Dame Jacqueline Wilson

One of our best-loved children's authors, Dame Jacqueline Wilson, is our guest today. Jacqueline has changed the lives of many young readers by introducing them to characters and subjects which reflect the complicated lives of real children. And in this conversation with Gyles, Jacqueline talks about her own childhood, which has informed a lot of her later writing. She grew up with two parents who didn't really get along - a mother who was a narcissist, and a father who was often angry and distant - and who had violent rows with each other, but gave Jacqueline rich material for her books. Jacqueline tells Gyles about being a bookish schoolgirl who liked to daydream, about a disastrous encounter with some orange hair dye, and about writing her first novel for a school teacher. Gyles and Jacqueline talk about her first job, at DC Thompson, and about her marriage and the birth of her daughter when she was only 21. They talk about writing, and about Jacqueline's relationship now, and new-found status as a gay icon. Our heartfelt thanks to Jacqueline Wilson for her delightful company, wonderful stories and wisdom. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 1:31Speaker 02

  Everything's coming up Rosebud. I'm Gyles Brandreth. You're here. What more could you ask for?

• 1:58Speaker 02

  Hello again. This is Gyles Brandreth, and this is another episode of Rosebud. But it's a bit different because it's the first-ever episode of Rosebud introduced to you from a car park. I'm in London at Paddington Station. I'm here in the car park waiting to catch a train to Cheltenham. I'm going to the Cheltenham Literary Festival. I've been going to this festival. I think it's the oldest British literary festival for many, many years. I think I first came to Cheltenham about 50 years ago. And we've featured quite a few noted authors on Rosebud over the last few years, but not as many children's writers as I would like. And I do think, since we are so much about childhood, we often say, childhood lasts a lifetime.

• 2:43Speaker 02

  The significance of children's writers in the life of children should not be underestimated. So today, we have a very special children's author on Rosebud. It's Dame Jacqueline Wilson. I say she's important for a number of reasons. One, she's one of our most distinguished children's authors. The Tracy Beaker novels have sold literally in there millions. She's written more than 100 books. But she's important because her books, her adult life, was so influenced by her childhood, by her life with her parents, with whom she didn't feel able to communicate and share some of the problems that she actually was a pioneer author

• 3:27Speaker 02

  in raising in her children's books, talking about things like divorce, adoption, death, difficult issues that she actually introduced young people to. I've discovered, in these Rosebud conversations, there are many children who find it difficult to relate to their families, to their parents, to their siblings. But somehow, they come alive through children's books, even through children's comics. Actually, children's magazines are relevant to our guest today, Jacqueline Wilson, because she gave her own name Jackie to the magazine Jackie. Yeah, which is really remarkable. You're going to find out some remarkable stuff about her and about what it's like growing up and why people become authors.

• 4:11Speaker 02

  I think you'll enjoy this one. Welcome to Rosebud. Cue the music. Jacqueline Wilson takes the page and the stage.

• 4:33Speaker 02

  Well, here we are. I'm with Jacqueline Wilson, born on the 17th of December, 1945. And I have to ask you, is it always Jacqueline? Do some people call you Jackie?

• 4:44Speaker 03

  It's Jacqueline on the books. So professionally, I'm Jacqueline Wilson. To, you know, close friends, I'm Jackie. That's that.

• 4:55Speaker 02

  Can I occasionally lapse into Jackie?

• 4:56Speaker 03

  Please do.

• 4:58Speaker 02

  Jackie. Well, I'm liking this already. Jackie Jacqueline Wilson, what is your very first memory?

• 5:06Speaker 03

  I think it's probably being in my grandma's lavatory. Because we we shuttled from rented room to rented room just after the war. And then we lived with my grandparents for about three years. So I must have been three or four. And she had in there wonderful wallpaper that had lots of bubbles in it, a bit like ancient bubble wrap or something. And I'd sit there and go pop, pop, pop. And because I was quite small, she didn't notice at first. And then she did. And she cornered me when I came out

• 5:49Speaker 03

  and said, "Did you do all that damage to my wallpaper?" And I really hated being in trouble and getting told off. And so I don't know why I said this, how I came up with the name. I said, "No, Gwenny did it", which startled my grandmother. And suddenly, Gwenny became my alter ego. If anybody had done anything naughty or silly or couldn't sleep, it was Gwenny. Otherwise, if I behaved myself and didn't get my frock dirty or whatever, I was me, Jacqueline.

• 6:28Speaker 02

  So how long did Gwenny stay with you as your alter ego and companion?

• 6:34Speaker 03

  She stopped being real to me, but I was a bit artful and carried on with it, even when I'd gone to school, because they still thought it quite cute, but a bit devious. And so if it was a really troubling thing, I was probably more likely not to be told off too much if it was all down to Gwenny.

• 6:56Speaker 02

  But then you immediately, your grandmother knew immediately that Gwenny was an invention of yours?

• 7:00Speaker 03

  I would think so, yes.

• 7:01Speaker 02

  Tell me, who was your, who were these grandparents that you were living with?

• 7:05Speaker 03

  They were my mother's parents and my mother and father and my grandparents. I think they really didn't like each other very much, but it was sort of, we had nowhere else to go. They did have, it was just a semi. But we had the top bit. And we stayed there. Then we went to Lewisham for further rented rooms where I started school. And then when I was six, my parents got allocated a council flat.

• 7:43Speaker 02

  Go back to your grandparents. Who were they?

