SOMEWHERE over the rainbow, skies, apparently, are blue. And get this: the dreams that you dare to dream really do come true. It’s a sentiment Janey Godley is familiar with. Her mother, Annie, was a massive fan of Judy Garland. She was also an alcoholic, an epileptic, “a fantasist” and, ultimately, a murder victim.

Actually, Annie wasn't officially a murder victim. She drowned in the Clyde in 1982, but her daughter is convinced it was no accident, and she is certain she knows who did it. More will doubtless be revealed in her Fringe stand-up show, Good Godley, and forthcoming autobiography Handstands In The Dark. Both deal with her mother and the sexual abuse that she herself suffered at the hands of her maternal uncle from when she was five till her early teens.

“I touched on death and child abuse at my show last year,” she says. “This year I’m actually tackling the subjects and telling the truth about them. I tell where I was abused, who abused me and how I came through it.”

All of which begs the question: how do you get laughs from rape and violent death? “It’s easy. Funeral itself is an anagram of ‘real fun’. You can do it. Obviously, child abuse isn't a funny subject. My ma being murdered isn’t a funny subject. But I can talk, in a funny way, about how it affected me. Nobody’s ever walked up afterwards and said, ‘I find it offensive that you laughed at child abuse’ because I’m laughing at my abuse, not anybody else’s.”

We are talking in the living room of Godley’s flat in the West End of Glasgow. She’s a tiny ball of noisy energy, all machine-gun laughter and scattergun swearing, pulling at her tights and drinking a mug of tea. As she talks, with astonishing honesty and openness, seemingly willing to tell me anything at all,

the room grows crowded with spilled beans and cats recklessly allowed out of bags. She is 43. She has been married for 25 years and has a daughter of 18. The years of abuse are long behind her, and she insists, “I don’t carry it around with me like a big, horrible burden. It doesn't define who I am. I’m not Janey, the raped child. I’m just me.”

She has been a comedian for around a decade. For her, the darkness of the past has become the solid gold material of the present. “Yeah,” she nods, “isn’t it weird how my uncle thought what he did f**ked me up, but it actually gave me a career? I remember my daughter said ‘It’s not that he underestimated you when you were a child that makes me giggle, mum, it’s the fact that he didn't know who you were going to be when you were older, with that big mouth, telling everybody everything.’ He must have thought that I was going to be meek and mild and timid. What a mistake.”

Godley first mentioned her abuse on stage at a Childline benefit in the early Nineties, but didn’t use it again in her act until three years ago at a comedy festival in New Zealand. “It was,” she says “weird and cathartic,” but more a professional breakthrough than a personal one. Everyone in her life knew about her past by then, and it was in the public realm anyway because, in 1996, she and her big sister Ann, who had also been sexually abused, succeeded in having their uncle sent to prison for two years.

She used to joke that she had had him killed and cut into pieces. But no, she took the legal route. Would she genuinely like to see him dead? “I don’t wish any harm on him at all. Even in court when the judge asked me did I hate him, which was a weird question, I said no, I feel really sorry for him. I’d rather be the victim than the perpetrator. I can sleep easier knowing I was the victim. I don’t think I could sleep knowing that I’d had sex with kids.”

He must be out of prison by now, but Godley says she has no idea of his whereabouts. He might be dead for all she knows or cares, and she doesn’t feel threatened. “He would never come near me.” Is that because of her act? “No, because I married into a family who really don’t like men that abuse children. My husband’s one of seven sons from the East End.”

When Godley talks about all this on stage she assures the audience that she is fine now, that they can laugh without fear. But she hasn't always been so together. As a child she would pull out great lumps of hair, she would tremble uncontrollably, she stopped using her right hand because that was the one he made her touch him with. She is now completely ambidextrous, and there is a certain irony in her using both hands to write up the book in which she details how she suffered.

In fact, she is quite worried about Handstands In The Dark (so named because, as a child, she used to do handstands as a way of coping with stress). The problem as she sees it is that Handstands isn’t funny; it’s a serious memoir, covering the period of her dirt-poor childhood in Glasgow’s East End up until 1994. “I feel responsible that I’ll make people sad,” she says. “I just like making people laugh. I can tell you about my rape and you’ll laugh; I don’t want to tell you about it and you cry.”

It does seem that Handstands will be a tear-jerker. At one point, I ask Godley about the passages which detail the abuse. Is she concerned that they will be voyeuristic? “I was worried about that,” she says, “but then I realised that I had to tell it from the child’s point of view. So in actual fact, it’s not all that graphically detailed. I write about what I see and hear while it’s happening. And what I see is a David Cassidy poster, the Partridge Family, and I imagine myself just going into it. So you’re not actually hearing about flesh ripping and blood, you’re just hearing a child talking about where she puts her imagination while it’s happening.”

Marriage saved Godley. She married at 18 and her husband was the first person, other than her mother and sister, who she told about the abuse. He convinced her she wasn’t “distorted and deformed” and she discovered that she really enjoyed sex. Those parts of her body became associated with pleasure rather than pain and fear.

“I blame Jesus,” she says now. “It’s his fault for giving me one of the few clitorises that actually work. I got one of them, there’s a woman in Ayr that got one, and I think there’s a woman in Spain. We’re an elite club.”

In 1979, Godley and her husband took over a pub in Calton, and ran it for 15 years. It was a rough place, favoured watering hole of gangsters and, from her vantage point behind the bar, she saw heroin grab Glasgow by the throat. Seventeen of her friends and family have died from using the drug. At last year’s Fringe, she wrote and performed a play on the subject, and now runs comedy and drama workshops in association with the Scottish Drugs Forum.

“I sat in a room with all my mates, and the needle went round, and everyone took it but me,” Godley recalls when asked how she, who had more reason to embrace oblivion than many of her peers, managed to avoid addiction. “I think the reason I didn’t do it is the same reason I don’t drink: I don’t like to be out of control. I want to be in control when I’m awake because when I sleep, my brain is out of control and I get horrific nightmares.”

Janey Godley has already lived through a nightmarish reality. If anyone deserves their dreams to come true, she does. So if you are trying to find her gig in Edinburgh, look out for a rainbow. There’s a potty mouth at the end of it.