Perhaps my red hair and freckles weren’t so bad after all. Somehow, though, I wasn’t convinced. But my mother – and my father – had a knack of arming me against the world. My mother held my hand as she led me to the kitchen. For as long as she lived, my mother would hold the hand of her ‘baby’.
The kitchen was pandemonium, loud with the sound of my brothers and sisters – William, Alex, Johnny, Tam, Janie and Katie. It was a typical Glasgow household. Some of them had already left home, but they always found their way back to Ma’s for tea.
‘Giselle Ross,’ said Da. ‘At last! We can eat now.’
Da never called me or my sister Katie simply by our Christian names. He always appended our surname. Don’t ask me why. It was just a tradition and it always sounded as if he were about to give us a telling off. Nothing could have been further from the truth. Da was like Ma, a sweetheart. You wouldn’t think it, if you met him. John Ross is a pre-war model, a long-distance lorry driver, and a bit of a man’s man. Ma was always hugging and kissing us, but it has to be admitted that the modern expression ‘touchy-feely’ was not coined on behalf of my father. He loves us all fiercely, but we don’t demand big public shows of affection. Christmas and New Year in his home are marked by a firm handshake for his sons and a peck on the cheek for his daughters.
When I was a child and being bullied at school, Dad would tell me, ‘If someone hits you, Giselle Ross, you hit them back. If you don’t, lady, I’ll come and hit you.’
Of course, he would do no such thing. It was his clumsy psychology lesson on how to stand up for yourself. I looked around me. I was safe. I was secure. What did it matter if I had red hair and freckles? I had all the love I needed. I never wanted to leave this place and I wouldn’t for the next two decades. I didn’t know that then, of course, but my brothers and sisters would fly the nest, one after the other, and I, the youngest, would stay. I would live a cloistered existence of my own making and not for a single second regret it by worrying whether I was missing out.
What had the world to offer me that I could not find at home?
June: You were so fortunate. If my mum couldn’t love me, how could anyone else?
Mum had cleared at arguably the most vulnerable time in the life of a teenage girl.
I was sad, deeply sad, but I tried to hide it behind a mask of indifference and bravado. A mother’s love should be the rock upon which each of our lives is built, but in my case it wasn’t to be the case.
Did my mother not love me enough to stay? If she had loved me why would she leave me? Perhaps I’m being too harsh, but I could not help how I felt then, and I can’t help how I feel now.
I’m certain she must have loved me in her own way – or is that just something I comfort myself with? I still don’t know. What I do know is that from that moment I knew I couldn’t rely on her.
Her leaving had dredged up many emotions which I now realised had been experienced subconsciously. Even when she was in my life, I did not feel the closeness with her that I had with my father.
I had been able to identify with my pals’ closeness to their own fathers because that was my experience. I never doubted for a single second that Dad loved me. Our closeness was a living thing and it remains so. I have no idea what the catalyst was for Mum leaving us for good. I wouldn’t see her for many years and then I would learn that she had eventually met someone else.
Mum and Dad had very different personalities and it was a period when ordinary couples were not expected to be openly affectionate towards each other. So there had been no real tell-tale signs indicating her impending departure. One day she was there, the next she was gone.
To this day, Dad will still not say a bad word about her, but I have always had the impression that he was secretly relieved when she left.
It must have been very difficult for him but he was armoured by his reputation for being a good and decent man. He was held in such high esteem and so well liked in the community that no one dared gossip about the breakdown of his marriage.
Dad was a foreman at the local dye works and he continued to work in the factory and function as father and mother to us all. In those days, in those circumstances, no one would have raised an eyebrow if Jim Martin had decided to deliver his children into the care of social workers. In fact, this was commonplace when a working man was deserted by his wife.
He was, however, made of sterner stuff. It must have been hard for him in a town such as Kilbirnie, in Ayrshire, a grim, grey industrial place that produced a similar breed of people.
Dad did not whine. He just did the best he could and his best was very good.
Ironically, I would repay him by going off the rails.
Giselle: Wherever I turned, wherever I looked, Ma and Da were always there …
The words written in my final school report card declared that Giselle Ross had grown into an amenable young woman who might do well in the world if she would just ‘push herself forward a bit more’.
Fat chance. I had no wish to push myself forward, or to trek too far into the world beyond the confines of my home and family. The word ‘confine’ conjures up a sense of being restricted. I wasn’t. I embraced the safety of home life. I harboured no ambition for a high-powered executive career. Was that wrong of me? Maybe. But I was being true to myself. One must never confuse contentment with a lack of ambition.
Teenage love affairs were mysteries to be experienced by others. I had never had a boyfriend. I was – and I remained for a long time – an innocent. My days revolved around the home, like a wheel that turned contentedly through one day to the next. Ma and Da were the hub, my brothers and sisters the spokes of the wheel. I had no notion of becoming a mother, but Ma demanded that her house be ‘filled with babies’, and in time it would. I would then become a brilliant auntie to the children in this ever-extending family.
When Katie had her two children, Paul and little Giselle, I drew them into my loving world. I saw them every day. I was like a second mother to them, as Katie would become a second mother to my Paul and little Jay-Jay when they came along.
From time to time, Ma and Da would, to coin a phrase, make efforts to persuade me to get a life. I had a life, a wonderful life, and one that satisfied all of my needs. I felt no jealousy of others who lived a different kind of life.
And so it would go on.
June: You were the perfect daughter; I was acting like a brat …
I wasn’t so much bad as wilful, an attention-seeker. These days psychologists would have a name for it and I’m sure they could come up with any number of reasons to explain why I began acting out. It doesn’t take a degree in psychology to recognise that the change in my behaviour coincided with abandonment and a flood of teenage hormones. I may have been secretly relieved that Mum was out of our lives but it did leave a huge void.
Afterwards, I felt as if I were searching, always searching, for something or someone to fill the emptiness. I pushed back the boundaries – pinching and drinking vodka from Dad’s cupboard; staying out late; running away from home. All stupid stuff, really. I just yearned to be noticed, to be valued; for someone to put their arms around me and assure me that I was safe. In the aftermath of my misdemeanours, my granny was drafted in to bring me back to my senses. She was a lovely old woman with a particularly simplistic view of the universe, which, as far as she was concerned, was painted in black and white.
She would declare, ‘Just remember, June, once you’ve made your bed you have to lie on it – think of what you’re doing to yourself and your dad.’
Poor Dad. He was so busy with work and looking after the home that the only way – in my confused mind – that I could get his full attention was by getting into bother. I can still remember the weary conversations, the pained expressions on his face.
‘Why are you doing this, June?’ he would say in an exasperated tone of voice, in