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flushing in
embarrassment. Then, to my distress, he would pounce, squeezing at knees and grabbing at suspenders. If they were unable to resist this onslaught, he would grope at their breasts. He might start
playfully, holding something they needed just out of reach, and they would end up involved in what seemed harmless horseplay – at first. His physique, of course, ensured that he was the
victor unless other men were around or his victim was unusually spirited. It worried me that he would not stop running his hands all over them. He would pin the person to the ground, rubbing his
face hard against their skin and declaring loudly that he was just playing a game. Couldn’t they take it then? All women liked this game, he said – he called it ‘Beardie’
– and the yells of outrage from those on whom he inflicted it were often because their chins were left raw. His sheer brute strength ensured that often the woman only put up token resistance
or squealed hysterically, which normally brought him to his senses.
    This behaviour never occurred around my mother or other men, and he chose his victims with care, making sure that if the woman was married her husband was half his size. In one or two cases, I
noticed he did not meet much resistance, and later I realized that he chalked up these conquests as affairs. My mother had had to contend with this from early in their marriage. In her seventies
she told me that the first one she had discovered had been the most painful: when she had given birth to the little girl she lost and was still in hospital, my father had taken a nurse to the
pictures and then dancing. She confronted him about all the clean underwear and shirts he had gone through in record time and told him that he had been seen, but he denied it. My mother, though,
had challenged the nurse, who had admitted it. ‘It hit me then what he was like,’ my mother said. ‘I couldn’t believe someone could do that after his wife had gone through a
big operation to carry his child. Then I made the mistake of thinking he might change, if he was given responsibilities.’
    In Partick Street, however, he went to great lengths to be accepted as a family man. He was at the memorable street party held for Queen Elizabeth’s Coronation, where people packed like
sardines into our next-door neighbour’s house to get a glimpse of the ceremony on a flickering black and white TV set. Afterwards, we ate outside on the drying greens where red, white and
blue tables were set under clothes lines draped with streamers. In the weeks before, my father had spent considerable time with hardboard, a hacksaw and nails. He stencilled ‘E.R.’ and
‘1953’ on the board and adorned it with crêpe paper, surprising my mother with the trouble he had taken.
    He fantasized about having a sideline that would make him money and lead to the kind of lifestyle to which he felt he was entitled. He thought of inventing something, and set up the small back
bedroom as a workshop, which fast degenerated into a Steptoe-like room full of objects such as radios or clocks, which he was always in the middle of taking apart. My mother gave up trying to tidy
this mess and simply closed the door on his domain. I can recall her muttering that she hoped one day they would have a place where he could have a workshop outside.
    I started school in January 1954, aged five. I began at Whifflet Primary, in the days when there were two intakes a year. I loved my first day there, and was only slightly disconcerted by
someone sitting next to me leaving a steamy puddle directly below our joint desk, which with great empathy I ignored. I came home amazed to have made the discovery that I shared my Christian name
with another little girl, Sandra Corbett. Thrilled by all the new experiences I had encountered, I regaled my mother with the letters of the alphabet I had learnt, and tested her thoroughly,
checking that she understood.
    ‘I already
know
my