Saving Gary McKinnon Read online

  In those days men in Scotland shied away from showing their affection towards their children. It was rare for dads to hug or to cuddle their children, but I used to sit at my dad’s knee and he would dry my hair with a towel and I’d never want it to end. That was his way of showing his affection.

  • • •

  The older children used to teach the younger ones all the skills they had learned. Lorna taught me how to make tablet, a Scottish sweet a bit like fudge, only more brittle.

  Fridges were virtually unheard of then, so we’d put the tablet out on the windowsill in the cold night air and leave it to set. It tasted good even if it was sickly sweet and bad for our teeth.

  We also made toffee but managing to do it without getting your fingers burned was an art and gave a sense of self-satisfaction when you got it right.

  My brother Ian was the eldest of the three and the quietest. Ian could draw well and tried to teach me but I was never any good. Ian once drew an excellent portrait of our dad sitting in his chair reading the newspaper. My dad didn’t really react and didn’t praise Ian, which I thought was a shame as the drawing was so good.

  Whenever the weather was fine we would wander with our friends and have picnics in the fields and make buttercup and daisy chains. When it was cold we would roast potatoes over the glowing embers of a campfire the older children made. That taste is something I remember to this day.

  We’d pick and eat wild blackberries and no matter how many we ate there were always loads left over to take home for our mums to make jam. Our clothes were saturated with bramble juice but we didn’t care; it was fun and the juice washed out.

  Some of the older people in the allotments would ask the children to help them with their gardening and would give the children carrots and turnips to munch on. They called the turnips tumshies, and we would eat them raw. Can you even imagine children wanting to eat raw turnips nowadays?

  One day, when one of our group helped themselves to a turnip without being given permission, the man from the allotment chased us and we all had to run for our lives. It seemed exciting at the time and the relief of getting away safely made us giggle until the tears rolled down our faces.

  My dad had an allotment and everything he touched seemed to grow to a huge size; he was forever winning prizes for his vegetables and flowers and we always had loads of fresh fruit and vegetables to eat. Perhaps it was because he was brought up on a croft in a pretty bleak part of the world, where unless you had such talents, survival would have been difficult.

  Although I didn’t inherit his green fingers, I did inherit my dad’s love of the outdoors.

  When I was little I felt like a free spirit, as much a part of nature as the deer that ran in the forest or the eagles that flew in the air. I wouldn’t have traded my upbringing for the world.

  Ever since I was a child I’ve cared desperately about neglected animals. When I was three years old I was playing in the back court in Glasgow. An old lady had put a litter of kittens in the dustbin and put a large rock on top of them and I could hear them crying. Neighbours were standing around looking and shouting at the woman, who was at her window, but no one was doing anything and I couldn’t understand why the adults were all just standing there and wouldn’t save the kittens.

  The older children were at school so couldn’t help me. I used every bit of strength I had to try to remove the rock but I couldn’t budge it. I ran to the house and begged my mum to come and save the kittens, but a neighbour told her that it was too late: they were beyond help.

  The kittens were hurt and crying and I was too small to help them. I was heartbroken and cried myself to sleep that night. I hated feeling powerless and wanted to grow up quickly.

  I felt far too young when I attended my first primary school. I was five years old and dearly missed my mum, even though she would come up to school to see me at playtime and would pass me sandwiches through the railings.

  I would sit at my desk gazing out of the windows, longing for the freedom of the outside. I wanted to run in the fields with the wind in my face, instead of being trapped in a classroom wasting my days away.

  I always thought it strange that young children, geared to run and jump and laugh and play, were confined to a schoolroom and made to sit still at a desk for seven hours a day. To be at an age when you are full of the joys of life and bursting with energy, and then be forced to suppress that energy seemed odd to me. It was like being put in a straitjacket.

  School was a shock to my system and I became quiet and shy when I was there. When my sister Lorna started secondary school I felt so lost and alone that I walked several miles to seek out her school. I have no idea how, at five years old, I could have found my way through miles of busy streets to a school I had never seen, but by sheer luck my sister was one of only two girls out in the playground when I arrived.

  In those days I would sometimes see groups of children hanging around outside pubs their parents were in, waiting for money to buy a fish supper. It was a reflection of the times that even some very young children fended for themselves, usually going around in groups with siblings and friends, the older children always looking out for the younger ones.

  Times in Glasgow were changing and when the old Victorian tenements where we lived were earmarked for demolition, we moved to a flat in a newly built development on the outskirts of Glasgow. My parents loved having a modern kitchen and a bathroom with hot running water and an indoor coal bunker, but my dad missed his allotment and we all missed our friends and tight-knit community.

  I remember after we moved my mum and I heard a man singing in the communal garden of our new flat. Looking out of the bedroom window we saw it was a busker who used to make a living singing in the back courts of our old tenements; as the population moved, he was searching them out in an attempt to continue to make a living. He was a proud-looking man with a strong voice, and he held his cap over his heart as he sang. It was sad, as he was a really good singer, but apart from my mum I don’t think anyone gave him money, and we never saw him again.

