I was born in 1956 but my story starts on a steam train speeding south from Scotland to England 3 years prior.
It is 1953 and, onboard, a little boy, aged 5, and little girl, aged 7, watch an English countryside speed past while, opposite, the formidable monochrome figure of a Catholic nun sternly pins the children to their seats with her gaze.
Abandoned by their mother, these children had spent years in a Scottish childrens home but now, partly due to an accident, (or some questionable act of serendipity), they were heading south to be reunited with her.
This fact is not, and would never represent some fairytale, happy ending for the children but it would create the circumstances that would lead to my own conception and birth.
It is difficult, perhaps impossible, to decypher the true psychological character of their mother, Kathleen McCartney, at the time these events were unfolding but I do know that the prior act of depositing her children in a Catholic orphanage several years earlier, would not have played heavily upon her conscience.
She was planning to marry an RAF airman she had met at a dance and, yes, one day he would become my father but, before then, she had a problem.
In order to gain approval for the marriage from the RAF man’s own mother, she would be forced to take the orphans back.
And that is what happened … and that was why this story opens with a train speeding south from Scotland.Three years later, Kathleen McCartney, who was not a maternal woman, gave birth to a baby boy.
His name was Christopher.