• 7:47Speaker 03

  My grandmother was Hilda Ellen Clivens and my grandfather was George Alfred Clivens. They met when my grandfather was invalid out of the First World War. And he used to sit at this convalescent home for wounded soldiers. And my grandmother walked past and these two soldiers always whistled at my grandma, apparently. And she was the little fair one, and he liked the look of her. And so they got together and got married.

• 8:22Speaker 02

  And were they, obviously, they were important to you. Were they happy as a couple, do you think?

• 8:27Speaker 03

  They were cozy as a couple. I never, ever saw them kiss. They didn't use endearments. The worst thing they ever said to each other was calling each other fathead. But they were soothing because my parents, who had got together after the Second World War, well, I think it was still going on when they liaised in Bath because they were both sort of sent there. And as my mother charmlessly said when I was a child, too, there weren't many decent men at home then,

• 9:11Speaker 03

  so your father was the best of the punch.

• 9:13Speaker 02

  Take us through each of them. Tell me about your mother, first of all.

• 9:17Speaker 03

  My mother was

• 9:22Speaker 03

  Probably a difficult child. She had a mind of her own. She was certainly a very, very difficult woman. That's not just my opinion, that's every single person.

• 9:36Speaker 02

  What makes a difficult woman?

• 9:39Speaker 03

  I think probably she was a narcissist. She couldn't understand anybody else's point of view. She thought everybody should be there to please her and do what she wanted because she was certain it was right. So she had made up her mind that when I came along, I was a mistake, though they were, again as my mother insisted, respectably married when I was conceived. But, um, she, it sounds pathetic, she refused to see me for forty-eight hours as a little newborn baby because she said she hurt me so much.

• 10:23Speaker 03

  And so, right from the start, everything I did, if I behaved myself and was sweet and spoke up a bit, she liked me, loved me. But if I didn't, and I was a very introverted shy child, who just liked reading and sitting in a corner stuck in my thumb, then she thought I was playing up.

• 10:43Speaker 02

  So childbirth was so painful to her that she thought you were a gauze.

• 10:47Speaker 03

  I mean, she was in labour forty-eight hours.

• 10:49Speaker 02

  Gosh.

• 10:49Speaker 03

  But, um.

• 10:50Speaker 02

  And for the next forty-eight hours, once you'd arrived, I don't want to see her.

• 10:54Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 10:55Speaker 02

  You're in the pain, she's called me.

• 10:56Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 10:56Speaker 02

  So what was her name?

• 10:58Speaker 03

  Biddy. I mean, she was Margaret Clibbins and then Margaret Aitkin. But for some reason, I don't know why, she started being nicknamed Biddy as a little girl.

• 11:09Speaker 02

  How does Biddy meet your father? How did they meet?

• 11:11Speaker 03

  They met at the pump rooms in Bath and got married three months later, I think.

• 11:18Speaker 02

  And who was he? What sort of person was he?

• 11:19Speaker 03

  His name was Harry Aitkin.

• 11:25Speaker 03

  He was a draftsman. He was helping to design submarines at that stage. He was shy, he was an introvert, he could be very moody. They were so unlike each other in personality. My mother would want to go out dancing and have fun. It was my father's idea of hell. In today's times, they would have had a quick fling, realised they had nothing in common, didn't even like each other, and gone their separate ways. But no, they got married and then I came along a year later. And then I think my mum would have left him.

• 12:07Speaker 03

  But in those days, she didn't have the earning power and then she would be lumbered with me presumably. And so it was not a harmonious childhood.

• 12:17Speaker 02

  Were there brothers and sisters for you?

• 12:20Speaker 03

  No brothers and sisters. My, my mother was an only child too. And sadly, although nothing could be better than my own daughter, I, I set out thinking I want at least six children. Don't think I could have coped, so I'd had just the one daughter.

• 12:35Speaker 02

  And you were the one unwanted child?

• 12:38Speaker 03

  Well.

• 12:38Speaker 02

  I mean, you now say that, but at the time.

• 12:40Speaker 03

  I wasn't one of these poor neglected little, little mites. I know, was always carefully dressed and kept very clean and tidy. And then my mum always thought Shirley Temple was the ideal small girl. And so she subjected me to terrible curlers at night so that my hair, which is still a bit wispy and odd, um, uh, was sort of sticking out all over the place. Um, and so I looked like a much cherished child. And in some ways I was. And she was very good at giving presents.

• 13:20Speaker 03

  And at Christmas, we didn't have much money, but I remember thinking Christmas quite wonderful. And, um, when I later developed a passion for the child film star Mandy Miller, my mum would take me up to London to where a lot of the film, um, I don't, they weren't exactly studios, but in Wardour Street, various places.

• 13:45Speaker 02

  Film companies, had their offices.

• 13:46Speaker 03

  And they had those, outside cinemas, there used to be those photographs stills from the film. And she would march in completely unannounced and say, hi, my, my daughter absolutely loves Mandy Miller. What, what could I buy from you? And generally, because she, she had, she, she possibly had a bit of charm too, otherwise I'd just told her to get lost. Um, and so she helped me build my collection, Mandy Miller photographs.

• 14:12Speaker 02

  That's a kind thing that your mother did for you?

• 14:15Speaker 03

  It was, you see.

• 14:16Speaker 02

  With enthusiasm?

• 14:17Speaker 03

  Yes, yes, because this was the sort of thing she loved. She loved to get something that nobody else could get. She loved to bargain. Much later in life, she became a minor antique dealer. And she was in her element, uh, sort of trying to sort of harass people into going much lower in their price when she was going around huge places like Ardenley or whatever. I said before that I was going to be writing a memoir because the publisher's asked for it. And annoyingly, I think my mother is the person everyone will fall in love with and find hilarious.

