When I was small, my mother put me in a large 1pram, which she parked at the end of the garden so she couldn’t hear me. We lived on a farm on the east coast of Scotland where the weather was bad. But as long as it wasn’t pouring with rain, that’s where I stayed for a couple of hours every day.
When I reached the age of five, my mother waved from the back door of our house as my sister and I joined the other farm children for the two-mile walk across the fields to school. The journeys were 2challenging. There was Flika, the Shetland pony with sharp teeth, Bruno the paranoid Labrador and Willy and Ian, a couple of boys who had cut a dog’s head off with an 3axe and loved to push us into the 4nettles that grew along the sides of the path.