The children’s author, Dame Jacqueline Wilson, has said her elderly mother slept with a gun beneath her pillow.
Wilson, creator of the Tracy Beaker series, told an audience at the Hay festival in Wales that she was the daughter of a character more colourful than any she had written – and that she was terrified her mother might shoot her by accident, and persuaded her to get rid of it.
Speaking in a talk recorded for BBC Radio 4’s This Cultural Life, she recalled how she had made the discovery: “One time, when she was very elderly and I went to visit her, because I’m an only child so I had to keep an eye on her, she said, ‘I’ve got something wonderful I’m keeping under my pillow’.
“I said, ‘What?’ and I looked and it was a gun. I said, ‘It’s not loaded?’ and she said, ‘Well, of course it’s loaded! What would be the point of it if it wasn’t loaded?’
“And some very dubious man had sold it to her because she collected bric-a-brac and antiques, and was scared somebody would come and burgle her. She said, ‘I could kill them’. I said, ‘Don’t be so silly’.”
Wilson, who is 76, said her mum was often fast asleep when she visited her and she worried she might wake up and mistake her for an intruder. “I thought, the person who’s going to get killed is me,” she said.
But she added that she had stood up to her mother “for once” and urged her to return the gun to the person who had sold her it. “‘If you don’t, I am going to take it and hand it in to the police station, because you are not allowed to have that gun in the house’. And what she did with it I don’t know, but it wasn’t there when I went back,” she said.
Wilson told the audience that the wild character of her mother, Biddy, who died in 2015 aged 92, had inspired her writing. “I sometimes dream of having one of the real bestsellers, right up at the top of the charts, and the only thing I could ever think of was to tell my mother’s story, which is quite extraordinary.”
After Biddy’s death Wilson published a book, Clover Moon, that drew on her own experiences of family tension, and began to speak publicly about her difficult childhood. Her father had been depressive and her mother, who she described as “terribly dominant” and “controlling”, was too ashamed to get a divorce. She considers her experiences of family dysfunction are what make her children’s books, which have sold more than 35m copies, so relatable.