• 15:00Speaker 03

  And I would too, but it, it wasn't all joy living with her.

• 15:04Speaker 02

  When did you first become aware as a little girl that things weren't quite right between your parents?

• 15:10Speaker 03

  From very early on. There were terrible arguments, great shoutings and screamings.

• 15:15Speaker 02

  Where did you hear these from?

• 15:16Speaker 03

  Um, I think possibly they weren't so bad when we lived with my grandparents. But when we moved to the council flat, there were huge rows. And, um, my, my mother, who goaded and goaded and goaded my father until he started really screaming. And then she'd always say that very classic British face, what will the neighbours think? And good God, what did they think?

• 15:46Speaker 02

  And you were in your bedroom hearing this, or you were actually in the room?

• 15:49Speaker 03

  Sometimes it was over my head. Um, one memorable Christmas, um, the, she, my father was cutting the turkey, carving the turkey, and my mother was criticizing him about his technique. And he suddenly lost it altogether and threw it at her.

• 16:10Speaker 02

  The turkey or the knife?

• 16:11Speaker 03

  The turkey, not the knife.

• 16:14Speaker 03

  You see, mine, mine's a very small suburban domestic horror. In a real book, it would be a knife. No, it was a turkey.

• 16:23Speaker 02

  Well, it's funny, isn't it? You picked up the turkey, but it was the Christmas turkey.

• 16:27Speaker 03

  And the thing is that, uh, and then, uh, my mother never wasted anything. So after he'd stomped off, I don't know where, into the bedroom, into the bathroom, you know, she'd mopped the turkey with the dish towel, shoved it back on the plate. And then after quite a long time, when more or less everything had gone cold, we had our Christmas dinner.

• 16:49Speaker 02

  Did you ever talk to her or him about it?

• 16:55Speaker 03

  They sided with me in that if there was a hu- huge argument, they would, my mother would say, I am right, aren't I, Jack? Yes, come on, say so. And your father's being terrible, isn't he? And then my father would say, no, no, et cetera. And so I always said, I'm not taking sides, which I think was a very wise thing to say. But that infuriated both of them.

• 17:24Speaker 02

  Did you feel unhappy about this when you were lying in bed at night?

• 17:27Speaker 03

  Um, yeah, I did feel unhappy. Um, but having said that, I had a lot of fun too. And I would, my father had such a temper, I was nearly always frightened of him because you just never knew when he was going to be on the turn. And yet, every summer holiday, he would take a day off work and take me out into the Surrey Hills. And then we'd go for long walks. And if we'd set off at Guildford, there was a wonderful secondhand bookshop there, which had its own children's room. And I was allowed a book, uh, which was fantastic.

• 18:05Speaker 03

  And, and much later on, I'd said that I wanted to go to a ballet and he did take me, I think it was the Nutcracker, generally the first choice. And, and I mean, he, he actually fell fast asleep because, but, so he did lovely things, but also, you know, I was always on edge with him.

• 18:25Speaker 02

  Have you subsequently thought why she was as she was and why your father was this? He sounds like a figure who is angry at times.

• 18:34Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 18:34Speaker 02

  Um, and he clearly is, and frightening. And she obviously is aspirational, so is she disappointed in what has happened to her life? Have you thought in retrospect?

• 18:43Speaker 03

  Disappointed. And I think she would have loved to be something like a journalist. She was nosey, she was cheeky. She would have loved to have been in the thick of things and, um, everybody roaring with laughter at her jokes or, or the things she did. And she wasn't. She was, um, she had a variety of jobs. Her first job was in a cake shop, which I appreciated enormously because she brought home, I mean, I often had for lunch a sort of bath bun and a cream doughnut, which I still have yearnings for that sort of things at lunchtime.

• 19:24Speaker 03

  Um, and, oh, she did a newspaper round in the big hospital near us. And she enjoyed that, sort of flirting with all the men. And, um, yeah, she was a terrible flirt. And in fact, at my.

• 19:41Speaker 03

  Mother's funeral, actually she'd run out of men then, but so she just had ex-carers come along, but right up until her eighties, truly, she was getting together with various different gentlemen.

• 19:58Speaker 02

  Oh, did she have dalliances, I mean, actually affairs?

• 20:00Speaker 03

  Oh, definitely, yes. And then with my father, at his funeral, not only my mum was still technically married to him, because she always had her eye on the civil service pension, but not one but two lady friends turned up as well.

• 20:16Speaker 02

  Well, congratulations to him. So they stayed together, did they?

• 20:19Speaker 03

  They stayed together, probably for financial reasons, until my mother inherited some money from my grandparents, and then she could set off in her own establishment.

• 20:35Speaker 02

  What I really want to know is, we often say here on Rosebud, a childhood lasts a lifetime. What from this experience as a child, and having these warring parents, essentially, though in an overall loving and responsible, they were loving and responsible parents, but they were at war, they weren't happy. What of that is in you still? What have you taken from that into your life?

• 21:00Speaker 03

  I get worried when people are shouting and very angry still. And although I'm very good at pretending and masking, but the heart goes boom, boom, boom, like that. And I don't think, well, I think the real and actual beneficial effect it's had on me is I'm quite good at working people out psychologically. And it's made me a bit too much of a people pleaser, I think, because I do, I'm needy still, and worry if somebody I feel doesn't like me very much,

• 21:45Speaker 03

  even if I don't like them very much. It's just because the way for my mother to make a fuss of me was to please her in every way. The way to keep my father calm was to keep out of his way, but always to be compliant and not a nuisance. So it's a way of life that is very difficult, I think, to change.

