Managed to find a few early pictures - from the top left is my sister Tinny, myself as the baby, and my other sister Alison. In the shot of us in the garden (not a kilt to be seen sadly, as it's the summer) is Robbie, Alison, Tinny, me - and our very important and much loved Jason, badly behaved but very affectionate springer spaniel. In the school Christmas party shot we're all in our very very best clothes - I can remember most of the names of the children in this picture. I'm third from the left on the bottom row in a checky dress (one of my favourites).

Forgot to mention earlier the other, hilarious holidays we used to have. My father bought a wooden "hut" in the Cheviot Hils for £100 with his best friend Jimmy Mitchell. It didn't have any electricity or running water and was about 5 metres square divided into three "rooms" - all the children there slept on wooden bunks (8) built into the walls. Robbie who was a baby, slept in a bunk with a cage door so he couldn't fall out. We carved our names into the walls surrounding our bunks. We had baths in the "burn" and used candlelight at night. Water came from a handpump which connected directly to a nearby boggy stream. We had to put a strainer over the water spout to catch the water beetles and other creepie crawlies but we didn't mind. We would spend weeks up running wild - fishing for trout and minnows in the burn, racing up hills, using eye-spy books to chart birds and wild flowers and playing at the farm nearby where there was always a selection of collie puppies and kittens. I don't want to paint a totally idyllic picture - I can remember longing for some shops at some point - or somewhere to buy sweets - I still have a diary which I wrote when I was 10, which tells of a day which we spent there when "everybody was in a bad mood apart from Robbie and Jason" but on the whole it was really good fun. The place is still owned by the family now, but we're not nearly as hardy as our parents and have installed electricity and running water - although we still don't have a telephone there (and there's no signal for mobiles) and we don't have a tv there either.

Right - have decided the only way I can do this, is if I squeeze in 10 mins in my lunch hour every day - otherwise it won't work. As a result you'll get short items - hopefully 4 - 5 ish times a week if this system gets going. My old pics are all in boxes as I've just moved house but should be able to locate some over the weekend.

Think I left off first blog talking about rough tough primary school in Berwick upon Tweed. Most of us had head lice - as it equally common nowadays - but the treatment was different. I remember running out of the classroom to visit the nasty outside toilets when I was about 6 or 7, to find one of the scariest girls in the schools all hunched up on her own in the corner of the playground with her head in her hands - she'd had all her hair shaved off and someone had given a dirty, turban like hat to wear to keep her warm. Years later I had a holiday job in a supermarket in the town - she worked on the next till to me - I never knew whether she remembered me or not and I was still a bit scared of her but I was really happy to see she had very long, shiny dark hair.

In answer to the question about why I knew so much about God - it had been drummed into me from an early age - my father was a leading light in the church choir and we were all marched to Church every Sunday (Church always had a capital letter in those days) - I liked the singing but Dad always used to embarrass us by singing the descant to all the hymns. We had big picture bibles full of horrific pictures which used to give me nightmares - Moses parting the waters so that the Israelites could cross over, but then Pharoh's men drowning when the water returned, the crucifixion, the slaughter of the innocents - all gruesomely depicted in my bedtime reading. We also had to say our prayers every night - god bless mummy and daddy and granny and alison, tinny, robbie and then a long list of all our pets.

I adored having a birthday on 28th October, because it meant that my birthday party could be a Halloween party. It was always brilliant. Every year,my mother would snap out of frugal mode and put on the most wonderful party tea. There would be sausages on sticks, egg sandwiches, meringues, chocolate crispies, buns with icing on top in paper cases, homemade shortbread biscuits shaped like life belts with chocolate stripes and jellies. We would all sit around the table and eat and eat until our tummies could take no more. We would catch sticky buns in our mouths which would hang from the pulley, we would duck for apples, play the smelling or feeling game where we’d sit in the dark and try to guess what was being passed around - or there was the sucking up dried peas on a straw game. Thanks to my mother who always threw herself into the arrangements with gusto, my birthday parties as a child were always legendary. She once made me a gingerbread Hansel and Gretel house cake with licorice allsorts for windows and doors and all sorts of other sweets for flowers in the gardens and chimneys and curtains etc.

