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| | | | | | PICTURE GALLERY | | | | | | 
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.
The school Christmas party. 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)
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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).
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. Read more here
Holidays
My father bought a wooden "hut" in the Cheviot Hills for £100 with his best friend Jimmy Mitchell. It didn't have any electricity or running water ... read more here
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