Oh, to live in The Faraway Tree; it just wasn’t fair that I ended up in a pokey council flat in Glasgow. My mother was as bossy and complaining as Dame Whashalot but Carnwadric, however much fun we had there, was not a patch on The Land of Do as You Please, or The Land of Goodies or The Land of Presents, now was it? My envy knew no bounds; I could see faeries in the pattern of my Aunty Jean’s living-room carpet, so was always asking if I could sleep there. Our place was boring; everything had flowers on it; I wanted to live in a house with smooth colours and beautiful people – a house with a real potato-masher and a record-player. I wished for modern before I knew what modern was, exactly – I only knew that I didn’t have it.

 

First, we lived in a shop in the Gorbals- just one room; all I remember of it is standing on a settee under the huge window, looking up at lightning flashing across the black sky, Dad behind me – Mum had probably locked herself in a wardrobe. Looking back on this, I should be impressed by the wall-to-wall window; those were the days of tiny square panes of glass. My paternal grandmother, The Dragon, had moved out to the suburbs, to a carbuncle called Carnwadric, growing on the little village of Thornliebank. I was four years old and my brother two, when we went to live with her. I have since learned that there was a serious housing shortage in the 50s, that’s why married couples had to live with parents for so long. My mother told me that she and my father lived with the dragon along with his sister, Jean, and her husband William, when they first got married – it was only a two-bedroom flat!

 

Wullie spent his spare time knitting stripy jumpers and Jean spent all his hard-earned money as fast as she could. The two men would be sitting down to supper when they returned from work; my father, with stew, mince or fish and poor old Wullie had toast n beans! Apparently Aunty Jean said something to Dragon, about my mother showing her up and her mother told her that she was showing herself up. In the end up poor old Uncle Wullie had to eat his supper in the kitchen at the pull-down counter of the dresser. My mother was always great at feeding people and her fridge bulged (though there were no fridges in those days, not in poor people’s Britain).