being given the benefit of the doubt – good, kind, teenage Helen who is having to take on so much. Perhaps Barnardo’s were more suspicious of my father – by asking whether Helen knew ‘the real facts’, maybe they are referring to the different paternity of each of us. Perhaps they thought Don hadn’t told Helen he was not the father of Frances and Simon because, by keeping quiet, he would have more chance of getting her to take us all back. That, in turn, makes sense only if he actively wanted all three of us, a scenario that seems valid only if it was the flat Frances’s father had left which was the real object of his intentions. It is all very confusing, and so long ago that I will never know the truth. Even now, even after years of trying to pick it all apart, I haven’t uncovered everything.

The people at Barnardo’s were good to me while I lived there. I visited other families and played with their children at weekends. I always had enough to eat and was kept safe and well. I was not one of those children who now claim that their years in a children’s home were marked by abuse and terror. That would not come to me until I left institutional care – until I was in the heart of a family unit.

I don’t remember very much about the home – partly because I was so young, but also because very little happened. We weren’t treated badly, but there was no affection, no softness. I do recall one worker, though. I’m not sure whether she lived in or not. I called her Scratchy Morag. I have memories of climbing up on her, curling up on her lap, and getting a cuddle every so often. She always wore these big, fluffy mohair sweaters, and as a little girl, the scratchiness stayed in my mind. I always felt itchy after Morag had cuddled me, and she is the only one I remember giving a name to, much less an affectionate nickname.