where's your mama gone?

Hi friends,

Part of the job I do involves developing and delivering training for health, social care and education professionals who work with families. We want them to understand and sensitively communicate the myriad benefits that come from sharing songs, rhymes and stories so that they can best support bonding and attachment between wee people and their grown ups.

One of the courses I facilitate is for folk who work with the most vulnerable families. The parents and carers who — for all kinds of reasons — are less likely to hold onto or share any of the five free book bags our charity gifts to every child in Scotland between birth and age five¹ or take them along to a free story, song and rhyme session in their local library. For those families, it’s about building trust and a sense of safety before anything else. Taking small steps together as a means to empower.

It was this course I was delivering on Wednesday in Dundee which, when I was 15 or 16, was named the teen pregnancy capital of Europe. Teen pregnancy rates have plummeted, but the numbers living in and impacted by poverty have soared in this part of the country. Many parts of the country — let’s not forget — and the impacts on family relationships and child development (including but not limited to speech, language and communication) aren't getting better in a hurry.

The Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation (SIMD) map: Dundee, like all of Scotland’s cities, has pockets of severe deprivation shown here in the hot colours

In training, the first task we ask delegates to do is talk to their partner about the power songs, rhymes or stories had during their own childhood. We’re trying to invoke nostalgia in this task. We want them to be transported from the training room for a moment; find themselves with hands that smell of play doh doing pat-a-cake with granny. Being bounced silly and almost made sick with laughter by dad. Being held, rocked and sung to by mum to soothe the sting of their scraped knee and the smear of calamine-pink Germoline that followed.

There’s always a trigger warning attached to this when it comes to trying it with families who likely had suboptimal early years experiences and I’m quick to add a health warning for the delegates themselves, but the room on Wednesday came alive as it always does. In a moment, the dozen or so women who had been quiet and earnest became animated, giddy. Some started singing snatches of songs. Others tapped or clapped, edging towards their partner in excitement about sharing their memory. This is what we want. For them to re-embody the feeling the generation of children they’re supporting might have decades hence when they reflect on a time when a song had the power to soothe, calm. Create a feeling of safety.

After five minutes or so, we got them to feed back. There were the usual: Twinkle Twinkle, The Wheels on the Bus, Ally Bally. The way the discussion flowed meant we could remind them that much of what we describe as “instinct” when it comes to relating to bumps and babies is, in fact, learned behaviour we imbibed as children from the engaged caregivers around us. Tell them that perhaps it might reassure some of the isolated young mums struggling with their mental health while wondering how they’ll feed and clothe their wee ones, never mind sing and bounce, tickle and tap. My colleague was leading this and so by the final pair, my mind was already on timings; comfort breaks; that our delivery of empathy dolls had failed to show up and were they really going to be able to get into the practical tasks by cradling their jumpers or tote bags?

My attention snapped back with the final response.

“Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep! Oh, it was my gran’s favourite song, so it was. We even sang it at her funeral, so we did. And I know it mibbe was a bit — “ she made a squirmy face “— but it was lovely and it still and it reminds us of her.”

The kind-eyed woman crossed her arms over her chest and gave herself what looked like a cuddle. I smiled and nodded, took a deep breath and launched the next section.

I got my first tape player for my sixth birthday in 1989. It was duck-egg blue, had two decks, an FM radio and a microphone. It would go on to live out a life of devoted service as both music player and radio station recorder before, eventually, the play and record buttons repeatedly pressed in tandem finally stopped clicking into place.

At the time, we were living in emergency accommodation at the far end of the village and it would be another couple of months until we would move back into our terraced house gutted by fire the previous Christmas. I have a few memories of that flat. I know it was close to the swing park. That the outside was roughcast and had a secure entry. That it was on the ground floor and had a similar layout to my gran and grandpa’s but, unlike their one-bed, this had two. I remember my gran, long retired, being with us a lot of the time. At Easter, the cupboard in the bedroom I was sharing with my brother was piled high with chocolate eggs in their cardboard boxes because folk in the village felt sorry for the two children who had lost everything. It was the kind of village in which people rallied and my grandparents were thought of warmly having run its general store for years. That kind of thing mattered, then.

