I don't see my family
1949
“I don’t see my family. Once my mother took against John – this was in ’65, I really stopped seeing any of them because I needed to develop my life with him. There was one sister I used to see fairly regularly but that faded out and Raymond had got married in the meantime and that faded out and the others I had no real kinship with. They were all tarred, as far as I was concerned, with the same brush as my mother and I didn’t like her.”
“There were several incidences - I must have been ten or maybe eleven when I realised, ‘Who is this bloody awful woman who is knocking me about all the time’? She used to hit me, whatever was nearest. If we were sitting here she’d pick up that chair and hit me with it. That was just the way she was, always, there was very little let up to the extent if I looked at her I’d get a smack because I’m looking at her arrogantly or questionably and I got fed up with this. She used to say about me playing with girls, ‘Stop playing with girls,’ she said ‘Go and play with the boys like your brothers do’. Well, I did, didn’t I, I started playing with boys. I was only a boy myself then obviously. So I gave up the girlies so who knows what might have happened if it hadn’t have been that. She made me wear one of my sister’s dresses one day as punishment for something, I’m not quite sure what, probably being a feminine boy and I never forgave her for that. That was the turning point, although I don’t dislike women, I have very few in my life. I may come across as bitter but I’m not really bitter. The best thing I did was to cut her out of my life when John came along. I should have done it earlier but I didn’t, I used to keep going back because it’s family and give her half my wages and the crazy things I would have done in those days. There’s not another gay in the family. There’s four boys and four girls and Robin, or John as I was in those days of course.”
Contributed by: Robin McGarry, 66