  CHAPTER 3

  THIS IS MUSIC

  We had been brought up with virtually no technology apart from a radio, but about a year before we left our old house someone in the street got a TV to watch the coronation of Queen Elizabeth. We were all invited in, and lots of us sat in our neighbour’s house watching the magical vision of TV for the very first time.

  When our old community died I felt that a part of us had died too, but life, like Glasgow, was changing – as was the music.

  My sister Lorna, who was almost six years older than I was and still charged with looking after me while my mum and dad worked, took me with her to the cinema for the first screening in Glasgow of the film Rock around the Clock. When we were in the cinema Lorna asked a few of her friends to keep an eye on me, and suddenly Lorna and other people in the cinema were dancing wildly in the aisles to this new music. At the age of eight I was witnessing the beginning of rock ’n’ roll. It was incredible.

  Lorna danced like a wild thing, but I wanted to learn how to play the music.

  Lorna used to teach me to jive and would throw me over her back no matter how reluctant I was or how much I protested; I had no choice as she was bigger than me.

  I used to skip lunch at primary school to run home and play my two favourite Elvis Presley songs, ‘Big Hunk of Love’ and ‘One Night with You’ on a Dansette record player. Headphones were unheard of then but I used to put my ear next to the little inbuilt speaker, cover my head with my coat and turn the volume up full so that I was enclosed in a world of music. I hated having to switch the music off to rush back to school again.

  One day Lorna sewed the name ‘Elvis’ onto her top using sequins and rhinestones and I thought it looked amazing. She offered to do the same for me, but my mum said I was too young to go to school with ‘Elvis’ emblazoned across my chest.

  I went to bed and when I got up in the morning my mum handed me my top and the large sequined
words across the chest read ‘Doris Day’. I could have cried. I looked at my mum and could see how tired she was. I knew she had been up all night sewing it for me and she so wanted me to like it. She had decided that Elvis on my top wasn’t appropriate at my age and had sewed Doris Day’s name on instead. She had no concept of how humiliating this would be for me to wear in school.

  I couldn’t bear to hurt my mum so I wore the top and sat mortified in school all day as my classmates teased and ridiculed me. I never wore it again.

  Music wasn’t just for kids – my mum adored Frank Sinatra and Irish music, whereas my dad’s taste was more operatic in the style of Mario Lanza. He often sang in Gaelic, his native language.

  Even though we sometimes got up to mischief, my mum never hit us, although smacking was common at that time. She herself had a difficult upbringing with an abusive father but she still had an amazing sense of humour and, like many people in Glasgow, possessed an optimism and a strength that carried her through the darkest of times. Even against the most daunting odds she believed that anything was possible, as do I.

  I was independent and used to go out on my own and wander through the fields and the woods with my dog. One day when I was walking along the canal bank, two boys had caught a large fish from the canal and I watched it gasping for breath as it was dying in front of me. Seeing the fish struggling to live upset me so much that I gave the boys sixpence to throw it back in the water. Watching it swimming to freedom made me feel so happy.

  • • •

  I always felt different from other people and it was a huge relief when a new girl named Jean Connolly came to our school. We got on like wildfire and talked continuously, and both of us had an opinion on just about everything – which also caused us to argue at times.

  We believed that we could change the movement of the clouds with the power of our thought. We’d cycle for miles and walk across fields barefoot with flowers in our hair, aspiring to emulate the romanticised lifestyle of a gypsy girl we had read about in story books. Our feet not being as tough as the gypsy girl’s meant going barefoot didn’t last long.

  We also used to love playing in the fog that would descend on Glasgow at that time. The fog was so thick that sometimes you couldn’t see two feet in front of you. It was like another world or a spooky film and we would call each other’s names and then jump out and grab each other from behind, scaring the living daylights out of ourselves and dissolving into laughter. Coal fires were banned some years later, making thick fog a rarity.

  Jean came from a big, warm family. Her dad was a lamp-lighter, who lit the gas streetlights in many areas of Glasgow.

  When a fifteen-year-old boy who lived with his grandmother was rendered homeless after her death, he went to live with Jean’s family. This was Charlie McKinnon, who was destined to become a big part of my life.

  Glasgow was full of warm-hearted people. Whenever you visited friends, no matter how much or how little they had, they would invite you to have dinner with them and always made you feel welcome.

  From the age of eleven I attended North Kelvinside Secondary School, one of the best in the area. Although I was in the top girls’ class and passed exams with flying colours, every stage of school felt like prison to me. School holidays were a huge relief and it was on one of these holidays I found a new love that would underscore my life.

  One summer I went to Butlins with my family and this is where I first heard the song ‘She Loves You’ by The Beatles. I had never heard music like this before: it was new and energetic and optimistic and I was in love with this song. My friend Jean and I started going to pop concerts, which is where I first saw and heard another legendary band, the Bee Gees. We started to dress differently from the other girls we knew, trying to look like the girls in The Ronettes, who had the hit record ‘Be My Baby’.

