I was four when my mum abandoned us – but I don’t blame her
When I was knighted my mouth stopped working. The Prince asked me something and I just flubbered and bejabbered...
MY DAD William was away with the RAF in Burma so I began life with my mum, Mamie, and my 18-month-old sister, Florence, in a tiny two-room apartment in a Glasgow tenement block. My mum slept in one room and Florence and I slept behind a curtain in a little alcove in the kitchen.
We had no bathroom, so we all bathed in the kitchen sink, normally in cold water – hot was virtually unheard of. My cot was a drawer from a sideboard. It sounds Dickensian but we were not the only people living like that. We accepted it as normal.
Like any child, I thought my mum would be there for ever. We never gave a thought to what her life was like, but it must have been unbearable. She was 19 when she had me, a teenager looking after two toddlers in a war, and who knew when, or if, my dad was coming back?
When I was four, Mum met a man who said he loved her. He asked her to go away with him and she just got up and left one day, telling nobody. It’s strange but, 70 years on, I don’t blame Mum for going. I still remember the day she went, though. I was alone in the house with Florence. We got hungry and neighbours heard us crying and called our Auntie Mona, who came around and took us away to her tenement in Partick. Mona was a totally destructive influence on my young life. She beat and bullied me. I was about five when Dad came back from the war. He’d take us out at weekends but the war had damaged him. He was distant and didn’t seem to notice how badly Mona treated me. Life only got worse when I went to school. Sister Philomena, the headmistress at St Peter’s, had paintings of Hell on her walls. They were probably illustrations from Dante’s Inferno, but I assumed they were her summer holiday photos. It was a horribly bleak time but I survived and it made me stronger.