• 22:09Speaker 02

  Once that pattern's established, you carry on with it. Reading, obviously you were a bookish girl right from the beginning. Was there a local library you went to?

• 22:14Speaker 03

  I loved the library. And my mother, again, at that time, you were, because they didn't really go in for picture books, so that the age to join the local library in Kingston used to be eight. And my mum took me along when I was six and said, look, we can't afford all these books. And she's read all her books, Humpty and Tums, can she join the library? And they did allow it, which was very nice of them. And I adored that library.

• 22:45Speaker 02

  And what are the books that are immediately in your head as the big ones from your childhood?

• 22:49Speaker 03

  Well, libraries, if you discover you love a book, like I read a later Mary Poppins, and then I wanted them all. And you have to be so patient to make sure that at last you've read from Mary Poppins, and then Mary Poppins come back and all the others. I loved those books. I loved Noah Stretfield's books. I did, with my first book that I ever bought myself with my pocket money, was a puffing paperback back of ballet shoes. And, and, oh, it's cringe making, I asked for pink bedroom slippers and danced around.

• 23:32Speaker 03

  I even had a book about how to do ballet and tried to do all the different positions and a pirouette and God knows what I would have looked like.

• 23:41Speaker 02

  It's charming, it's lovely.

• 23:43Speaker 03

  Well, no, probably not. But I didn't do ballet because my mother had done ballet, and she hadn't liked it. And so she said, no, you're not doing it. You won't like it. You see, she thought my personality was a watered down version of hers, so that we were very, very different. But she, this is the thing, is if somebody is born that way, can they change? Therefore, is it their fault? I don't know. I mean, as a child, I thought she was always right. As a teenager, I rebelled fiercely.

• 24:24Speaker 02

  How did the rebellion manifest itself?

• 24:29Speaker 03

  I thought she was a terrible hypocrite because she was seeing boyfriends.

• 24:37Speaker 02

  And you knew about this, did you?

• 24:38Speaker 03

  Yes, yes.

• 24:39Speaker 02

  She brought them home?

• 24:40Speaker 03

  Well, there was one that she was really keen on, and bizarrely, they used to go out with my father on a Saturday night. I mean, what he thought of it, I have no idea. But when I started to have boyfriends, my mum got very angry with me if I stayed out even till 10 o'clock at night, say. And this was, I thought, very annoying. And they would just rouse about, she wanted to choose my clothes. And I always remember, she loved a bargain,

• 25:24Speaker 03

  and she bought me once a bright turquoise fake fur cape, which was not remotely fashionable. And I was terribly teased outside school. I mean, I wore school uniform in school. And, you know, she bought things that she said were knobby. Now, I wasn't a knobby child. And she also...

• 25:50Speaker 02

  Knobby meaning like a grand?

• 25:53Speaker 03

  Well, she sort of meant it, I think, as unusual, quirky, perhaps. That's a knobby little thing. Yes, wear that, Jack.

• 26:04Speaker 02

  You'd be rather fun. You'd look rather stylish.

• 26:05Speaker 03

  Yeah. And, no, I didn't. I just, I mean, when I was about 15, I longed to be a beatnik, grow my hair, and wear all black with a sort of long sloppy jumper and have Winkle Picker shoes.

• 26:21Speaker 02

  Well, this was 1960, you were 15.

• 26:23Speaker 03

  And, no, I had to wear sort of pastel coloured things.

• 26:29Speaker 02

  At the secondary school, were you successful? Was it a big school with their boys and girls?

• 26:33Speaker 03

  No, it was a girls' school. I had been quite popular at my primary school, but it wasn't, I had a good friend, Chris, who I'm still friends with all these many years later. And it was, I didn't really like the regime in that the head teacher was trying very hard, because it was one of the first comprehensives, but a bilateral one, just for girls. And she was stricter with us than, you know, I can believe now. And one time, I think I committed a terrible offence of not

• 27:18Speaker 03

  wearing my school berry out of school, and I was forced to stand for hours outside her study, which seemed to me silly. You know, if I'd done something really wrong, I could understand, but just getting fed up with the berry and shoving it in my satchel just didn't seem a heinous offence. But we had a wonderful art teacher who came along to have a word with the head teacher. And then when he came out, he felt in his pocket and put some chocolate on the windowsill beside me. And I've never forgotten that sweetness. He was a lovely man.

• 28:07Speaker 00

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• 28:51Speaker 00

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• 29:06Speaker 04

  Talking about guns with others might not always feel comfortable, but it could save a life. Here's a way to start a conversation. Your family is going over to your neighbour's home for dinner for the first time. How would you ask if there are any unlocked guns in the home?

• 29:18Speaker 05

  Hey.

• 29:19Speaker 06

  Hey, we're so excited for tonight. Before we come over, though, may I ask if there are any unlocked guns in your home?

• 29:25Speaker 05

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• 29:30Speaker 06

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• 30:09Speaker 02

  Can you remember how old you were and who taught you the facts of life?

• 30:15Speaker 03

  Yes, I was nine and I was addicted to a bizarre women's magazine called Women's Companion, which was Fortun's hate me, and it had all sorts of stories. And there was one I particularly loved, a serial called The Latchkey Child. And I like these stories because they were all about quite poor people and with different problems. And I mean, I suppose I often write the same sorts of things now. And I adored this magazine and I was given a subscription to this magazine. And but there were the problem pages, which I adored.

