The idea of this novel has been twenty-five years in the making. It started when my father suddenly died one Friday dinnertime in the gym at work. My mum was forty-seven at the time and the shock was shattering.
I was twenty-one and in the aftermath of it all I moved back home to be with her. We started to talk more than we ever had before, now that it was just me and her in the house together, and she would tell stories of her upbringing. She had grown up in the Quarriers orphan village near Bridge of Weir in Scotland. Until then I had known very little about her early life. I knew we didn’t have grandparents on her side, but little else was explained.
The idea of the Quarriers homes fascinated me; that you would have one thousand children in a purpose-built village seemed so strange. My mother did not realise that most children lived with their parents until she was about six.
There is a real Morag ‘Jonesy’ Jones, who inspired the character in this book. She is alive and well, and is still friends with my mum to this day. During the time when Mum was trying to put her life back together after my father’s death, Morag came down to stay with us and help look after her. Seeing the two of them together was fascinating: Mum went from being my mother to a teenager, and helped me see what she was like as a young woman rather than just my parent.
Mum and Jonesy didn’t actually know each other whilst in the Quarriers homes, but they moved in together shortly after Mum left at sixteen and became best friends straight away. They were so different from one another but both true survivors in what was a brutal place to grow up. I was inspired to write this by their courage, brains and bravery – they overcame the rough hand life had dealt them – and I wanted it published before the generation of people who had been in these types of places was gone.
Mum went on to have three children and seven grandchildren, and became an actuary as, like Lesley, she loved maths as a girl. She is now retired and living in Surrey. On the twentieth anniversary of Dad’s death we went up to where we had scattered his ashes on Gleniffer Braes. Afterwards we drove to the Quarriers homes so Mum could show us where she had grown up and her ‘cottage’.
After I had finished writing this book there was a development in my mother’s story. She googled her own mother’s name and found out that she had died a couple of months earlier. After waiting a period of time, and getting up the courage to do so, she wrote a letter to the eldest of her mother’s other children, thinking that at seventy-two she didn’t want to spend the rest of her life wondering what if she had tried to make contact with them.
They wrote back and after some confirmation of the facts my mother now has four sisters. They are in regular contact, she has met up with them, and she now has siblings for the first time in her life. They are the loveliest of people and I am so happy for my mum.
Lesley’s mother in this book is completely fictional; that said, many unmarried women at the time were pressured into giving up their children by society; in fact, I have seen a handwritten letter from my grandmother to the Homes saying she only wanted her child in there for a couple of years as she wanted to be able to bring her back into the family. Although it took far longer, Mum is now back with her family.
This whole story is a tribute to my mum, who is an inspirational woman in the quietest, most dignified way. I wanted this book to show that courage comes in many forms.
This story is set in a fictional Scottish orphans’ village in the 1960s. Truly awful things did happen in the real Quarriers homes. I haven’t told that story here; that is for others to tell. Adults from Mum’s cottage have been prosecuted and gone to prison for what they did. There were good people in the Homes trying to help the children there but there were also some very, very bad ones too.
If you were affected, there are support groups such as http://www.fbga.org.