It was dad who gave me the tape player that morning. I would’ve been excited because it was my birthday but, when he handed me it, I got a yucky feeling in my tummy like the other feelings I’d been stuffing down for months and not telling anyone about. Was it in a box or not? It must’ve been, surely. Whatever, it was swaddled in a black plastic bin bag and handed to me from his bed as I stood at the side of it. He would have removed the old black underskirt of my mum’s that he used as an eye mask for his “migraines”. There would’ve been no time to try it out as he had work to go to and so my gran must’ve been there because I’d have needed to be taken to the school bus and my two year old brother would have needed looking after.

The tape that pre-dated the tape player had been recently found in a discount bucket in the Jolly Green Giant toy store in Glasgow. Maybe it was the impetus for providing me with my own tape player because I had developed a habit of carting it about with me, hijacking the wider family’s car tape decks and hi-fi systems. It was called Hits for Kids and featured a whole load of jolly songs from decades past. Lesser-remembered ones like Johnny Reggae and Yellow River. Classics like Yellow Submarine and Lily the Pink. These were and are the songs of my childhood. The ones that are etched into my psyche and that I recall now as fondly as the nursery songs my gran sang to me.

But there is one that had the opposite impact.

When Chirpy came on, the fear I experienced was intense and powerful. I didn’t want to listen to it because it scared me that much, but I’d make myself.

“Where’s your mama gone? (where’s your mama gone?)

Little baby Don (little baby Don)

Where’s your mama gone? Far, far away

Last night I heard my mama singing a song…

Woke up this morning and my mama was gone…

How could everyone singing to the wee bird be so happy when his mummy had gone away and wasn’t coming back and how they could just keep on asking him about it like they were making fun of him and how could he sing about it?

It’s easy enough to understand why the song had the power to interrupt the salve offered by the others. Where had my mother gone? Would she come back or would I be forever hearing that same question, to which I had no answer having never been offered one?

For the first six months of 1989 my mother was an in-patient in a psychiatric hospital being treated for her recently-diagnosed Manic Depression². Following the house fire her mental health, which had already been precarious following my brother's birth, deteriorated to the point where she was sectioned under the Mental Health Act (1983). I know my wider family were all doing their best while mum was ill and dad’s drinking worsened but, in trying to protect me, I was further stripped of the sense of unquestioning safely I’d had in my earlier childhood. I know I’d benefitted from stability in the first few years of life, which might have been protection from worse harms. Maybe those strong enough foundations helped me to develop coping strategies that saw me through the next couple of decades before the wheels finally fell off. In a roundabout way, Chirpy became a 3-minute space in which I could feel the feelings I had intuited couldn’t be legitimately expressed in other ways, at other times or with other people.

Mum was eventually discharged and the four of us moved back in to our home trying to pretend that the fire never happened and that she hadn’t been away from us all for half a year. I wrote about the impact of these stories being silenced in my first book, Held in Mind.

I know I’m not the same person I was when I wrote that first memoir and that my perception of events has shifted forever because of the work I did on the page and on the therapist’s couch but it’s plain, too, that I’m still triggerable. Still writing into and around the same story. And in the writing of this, I went looking for the map of the village I grew up in.

Our emergency accommodation was in the area coloured red indicating it ranks in the top 10% of deprived postcodes in the country; our terraced house was in the 3rd decile.

I don’t know whether the former lace-manufacturing village would have ranked so low in the late 1980s as this map shows it to now. There was still some industry. There were decent amenities. It wasn’t until I left aged 11 and came across children at my new primary school who had quite clearly had very different childhood experiences to mine — ones involving foreign holidays and branded clothes and shoes — that I felt the hot shame of growing up poor. Then as now, I needed a visual prompt to see something clearly for the first time. It’s taken looking at that map for me to acknowledge that the unvarnished facts of that period of my own childhood read like one of the “vulnerable family” scenarios we issue during one of the later tasks.

It wouldn’t have been my place the other day to tell my own story of this song. It could have, in that inconvenient way of things, become the thing that woman remembered from training above all else. Worse still if it tainted her experience of the song for a time. Bled into her own memories. “Oh yeah, ‘Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep’… That trainer’s story that day… Oh…”

The past, though. Even the one you thought you were reconciled with, is only ever a song away.

1. Ours is the biggest universal free book-gifting programme in the world

2. Bipolar now, but not in 1989