When Janice Galloway was 11 she was sent to buy ice cream after a bitter
family row triggered by her school report — she came first equal in the
class instead of the usual first. Nora, her jealous adult sister, reminded
her she was useless and a burden on their mother. The child had no appetite
as a result and refused to eat her cone. They were in the kitchen of their
council house in Saltcoats.
Nora, who was then almost 30, suddenly bit into the ice cream, grabbed the
girl’s jumper, hauled her close, and kissed her. “I felt her tongue push and
the cold mess slither from her mouth to mine,” Galloway writes in her
memoir, This Is Not About Me. “Then she pressed her fingers against my neck,
just at the bump, to make me swallow.” Nora — called Cora in the book;
Galloway slightly changes several names — finishes by pouring the rest of the
ice cream all over her little sister, saying: “Always remember Jesus and
Cora love you. We love you very much.” Galloway recalls her bright blue eyes
and “the thick as paint voice she saved for really good jokes”.
The ice cream kiss is not the worse assault detailed in this book. But its
gleeful perversity makes it one of the most memorable. Galloway runs from
the house to a telephone box and calls the Samaritans who advertise
themselves on a card bearing the word Despair. But she cannot speak, hangs
up and, in frustration, begins to kick at the glass with her good school
shoes. There was no Childline in 1967.
This is Not About Me is a literary, not a misery, memoir. There is mirth, and
a Proustian attention to the sights, sounds and smells of the industrialised
coast of Clydeside: the Italian cafés, saline air, crying gulls and rotting
seaweed. But the most memorable sight and sound of all is ‘Cora’, the cold,
glamorous sister who rejected her own husband and baby and later came
storming back into Galloway’s life.
We are used to tales of unhappy childhoods, but the evil-doer is usually a
violent father. Galloway’s baddie wears sticky green eyeshadow and
cantilevered bras. Kind critics describe her as a “force of nature”,
suggesting a proto-feminist ahead of her time. In fact she is selfish and
cruel. She challenges our assumptions about the nurturing and empathetic
female.
Nora died of the lung disease emphysema several years ago. Galloway last saw
her when her own 16-year-old son was born. “I was so thrilled with myself
that I wrote my sister a note . . . she came, looked at the baby and told me
all about her life. She was doing fine.”
The early abuse had been tucked away. But as Galloway’s baby grew, she
remembered, and realised how odd her own childhood had been. “Watching my
son grow up took me into places I thought I’d forgotten. You think, ‘Jesus!
When I was three THAT happened?’ You’re shocked by the smallness of what you
yourself must have been.”
Galloway bares no outward scars. She is youthful and sexy at 52, with a
disarming warmth. We meet in a bookshop café and she heads excitedly for the
teenage fiction shelf while I get coffee. “I just love teenage fiction,”
she says, returning with a clutch of pink paperbacks. Her previous books The
Trick Is to Keep Breathing and Clara won awards and critical acclaim. A
music graduate and former teacher, she has written opera librettos. Her
admirers will appreciate the true scale of these accomplishments when they
read this memoir.
Galloway’s mother left her father when she was three because of his drinking,
violence and mood swings. She was offered a box room above the local
doctor’s surgery in return for cleaning. Mother and child were living
without a lavatory or running water when Nora returned from Glasgow. She was
all polished talons and coiffured hair — a head-turner lacking any remorse
at abandoning her baby son.
“I like a good time, me,” she would say. Having ditched one child, Nora was
not about to be lumbered with another. When left to babysit Janice, she
entertained a series of male friends in the tiny space. During one “special
visit” from an American, she demanded the girl, then four years old, sit
with her back to them. Galloway hears the man’s snorting and catches a
glimpse of her sister’s skirt “open like a flower” to reveal black net
petticoats. When it’s all over she turns to see the man zipping up his
trousers and her sister reaching for discarded knickers. Shocked but
uncomprehending, Janice fails to thank the American for the coin he presses
guiltily into her palm. After he leaves, Nora attacks.
“Cora was hauling me from the window to the bed with her fist tangled in my
hair,” Galloway writes. “I remember tripping over my own feet and dropping
on to my knees, like a bird landing badly, then there was a crack, a camera
flash, and something sharp stinging into the bridge of my nose. I opened my
mouth to yell and a hand went over it hard.” ‘Cora’ tells her to mind her
manners. “On the last word she hit me again. Then something — it had to be
her — shook my neck sharply from side to side, tugging the hair to snapping
point. When she opened her hand, my head seemed to surface from deep water,
ringing with pain.” On another occasion, she locks Galloway in a cupboard
and taunts her with stories of how she is about to be “taken away” to a
home. Another time she sets her hair on fire. Their down-trodden mother
appears oblivious. Once, the sisters are sitting in front of the fire with
hot soup. Cora takes her burning spoon and presses it into Galloway’s neck.
Galloway has not quite settled the mad or bad questions that swirl around this
monster. She speculates that Nora was ill. “I don't think my sister was
completely in control. I was aware of that even when I was small. I guess my
role model for that was dad, I knew my dad wasn’t in control because there
were two totally different dads.”
Nora might have been the product of circumstance, however. She saw the routes
open to women in the 1950s and 1960s and rejected them. “She was acutely
aware that she was interested in sex and men, and she saw men as a route to
fun.”
Readers will be repulsed and compelled by her energy. She expected to be
waited on. She never cooked a meal, made a bed or washed a woollen. She was
as much a tyrant towards their washed-out mother as the west of Scotland
hardman demanding his tea on the table at 5pm. But women like her still
exist. “You see them all the time,” says Galloway. “On a Saturday night,
hanging about at bus stops, baiting men and irritating the hell out of taxi
drivers. I guess we called it ladettes in later years. I hate the expression
ladette. I certainly don’t see it as a means to liberation. It takes the
worst aspects of masculinity and dresses them up in a mini-skirt.”
This book ends when Galloway is about to enter secondary school, where her
life was saved by an inspirational music teacher. A second memoir will
reveal more about ‘Cora’ and the mess she left in her wake.
None of this explains the violence, or why Galloway was the target. Did the
timid little girl remind Nora of the son she abandoned? Was it guilt? Envy?
Galloway still doesn’t know. “Maybe I was just handy, I suspect that was it.
I was just there. I was like a dog you can kick.”
Memories of those kickings came back when Galloway was pregnant. She dreaded
having a baby girl because her role models were so poor. “I was scared of
raising a girl in case I turned into my sister. I’d think, ‘What if it’s a
girl and I do something bad?’
But it was a boy and it was all good — as it almost certainly would have been
with a daughter. Galloway realised that she could do things differently. She
made a point of always talking to her son, explaining things. She saw the
richness of rearing a child and wondered how her sister could throw that
away. “I ended up feeling sorry for her.”
It’s unwitting revenge. Nora, hard as a steel-tipped stiletto, would have
hated pity.
This Is Not About Me, by Janice Galloway, is published by Granta on
September 11.
