AUTHOR’S DEPRIVED CHILDHOOD
Darren, aka rapper Loki, suffered in childhood at the hands of his drug addict mother but has thrived in adult life thanks to the inspiring example set by his dad
WHEN Darren McGarvey was five years old, his mother pinned him against a wall with a knife to his throat.
He said: “I don’t remember what she said to me but I do remember the hate in her eyes. I remember thinking that I was about to be cut open and would probably die.”
His father Andy dragged her from him and restrained her while Darren escaped.
It was always Andy who was the saviour. He was the advocate and guardian who acted as a human shield against the heavy fire of his mother Sandra’s addiction and violence.
Darren – now a father himself – is an accomplished writer, a respected commentator and also Loki, a rapper.
And he reckons he only survived the havoc wreaked by deprivation because Andy was his father.
He said: “Any success I am having is because of the stability he was able to cobble together – even though his nerves were shattered with the experience of being with my mother.
“If it wasn’t for him, the chaos that was described in the book would have been so much worse.
“I would have ended up on harder drugs and around more dangerous people. It is because of the continuity of that one aspect of my life that I have been given enough to hold it together.
“In working-class communities, it can be a game of Russian roulette on who you have as a male role model.
“My father raised three of us on his own. He became the sort of man he wasn’t shown how to be. He was responsible and encouraging. We all had bicycles, he took us swimming and made us eat fruit when all we wanted was Frosties.
“If it wasn’t for my father, I would never have had the courage to become a writer, although I still don’t consider myself a real writer.”
However, his book is proof that he is, in fact, a masterful writer – with JK Rowling describing it as “powerful” and “necessary” and “an unflinching account of the realities of systemic poverty”.
Poverty Safari is a personal social commentary which dissects – with surgical precision – the disease of hardship, without offering the pretence of an easy cure.
As an adult and struggling with his own alcoholism, Darren could then see that although his mother did villainous things, she wasn’t a villain but a casualty of her own childhood poverty and trauma.
For many years, her behaviour traumatised her son, who was so damaged, anxious and fearful that he was referred to a child psychologist, Marilyn, when he was a teenager.
The sessions helped him but he had flashbacks to being dangled from a window by his legs or being sent by Sandra to get cigarettes in a powerful gale and her laughing from the window as the gusts hurtled him to the ground and ripped his coat.
She once threw his bike in the river and burned the contents of their home in the garden. He also recalled her frantically trying to dig their dead dog up from the garden with her bare hands – a pet having evoked stronger emotion than her children ever could.
While Andy worked to pay for a small family flat, Sandra sold their possessions and spent the mortgage on drink and drugs, repossession forcing them to move to a house in Glasgow’s Pollok.
Darren was left to fend for himself when his dad was at work, trying to
make porridge with cold water over oats and making crude attempts to dress himself, which led to playground taunts.
He said: “I adapted to the fact that my mother was not fit to look after me. Dysfunction, like poverty, can lead to disfigurements which are visible to everyone but you. Dignity was for the fancy people.
“From my mother’s behaviour, what I learned was that I lived in a dangerous, hostile world full of people who couldn’t be trusted. This impacted on every relationship I had, whether it was a personal relationship or with an institution.”
She left when he was 10, and he felt a sense of peace but also guilt and festering resentment.
In his late teens and early 20s, Darren’s trauma and anger saw him submerged in drink and drugs, although not the fatal destroyers of heroin and crack.
His mother died, aged 36, from cirrhosis of the liver when Darren was 17. A couple of weeks before her death, she called him and, for the first time in years, she was sober and lucid.
He was in the middle of writing a song about her and growing up around alcoholism but it was a forgiving, empathetic take.
He said: “For me, beginning to see her as a sick person as opposed to a bad one was a breakthrough. To make peace with her alcoholism filled me with hope that we could salvage a relationship. I dreamed of helping her to recover but by the end of the month, she was dead.”
He is now settled with his partner – singer and songwriter Becci – and is a father to Daniel, one, with another baby due in April.
He has been sober for three years and is less partisan politically, maturity having quelled his anger and taught him life is not monochrome.
He said: “I’m not sure that activism based on everyone being angry all the time is very sensible. Learning to manage my emotions doesn’t mean I don’t care any more. I just don’t think perpetual anger makes emotional sense in communities where stress is the engine room of so many problems.”
He has given himself a year to make his writing profitable and is working on more rap, building on his existing profile in music.
Ironically, he admits he is becoming part of the “establishment” he once threw verbal bricks at and, inevitably, there is criticism of his social mobility as a betrayal of his class. He said: “The question is now how much of me I can retain.
“I still very much feel connected to a lower class community. I just don’t want to stay in a box. It’s unnecessarily limiting.”
Aspiration, ambition and his natural talents should make for success and he is not willing to feel guilty for wanting better.
He said: “Having a child, it is easy to rationalise the need for me to create security. I’m not as bothered now about what people have to say about what I do any more.”
The book is a megaphone to the mouth of the poor and should be read by anyone who wants to understand the increasing social economic polarity of today’s Scotland.
He said: “My intention has been for Poverty Safari to resonate with people who feel misunderstood and unheard, that the book might be a sort of forum, giving voice to their feelings and concerns.
“People are routinely ignored by decision-makers who think they know better even when, as they were in Grenfell, they are fatally mistaken.” ● Tomorrow, the truth of poverty and how it shapes our communities as witnessed by Darren.
I lived in a dangerous, hostile world full of people who couldn’t be trusted DARREN McGARVEY