Sweets were big in our house. My father used to take 6 teaspoons of sugar in his tea and every Saturday he'd bring us children a great big selection of boiled sweets, creamline toffees, everton mints, lucky numbers, sherbert lemons, sour plums - which were usually all finished by Monday. Alison and I were always having fillings at the dentist, although Tinny and Robbie weren't affected. The dentist had terrible halitosis and drilled our teeth fiercely with no injections. I was terrified of going and had to be bribed with a trip to the cafe afterwards. Needless to say I still hate going to the dentist today, but at least you get a numbing injection.

My mother had 4 sisters - and a brother (who was very clever but had manged to escape to Canada - presumably so he wouldn't have to look after them all). They were all much older than her. The eldest sister, a nurse in her 60s at this stage, was asked to look after her brother's father in law who was a retired Church of Scotland minister and was in his 80s and dying. Much to our astonishment, when I was about 11, she ended up marrying him. My mother was aghast! We girls were disgusted to find they were also sharing a bed - at that age! we thought The next sister, Mary, also a nurse, had married in her 50s. Auntie Nancy, another nurse, was still unmarried in her late 50s and surprised us all by marrying a man sustantially younger than her - and younger than our father. He was a banker who lived in Chelmsford. My brother Robbie and I used to think he was slightly strange because he was always very keen to play "ball" with us, with Auntie Mary's evil tempered scotty dog who insisted on rodgering the football at every opportunity. At any opportunity when were were playing on the lawn with the dog - and strange Chris, he would lean over and say "I think that deserves a kiss, don't you" . We never mentioned it to anyone and nothing else happened but we always had him down as a bit of a strange one. Nancy and Chris eventually departed to the Hebridean Isles where they ran a bed and breakfast and Chris worked in a bank in Tobermory. The final sister lived in Edinburgh and ran a hotel until her husband died suddenly of a heart attack at 42. She had 2 daughters, 10 years older than us, who stayed frequently with us.

Holidays were always spent in damp, drafty cottages in Scotland - which allowed my father to fish - we absolutely adored our holidays - even if we were dragged up several mountains in the process - I used to like the boats and being allowed to have an ice cream and crisps every day.

Sorry getting a bit bogged down in this early section - but suffice to say had a nice, scruffy happy childhood - but suddenly - from our tartan clad background, like a bolt from the blue - all we three girls were packed off to boarding school - in Yorkshire - of all places - it was like another world - and a complete culture change. We were teased about our accents and we certainly didn't have the right trendy clothes. We were incarcarated on the Yorkshire Moors for several years (I later learnt it was because my elder sister had been gathering a bit of a reputation for enjoying the choir boys company - obviously my parents decided we were all destined to go the same way, and so would be safer in a more God fearing establishment where we couldn't escape. We wore Harry Potter type brown cloaks and had to attend chapel every night. I was very very homesick. To be continued the next time I can find a few minutes. Pics to come. Sorry this isn't proof read so possibly typos - I am getting very suspicious glances from my workmates so need to log off.

Hurray - I've managed to post a picture but it's far too close up for my liking and I think it's time for botox - also probably not very useful to you anyway as I know you want old pics.

However now that I've got this far, I shall try to find old pics and scan them in very soon.

Not quite sure how I can link this message to my earlier one so I hope you find it.

I'll try to find time to add more tales and old pics very soon, and I will continue the story - however a bit busy with work and kids back from uni and moving house right now Many thanks for your encouragement. It's quite fun once I get going - I will persevere!

Eccentric families - growing up in the 60s

Haven't done a blog before so am probably doing this in totally the wrong way - it was sharing a birthday with the Today programme that did it, and receiving instructions on how to "blog" via email during an unusually quiet hour at work. The Today programme are wanting memories from people who were born on their birthday. Here are a few of mine for what they're worth - my family was and is still fairly eccentric and highly entertaining - this is all pretty lighthearted and not really political so I hope it's still useful.

I was born in Berwick upon Tweed on 28th October 1957 and have lots of memories of my childhood, growing up in a very strict scottish "frugal" family with my two elder sisters and younger brother.