• 30:57Speaker 03

  And then my mother had taken me to a little cafe for a treat where we often went called Winifred's, which was full of elderly spinster ladies and gentlemen who had retired and couldn't be bothered to make their own thing. And it was always very quiet and genteel, just clinking of cutlery. And I suddenly said, mommy, what a periods. My mother with reasonable panache said, I think we'll talk about that at home. And then she did talk about it at home and I was quite astonished. And then she she bought me a book called, a small book called How a Baby is Born.

• 31:40Speaker 03

  And it showed how chickens came out of eggs and there were all sorts of fudging matters. Nothing at all about how human beings babies were born. But then by the time I was 11, I mean, somebody had been told reasonably truthful facts of life, although being kids, we sometimes got it wrong.

• 32:04Speaker 02

  And were you comfortable with it when it all happened?

• 32:07Speaker 03

  I was quite curious, actually. It just seems such a bizarre thing to do. And then when I had a discussion with my mother and I said, well, where do people do it? And she said, in bed. And and I said, when they're asleep. And my mother oddly said, yes.

• 32:26Speaker 02

  It may tell you something about your conception. Who knows? This could be why she resented it so much. She didn't know she was going to have a baby. Oh, Lord, I woke up.

• 32:37Speaker 03

  So so I did have the wrong idea about it somehow. But then then I discovered we just had one bookcase. And as I was looking through, desperate for something else to read, I saw there was a really big fat book at the back of the books. And I got this out and it was a sex instruction book, a really quite detailed one. And that was alarming because it described various different sex acts that had never occurred to me. And I had a vivid imagination. But I shut up about finding it and always felt a little odd if I ever, if I was on

• 33:21Speaker 03

  my own in the flat, took it out and had a little peep again. But certainly for a youngish girl, 12, maybe, it was a lot of facts.

• 33:34Speaker 02

  When did boys come into your life?

• 33:35Speaker 03

  I did have a proper boyfriend that I went out with for about 18 months when I was about 15 through to 16, who actually lived in the same flats. And and that was quite an intense relationship. He was training to be a hairdresser and he used to do my hair. And one terrible time, he had tried out, I had dark brown hair then. And he tried out doing a slightly auburn rinse on it. And it looked quite the thing. It didn't look too obvious at all.

• 34:12Speaker 03

  But it was a bit the color of Judy Garland's hair in Wizard of Oz, that just slight chestnut sort of thing. So I thought that was lovely. And then he said, well, come along to the salon after hours because he had the key to it. And he said, and I'll do you a sort of permanent dye like that. And madly I went along. And I think this was the first time he'd ever tried to dye anybody's hair. And first of all, he peroxided it so it went sort of bright yellow straw. And then he put the dye on. And dear God, it was marmalade colored, absolutely orange.

• 34:58Speaker 03

  And I said, I can't bear it. Then wash it out. He said, it won't wash out. And I think I broke up with him several months later, but I was so shocked. I didn't know what to do. I had to go home and my parents were amazed. But worst of all, I had to go to school. And again, I was up to the head teacher and how dare you, what do you look like? And I agreed with her, what did I look like? And I mean, I had dark eyebrows and so I had to try and pluck them, not not completely way, but in a reasonably neat arch because, you know, they, my eyebrows rather wanted to be like Frida Kahlo's. And if you have orange hair and these rather stern black

• 35:42Speaker 03

  eyebrows, that that just looked awful.

• 35:44Speaker 02

  How old were you when you began to create stories? Quite young, weren't you?

• 35:48Speaker 03

  Before I could read, in that I used to, I had one or two books when I was really little. And my parents thought that once you'd read a book aloud to a child, that was it. And of course, you want it again and again and again. And so I tried to, I got the books and tried to reconstruct the stories. But often I preferred to make up my own stories to the illustrations. And then I got to be making them up inside my head. And then I I always could make it up much more quickly than when I started to write

• 36:33Speaker 03

  very laboriously in pencil.

• 36:37Speaker 03

  The words wouldn't on page wouldn't keep up with the ones in my head. So I sort of acted it out in my head. And then it was my absolute delight when I really did become a latchkey child myself. In the summer holidays, my mom went out to work. She came home at lunchtime to feed me. But then I loved being by myself. And I would generally stay in bed and I would just, I would cut out sort of pictures of children in magazines or try to draw them myself from the book and make up stories about them and just imagine what they were doing or I played with my dolls, say.

• 37:20Speaker 03

  And and those games and that sort of imaginary life were more real to me than my actual friends.

• 37:27Speaker 02

  Is this when you did your first book, that you made Meet the Maggots? You put together a book?

• 37:32Speaker 03

  That was a school project. We had a heavenly teacher, Mr. Townsend. We all adored him. And he was, I think it was his mission to make every child feel special in whatever way. And he'd given us all a special notebook, probably the school notebook, but we weren't used to having a brand new one. And he said, I want you to do a project, whatever you like in it, you can do it about football, birds, ballet, whatever. And he was so sweet. I said to him, please, Mr. Townsend, may I write a novel? And instead of bursting out laughing, he said, yes, of course. And took it as, yes, that's perfectly normal.

