My grandmother wasn’t actually my grandmother. My mother and I moved in with her in Wigton, Cumbria, when my father was off in the war. I later learned that she was my mother’s foster mother, Mrs Gilbertson, and that my mother had been illegitimate. The people I thought were aunts and uncles were mostly foster children. My mother and I never discussed it. What impact it may have had on me I don’t know.
I never noticed I was an only child. We were working-class and surrounded by interesting people of ingenuity. There was so much going on in Wigton – choirs, sports clubs, youth clubs. People had hobbies. You could never be bored.
