Fear that she would come home to find all the family belongings in the front garden of the tenement where she lived. Fear that she would no longer be sleeping in her own bed. Fear that everything she knew and was cosily familiar with would be ripped from her.
This week, learning about the thousands of homeless children in Scotland living in cramped, soulless accommodation with sparse facilities, that fear came rushing back.
Now aged 50, and a successful stand-up comic, Janey read and immediately understood how those children felt.
She said: “As a child, knowing that the place you call home could be taken off you has stuck with me my entire life.
“You’re sitting in school and you’re trying to read your books and you’re trying to be a good child and sing songs for Jesus and pray – all that goodwill to all men, especially at Christmas and you’re thinking, ‘I’m going home and my dog’s going to be tied to a fence and my mammy’s going to be running about the streets trying to raise the cash.’
“Where would we stay and where would we go and how would we get the money? We were evicted a few times – put out on the streets. I remember all the furniture being thrown in Mr Woods’s front garden – our downstairs neighbour – and I was horrified.
“The fear grips you terribly. It still wakes me up. What if I couldn’t pay my rent or my mortgage? It stays with me.
“What I can’t understand is in the 21st century why this is still happening?
“They’ve had years to fix this.”
Between the ages of seven and nine, her family faced eviction several times.
And there were others. She remembers a pal of her mum’s with four kids coming up to Glasgow from Birmingham fleeing a violent marriage.
She was homeless, so along with her four children she squatted in a condemned tenement block at the foot of Kenmore Street in Shettleston, where Janey lived.
Janey said: “It was a dank old scabby place and they just stayed there until someone found it in their hearts to rehouse them.”
Raging still at the injustice suffered by the homeless a generation later, Janey believes the government should step in.
Free prescriptions and free university tuition sit well within a modern Scotland, but not when children are unable to reach their full potential because of the blight of homelessness.
A firm believer in helping others and a veteran of many a charity fundraiser, Janey cannot understand why Scotland cannot look after its own most vulnerable youngsters.
And she believes that without a basic house to live in, kids will lose the will, the hope and the aspiration to go further.
“Any country that can’t house its kids needs to take a good long look at itself and stop bleating about its achievements,” she said.
“If you can’t house the weakest and the most vulnerable amongst you, then you shouldn’t be allowed to keep pandas.
“My mammy said you shouldn’t have a dog if you can’t feed your kids, and she was right.
“I believe we should give foreign aid and any civilised country should give money to people who are the world’s poorest. That’s what civilised people do.
“But civilised people also should make sure that their own children aren’t living in unsafe accommodation or are homeless.
“It’s horrific in this day and age that wee kids are living in temporary accommodation far from their schools, either through poverty or through domestic violence or through their parents not being able to cope, and it’s the children that suffer.
“They’re ripped away from their communities, their wee school, their friends, their neighbours, their wee clique of pals and they’re flung in some bed and breakfast and they’re living out of plastic bags. That’s just inhumane. And now we’ve got a tram they can’t pay for and two pandas.
“They should strap the two pandas on to the front of the tram and make them pull it – and then it would work.”
Shelter Scotland have released the horrifying statistics that there are three times as many families living in temporary accommodation today as there were in 2002.
Then, there were 4153 households – now there are more than 11,000.
The disruption and the damage to children in particular is enormous.
Their health suffers since the new accommodation is often poor.
Academically, they struggle to keep up with schoolwork because of all the upheaval.
And the psychological effects could linger for years.
The SNP pledged to build 6000 affordable homes for each year of the lifetime of the parliament – but now they have cut their budget by half and in the last 12 months, only 3696 homes have been built. There is also a desperate shortage of family homes.
In the last 10 years, 92,000 homes have been lost to the social rented sector through right to buy legislation, while thousands of private homes throughout Scotland are lying empty.
The Daily Record is working with Shelter to press for more affordable rented homes to be built and for the refurbishment of homes lying empty.
Shelter also want a tax on empty homes to raise cash for the renovation.
Janey went on: “When our great great great grandchildren study this period they are going to wonder why when we had our own government, we couldn’t house our own kids. It’s Dickensian.
“It is the most fundamental right of a child to have shelter.
“When you’re a child and you don’t have a safe place to go, the foundations of your personality, your security and emotional welfare are warped.
“In the 21st century, the voluntary sector should not be picking up the slack for homeless children – it should be the government.
“They should be building affordable housing stock. I thought this finished when I was a kid but I am still horrified by these stories.
“There are still kids over Christmas living in unsafe, unsociable housing with all their stuff in a carrier bag.
“If we cannot provide the most basic needs of shelter to the most vulnerable then we as a nation are letting ourselves down.”
Show your support and get online. Sign Shelter Scotland’s petition at www.shelter.org.uk/noroom
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