• 38:16Speaker 03

  Well, it probably went to 12, 14 pages, maybe, but I loved doing it. And it was not a work of infant genius. I still have had it pretty tattered. My mom threw most of my stuff away when I left home at 17. Not in a sort of vindictive, how dare you leave home, but more, she wanted that she collected dolls then, my bedroom as a place to keep all her dolls. So she chucked out all the notebooks and everything, but anything in a school notebook, she thought, no, I'd better keep that. So this this survived. And it's about a family with problems.

• 39:00Speaker 03

  And there was a shy girl who wore glasses and read a lot. And there were identical twins and there was a bossy little girl with curly hair that really could have been an infant Tracy Beaker. I mean, the germs of all the stories that I've written were there. That was the way I wanted to write.

• 39:21Speaker 02

  Who gave you the nickname Jackie Daydreamer?

• 39:23Speaker 03

  That was Mr. Branson, the teacher in the last year at school, who really was terrifying. He would lose his temper at the slightest thing. You still could cane children in those days. Actually, he was quite sexist in that he only can the boys, not the girls. But it was startling having to watch that. He could be a charismatic teacher, though, and he he played a vocabulary game where...

• 39:54Speaker 03

  We would, we had to, I think there was a vocabulary book and we had quite hard words and he'd explained what they meant. And so we got through ten or even twenty words with all their meanings. And then he made up a story, he must have done this year after year, so he was all prepared, using all of the words that he told us. And I mean, that was a very clever way of teaching. But he also, if you were sitting at your desk, and we had dip in pens then, and he came up, and if you inadvertently made a blot, or he saw a spelling mistake, out would come the ruler and go whack on your knuckles like that.

• 40:34Speaker 03

  I mean, it was, it's a wonder we all didn't develop nervous twitches or something. I think, I think nowadays he would be diagnosed as completely mad, but we survived him.

• 40:47Speaker 02

  And your ambition as a girl, as a teenager now, what was it in your head?

• 40:52Speaker 03

  Still to be a writer.

• 40:53Speaker 02

  That's what you wanted.

• 40:54Speaker 03

  Very, very much. And I told my English teacher at the secondary school, because she'd been, I knew nothing about the actual classics and the sort of how English literature is, is taught and what's considered good and what's not. Actually, it was quite good for me because then I discovered these things, I made up my own mind about things. And yet I was painfully eager to learn about this and to know what books to take out the library, and she was very helpful. And then I confided her in, in her one day and said, actually, I'd like to be a writer myself and write books.

• 41:36Speaker 03

  And she looked at me, and I have no idea to this day what her motive was, but she said, well, maybe you could be a typist and work in a publisher's office. And I don't know if she meant it to be a snub, or if she was just being realistic, but I did, I actually wrote about it in my diary, and I did say, I am gonna buy a book one day, and hopefully it will get published.

• 42:07Speaker 02

  But that's why you went to secretarial college? Because that was a-

• 42:09Speaker 03

  Well, no, it, it wasn't. I wanted to do A levels because Chris, my friend, her older sister Jan was doing A levels at that time, and I used to go to tea with them. And I used to look at her A level English essays and the different things she was writing about. I longed to do it. I didn't really want to stay at school, and sadly I had no idea that you could go to a sixth form college. And then anyway, my parents wouldn't let me do A levels because my mother said, no, it's just a way of your head teacher getting extra money for the more girls that can stay on and do A levels. So she insisted I did a secretarial course.

• 42:53Speaker 03

  And she did have a, a way of persuading me because she said, look, you wanna be a writer? Okay, learn to type.

• 43:00Speaker 02

  You emerged from secretarial college, and how do you, how do the transition come from being someone who now can type, someone whose daydream is to be a writer, and making the leap?

• 43:11Speaker 03

  Because I saw an advert in the Evening Standard, looking for a secretarial job, and I saw a wanted teenage writers, sort of in a little box. And it was DC Thompson's who did the Beano and the Dundee-

• 43:29Speaker 02

  Company up in Dundee?

• 43:30Speaker 03

  Yes, up in Dundee.

• 43:32Speaker 02

  The famous girls magazine Jackie.

• 43:34Speaker 03

  Jackie, which, there was Mr Cuthbert and Mr Tate, who were in charge of women's and girls fiction, and they told me they were going to be naming, because it hadn't come out yet, they just wanted to collect material for it. They wanted to name it after me because I was their youngest journalist.

• 43:53Speaker 02

  So you are the reason?

• 43:54Speaker 03

  Well, the-

• 43:56Speaker 02

  This is fantastic.

• 43:57Speaker 03

  It's disputed because somebody else working on Jackie much later on told me, no, no, it was a communal decision. I don't know, but Mr Cuthbert, Mr Tate, I stick with them.

• 44:08Speaker 02

  I stick with them as well, because it was, I knew it not long after that period. And it was a very, almost like a secret society. And I'm not right, DC Thompson was very private, it was run very old school lines.

• 44:21Speaker 03

  Totally, you weren't, once you'd left, you could never go back and say hi to your colleagues. And the very first question they asked me, when they were interviewing me, when the two gentlemen came down from Dundee to the Waldorf Hotel, which is the first time I'd been in a posh hotel, and my mother was, you mustn't go up to their bedrooms.

• 44:43Speaker 02

  How right she was.

• 44:45Speaker 03

  She was.

• 44:46Speaker 02

  I'm liking her more and more. You're right, when the memoir, when I read the memoir, she'll come out as the heroine.