My father ran a successful grain and seed merchant company with his elder brother in Berwick and my mother had been a nurse at Edinburgh Royal Infirmary, but stopped working when she got married. She had been the youngest of six children and her father was a doctor in nearby Norham who died suddenly in his early 40s when she was 5. The family had been left penniless as her father hadn't ever chased up his patients' bills and so they had to move to Edinburgh where my fiercely snobbish grandmother was forced to take in lodgers to pay the bills. The sense that education and manners meant far more than money and success pervaded all of our childhood. Wastefulness was sinful and all things Scottish were good.

As a result we all grew up in hand me down clothes – as the third daughter, I naturally fared the worst but would also protest the loudest. It was usually ancient kilts that had passed down through the family (McCreath tartan of course). Cheery, cheeky Scottish singer Andy Stewart would usually be warrrbling away in the background at home: “Step we gaily on we go, heel for heel and toe ferr toe, Arm in Arm and RRRRoe and Rrrroe (I never quite knew what the rrroe and rrroe was – but my mother would make me eat cod roe, so I thought it was possibly something to do with that) – All for Marrrie’s wedding”. For same strange reason, my sister Tinny (short for Catriona) and I secretly fancied Andy Stewart and used to sing along to “Donald where’s yer trooosers” with great enthusiasm: “OOOO - let the winds blow high, let the winds blow low, through the stRRReet in my kilt ah go, all the lassies say Hello Donald, where’s yer Trrrroooosers!!!


There was often an evil smell in the house as my mother would be boiling up a sheep’s head for Jason, our beloved springer spaniel, father’s badly behaved “gun dog” and our surrogate extra brother to whom we would confide our darkest secrets when sent to our rooms in disgrace for not eating cold ratatouille. My mother was a little ahead of her time in the culinary stakes – much to our embarrassment as children. I remember begging her to have fish fingers and ice cream when I brought my friends home from school, but no, inevitably, she would serve up something even more gruesome like tongue and sweetbreads with prunes for pudding or tapioca. Looking back, I wonder if she did it on purpose?

Primary school was sometimes an ordeal. Wearing my sisters’ hand me down navy blue baggy knickers, ubiquitous kilt, scratchy cable knit, brown wooly socks held up with elastic garters at the knee and sensible brown lace up shoes I held my head high, but secretly prayed in bed at night for some pretty pink nylon flowery knickers, a pink skinny rib top, shiny black pointy shoes, and a pale grey pinafore dress. However despite my appearance, I managed to maintain my street cred by being the “two bally” and “jacks” champion and also the fastest girl to shin up a rope to the top of the dining hall – I could also stand on my head, run fast, pull very funny faces which made people laugh - and knew all about God – which endeared me to some, but not all, of the teachers.

The teachers were a very very terrifying bunch – as anyone who went to the Parade School in Berwick upon Tweed in the early 60s will testify – or was I just an awful wimp? Growler was the worse. He was the Headmaster and would parade around the dinner hall at lunchtime, demonically playing with a large leather strap. His huge face would be permanently an unhealthy dark red with fury, the jutting-out moles wobbling on his face. For spurious reasons, he would suddenly roar out and pounce on some poor unsuspecting child and drag him or her out to his office. The whole dining hall with its 200 pupils would immediately fall eerily silent as we all sympathized with the victim.

Miss Bell was another petrifying teacher with a strap who used to regularly beat children at the front of the classroom while we all had to watch. She would screech and scream: “I’ll go high jinks up a lamp post and come down on you like a ton of bricks!!” I suffered in Miss Bell’s class and at one point refused to go to school for days. If anyone got less than 6 out of 10 for mental arithmetic test on a Friday morning, they had to stand on their chair and be systematically humiliated by Miss Bell, who would encourage the rest of the class to join in. The poor child would also usually end up being smacked, or belted. I was totally useless at mental arithmetic, and was so scared the night before that I could never sleep – as a consequence was even denser the next day than ever and would always end up standing on my chair. When my mother’s sister, Auntie Nancy, aged 50, announced her engagement to slightly strange Chris, who was 20 years younger (disapproving pursed lips throughout the older members of the family), I begged her to have her wedding on a Friday, so that I could miss mental arithmetic. I almost wept with relief when we duly received the wedding invitation for a Friday.