My mother was a Mantle-machinist; that means she made the whole coat – she didn’t do piece-work…in fact she sneered at piece-work. Her skills gave her power; she worked to her own timetable and her boss let her away with murder, apparently. I vaguely remember the mention of a company called Silvers. (for security purposes I will give my parents new names). Mum can be Queenie and Dad shall be Father Ted – but he wasn’t Irish or priestly.

 

She made most of our clothes. One of my jobs was to rock the treadle for her sewing machine, though I don’t suppose I did it for more than a few minutes. I couldn’t wait to try on her creations, especially when the dresses had a beautifully long and wide sash that tied in a great bow in my back; there’s a red one in my memory that I never tired of twisting at the mirror to see. The first thing I did with a new dress was twirl to see how high the skirt went – I think I wanted to flash my knickers like Ellenor Powell in the tap-dancing video below; I adored skirts that fanned out around their waists but mine never quite did that. My mother kept my legs well-covered; when other kids were wearing clothes up their legs mine reached mid-calf! I knew I was different even then.

 

Queenie doesn’t appear much in my early childhood, probably because she was always in the background – she couldn’t have done anything too startling to get my attention or really star in my memoirs: my father was the star for opposite reasons; if I got to see him before bedtime that was a real treat – he worked long hours but I don’t know what he did then, after he left the Merchant Navy. When I was very young he worked on the Renfrew ferry. I was told a story about him taking me to work with him and telling me to sit quietly and don’t move – which I did, so I got to go several times. My brother only got to go once and he was barred because he wouldn’t stay still. That must be where I get my sea-legs from.

 

My brother was a holy terror and drove Queenie up the wall. We had a huge back garden with four poles to string washing across the green; after getting up and running after my brother a dozen times my mother tied him to one of the poles with a length of rope so he couldn’t escape out into the street; all she ever wanted was to rest in the sun with happy children around her, not bothering her or anyone else. I know that we were difficult.

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).