• 44:50Speaker 03

  She will, isn't she annoying? But the very first question they asked was, what religion are you? And I thought, oh, I'm not really any religion as such, thinking in my head, and why on earth does this matter? So I actually said, well, I suppose, I was christened in Church of England. They said, that's fine. And I did say, well, why did you ask? And they said, we can't employ Catholics. Goodness, well, I suppose it was a bit like Northern Ireland then, and-

• 45:23Speaker 02

  It was also a closed world, the world of DC Thompson, extraordinary.

• 45:27Speaker 03

  It was, it was very odd, and when Jackie came out, it was an astonishing hit, because it was the first full column magazine, and also it was the first one that had full page photographs of pop stars of their day. And yet they were incredibly moral, there was a very interesting, ultra cool photographer who often went to London and knew people like the Beatles, who were just becoming extraordinary, and various other Liverpool groups, London groups, and so we got all these fantastic photographs.

• 46:11Speaker 03

  And then somebody on the firm discovered that he was living with his girlfriend in a flat in sin. And would you believe, they sacked him.

• 46:23Speaker 02

  I would believe.

• 46:24Speaker 03

  And how, how stupid is that? Because it was the making of the magazine.

• 46:28Speaker 02

  I know, but that is the world that then existed. I mean, I'm assuming, you meet your husband, because you're only twenty-one, that you meet him as a virgin. That's the way it was.

• 46:37Speaker 03

  You can assume that.

• 46:38Speaker 02

  Oh, I'm wrong, am I?

• 46:39Speaker 03

  I'm pretty certain, yes.

• 46:40Speaker 02

  Oh, well, now, this is, this is a surprise to me, because we're talking now about nineteen sixty-six. So you discovered a bit of swinging-

• 46:50Speaker 03

  We got married at nineteen sixty-five, no.

• 46:52Speaker 02

  Oh, well, that explains it all.

• 46:53Speaker 03

  I, I was actually the one that thought it would be much more sensible, perhaps having the experience of my parents, if we lived together first. But he said he couldn't do that because his parents would be too shocked, and I'd think, oh dear goodness. But anyway.

• 47:11Speaker 02

  That was a period of transition. I mean, I'm not gonna let you knock him too much, because knowing that era, it really would have been considered-

• 47:19Speaker 03

  In Scotland, possibly, yes.

• 47:21Speaker 02

  Well, I think actually in England, up until the nineteen sixties. You know, the pill had only just come along.

• 47:27Speaker 03

  Yes, and actually it wasn't available if you weren't married then, but-

• 47:33Speaker 02

  Anyway, you boldly-

• 47:34Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 47:35Speaker 02

  Tell your story.

• 47:36Speaker 03

  He didn't want to do that, but then, I'd started off at a Church of Scotland Girls hostel, which obviously any liaison wasn't possible.

• 47:48Speaker 02

  This is when you're working in Dundee?

• 47:49Speaker 03

  In Dundee, when I was seventeen. And then, and then I went to live in digs with another girl from the hostel, and, and that was fine. But then she went off to live with her boyfriend's parents, possibly in single bedrooms, who knows. And I couldn't afford the rent by myself and didn't know what to do, because I didn't want to go back and live with my parents, who were on the verge of splitting up anyway. And, and then my ex came along, and he was quite good fun, and-

• 48:32Speaker 02

  What was his name?

• 48:33Speaker 03

  Miller.

• 48:34Speaker 02

  What was his first name?

• 48:37Speaker 03

  Well, Miller was the name, he was, everybody called him by, but his first name was actually William.

• 48:42Speaker 02

  But you called him Miller?

• 48:43Speaker 03

  Miller, yes. And, and we liked going dancing and everything, and so, and he seemed quite keen to marry me, so I thought, okay. And, and we were married a long, long time, because I was determined to make my marriage work, simply because my parents hadn't. And the wonderful thing about it was, I had my glorious daughter Emma, who I've always been very close to, and had a wonderful time, I was really quite young at twenty-one, to have a baby. And yet I liked playing with her dolls and dolls houses as much as she did.

• 49:27Speaker 03

  And then when she got a little bit older, it was quite wonderful, because we were on the same wavelength, and I hadn't ever found that before. I mean, I could take her, when she was quite little, to art galleries, and as long as, you know, we, we looked at different paintings and I would make something up about it. But Emma, by the time she was ten or so, it's the little academic in her coming out. She wanted to go and listen to the lectures that explained, you know, more about things than the different movements in art. And so I got her interested, but she was the one going with her that educated me.

• 50:09Speaker 02

  And did you spend so much time with her that Miller became a little bit of a sideshow?

• 50:15Speaker 03

  You could say that. You could say Miller had his own sideshows at the same time.

• 50:22Speaker 02

  Man, I'm so sorry. Week in, week out, I have to apologize for them on Rosebud. How quickly did you realize this isn't gonna work?

• 50:33Speaker 03

  Well-

• 50:36Speaker 03

  I vaguely thought about it, but I was so determined that I didn't really see what was happening. And he did eventually have an affair that he's decided, right? He kept quiet about it at first, but then I found out and then he left. And although it was a bit of two and throwing for a bit, but that was it. And it's quite worrying because I realised I'd never actually lived on my own before. Because, you know, I was with my parents and then I was at the hostel, the flat,

• 51:21Speaker 03

  different flats with Miller. And then suddenly there I was, in charge of my own life.

• 51:29Speaker 02

  How old were you then?

• 51:32Speaker 02

  It was just you and you and Emma.

• 51:33Speaker 03

  It was the year, no, Emma had left home and was at university then. It was the year Princess Diana died.