  Some of the other girls from school said we looked ‘gallus’ in our black trousers and jackets, but we noticed at the school dance, when our parents made us wear party dresses, that it was girls who seemed prim and as though butter wouldn’t melt in their mouths who were getting up to things that their parents might have been less than happy about.

  Jean and I used to stand on the table using a hairbrush as a microphone and sing our hearts out, pretending we were on stage. Eventually we acquired an old tape recorder with a real microphone and we were able to make our own recordings.

  Some of Jean’s brother’s friends formed a band, and one day I asked if I could try their electric guitar. I taught myself to play the riff from ‘Peter Gunn’, an instrumental song by Duane Eddy. The boy took the guitar back from me quite abruptly. At the time I thought it was because I hadn’t played it well but when I got older I realised that it was probably because I had played it too well and too quickly.

  Because I loved animals so much I wanted to be a vet and thought I would stay on at school to get the qualifications, but when I found out that part of the job would involve putting healthy animals down, I knew there was no way I could do it. So I left school just a few months before my fifteenth birthday. I decided to go out to work and earn my own money while I figured out what I’d like to do with my life.

  It was 1963. Glasgow was bursting with energy and with an eclectic mix of musicians, artists, dancers, singers and writers. In May there had been anti-Vietnam War protests in Britain, and music was changing in line with the mood of the people. The world was changing and there was a sense of freedom in the air. I felt I belonged in this brave new world.

  CHAPTER 4

  BABY, IT’S THE FIRST TIME

  One of my first jobs was at a clothes boutique in the centre of Glasgow. It was always busy and the other girls who worked there were full of fun. Occasionally, in a mischievous mood, they would drag their feet along the nylon carpet to build up a static charge in their fingertips and then touch the back of the neck of one of the unsuspecting young male customers, saying, ‘Can I help you?’ The boys would jump at the shock and then join in with our laughter. They never seemed to get annoyed at all.

  I had known Charlie McKinnon since I was twelve years old and saw him regularly as he was living with my best friend’s family. We fell in love when I was fourteen years old and got engaged when I was fifteen but I think I loved Charlie from the first moment I saw him. He was and is one of the kindest and most caring people I’ve ever known. He was a huge Elvis fan and an excellent singer, performing in pubs and always working hard at whatever job he was doing.

  I saved up all my wages, as did he, and we bought a flat when I was fifteen years old, which was as unusual at that time as it is now.

  We were planning to get married four days after my sixteenth birthday, and visited the man from the church to organise the banns. It’s perfectly legal to marry at the age of sixteen in Scotland and no parental permission is needed, which is why for centuries many young couples fled from England to Gretna Green, just over the border, where a marriage can be conducted by a blacksmith.

  Gretna Green is still one of the world’s most popular wedding destinations, hosting over 5,000 weddings each year. All the weddings are performed over an iconic blacksmith’s anvil and the blacksmiths in Gretna became known as anvil priests.

  Because the church official we had visited was worried about me being so young and was afraid that my parents might not have known I was getting married, he called unexpectedly at our house. The man explained his concerns about my age and my mum told him she had advised me that because of my age the marriage had a higher chance of failure but that in the end I made my own decisions. Charlie was a good person whom my mum and dad trusted and were fond of.

  Charlie and I married four days after my sixteenth birthday, as planned. It was a freezing cold December day and Charlie’s friend Jim, Jean’s brother, who was the best man, had flu and collapsed in church during the ceremony. Fortunately he soon recovered and Charlie and I were married, with Jean as my maid of honour. Seeing the photos now, I look like a little girl dressed up as a bride.
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  We were married the year that hundreds of students demonstrated against the Vietnam War in New York’s Times Square and twelve young men publicly burned their draft cards – the first such act of war resistance.

  • • •

  Gary was born just over a year later in 1966, the same year the Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, refused to send British troops to Vietnam. I was seventeen years old.

  My mum had worried that because of my impulsive nature and my age, I might change quite quickly and want to follow another path in life, and in a way she was right. I went into hospital as a very young girl who was in love, happy with her life and about to have a baby, and I came home almost as a stranger, with a totally different outlook.

  I looked around the one-bedroom flat that was home and saw it as dark and dull. I was upset because my pet bird had died and I thought that someone had forgotten to feed it. Above all, I felt as though I didn’t belong there anymore. I felt guilty for changing but the change just happened.

  When I went out to shops or to the park and saw other girls with their babies, I didn’t feel a connection with them. Many very young girls had three or four children and this scared me so much that I decided then and there that I only ever wanted to have one child.

  I also knew I couldn’t live in the same place forever until I died, as many people did at that time. Just the thought of that terrified me.

  When Gary was born he was healthy and well but wouldn’t feed. The nurses were concerned about it but left me to deal with it and I was panicking. I don’t remember how long it took or how I managed it but it seemed to take forever before I eventually succeeded.

  I used to be fascinated just watching Gary for hours as he lay in his cot. It was amazing that this little life had come from inside me.

  I initially saw Gary as a baby that I fed and cared for and was protective towards. I loved it when he gripped my fingers with his tiny hands but when Gary said his first words I was totally smitten – I realised that he was a real little person, and he was my little person.