• 51:41Speaker 02

  Yes, ninety seven, nineteen ninety seven.

• 51:43Speaker 03

  Right, so it's a difficult time, but I was determined to get on with life. And so I already did a lot of day classes in literature because I enjoyed it. And I had a good circle of friends around me, but I wanted to do new things. So I did a sort of London architecture course. I went on London Walks course. I I longed to go dancing, but you'd have to be mad or incredibly courageous to go actual clubbing or whatever at that age.

• 52:24Speaker 03

  But line dancing had happened and I knew it was considered naff. But I thought it's the one place you can go, you dance. We don't dance on your own, but you dance with a whole crowd of people. And so I thought, I'll try that. I was a bit nervous going and they were such a wonderful crowd. There are, I think it was only one man, but lots of lovely, down-to-earth women, many of whom were then on their own. And they made me so welcome. Didn't have a clue that I was, you know, a writer or anything. I was just Jackie.

• 53:00Speaker 02

  When did Trish come along?

• 53:02Speaker 03

  She didn't come along. I had six years by myself, but then.

• 53:08Speaker 02

  Were you lonely?

• 53:09Speaker 03

  Sometimes I was lonely. Weekends could be lonely sometimes, although a lovely woman in the road I lived in often asked me for Sunday lunch, which was so thoughtful of her. Because most people are doing their own family things. But I was certainly very busy. I saw Emma sometimes too, which was great.

• 53:32Speaker 03

  So it was okay. I went to the quiz every week. Almost had too much to do, but you do feel weirdly on your own sometimes. And, you know, I went to places, I went on holiday to America on my own and thoroughly enjoyed it. But it sometimes is hard.

• 53:54Speaker 02

  Were you looking for love in your head?

• 53:55Speaker 03

  Not really, no, I was wary.

• 53:59Speaker 02

  And had you dismissed the idea of men totally from your?

• 54:02Speaker 03

  Not really either. I've never really, I don't have a type. You know, most people have a type, whether they're, you know, they want men or women. I didn't have that. What I've always interested in is somebody's personality. If if they like reading, if they're just fun to be with. But we were at this book event and and several authors were invited along. And then you sort of broke up into little clumps when you're having your meal and everything. And I I am hopeless with any kind of machinery.

• 54:44Speaker 03

  I badly wanted a coffee and you know, there's coffee machines. You press all these buttons and then suddenly all spurts out up your sleeve. So this was happening and this woman came over and said, oh goodness, let me help you. And she did. And then she said, is anyone meeting you? She she knew who I was. I mean, she'd been there for my little talk. And I said, no, I don't think so. She said, well, come over at our table and was just lovely. And then we got talking. I really sort of, it was so exciting to have somebody that seemed to be exactly on the same wavelength. And I really, really liked her.

• 55:23Speaker 03

  And then then she had to go off to her conference and I was waiting for a taxi to the railway station where I was going to go home. And and then she came past after the first session. And then she gave me a hug and said, oh, I really like meeting you. Now, I wasn't used to being hugged. I had no idea that Trish is such a hugger. You know, she sits next to somebody on the train and when she gets up to go, she gives them a hug. But anyway, I thought, oh, she's nice. And so I got in touch with the shop that I knew she worked at

• 56:03Speaker 03

  and took a risk on saying, I hear you do really good events. You didn't ask me for one. Would you like me to come? Which is the most forward thing I think I've ever done in my life. And she, being slightly slow on the uptake, wrote back very excitedly, yes, yes, thinking, oh, this is a well-known author and she'll draw in the crowds and everything. Yes, please. Not thinking that I might have had tiny ulterior motive here. But anyway, there were complications, there always are. And we didn't get together for quite a while, but then we did. And and I think we met twenty four years ago.

• 56:48Speaker 02

  Oh, my goodness.

• 56:49Speaker 03

  And I mean, we can still have rows, but, you know, I do think that she's the person I was always meant to meet. And so that if there are any women in their fifties out there suddenly left on their own, take heart, you never know what's going to happen next. And I think when you meet when you're older,

• 57:09Speaker 03

  you have, you know what will work and you know it won't. And you don't have, you don't want a ten out of ten person because that so rarely happens. But you can have a

• 57:25Speaker 03

  a nine and a half out of person.

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• 59:35Speaker 02

  What's interesting about talking to you is that it's not a matter of you're bisexual, you had a husband and you liked that for a while, you fancied him, didn't you, in the early days?

• 59:46Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 59:46Speaker 02

  You were the one who was keener to move in together than he was, and you love your daughter, and all that must have happened. And now you fancy a girl. It's not really about that with you, I suspect.

• 59:58Speaker 03

  No, it isn't. It's the person really interests me and intrigues me and, you know, on the same wavelength. There were very different sorts of women, too. She's much more an extrovert than I am, and...

• 1:00:14Speaker 02

  I've met her, she's huge fun.

• 1:00:16Speaker 03

  Oh, thank you, she is.

• 1:00:18Speaker 02

  I met her first in a cathedral, and she hugged me.

• 1:00:20Speaker 03

  Well, there we go.

• 1:00:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly. No, she's great fun.

• 1:00:24Speaker 03

  And so, you know, she makes life great fun. And she's introduced me to the joys of having animals. I mean, Molly, my cavapoo. Emma says she's like your second daughter, and then she jokes, and she's obviously the favourite. I mean, I adore Molly.

• 1:00:45Speaker 02

  Because you're so, because you are an author, and I love your books, and my children and now grandchildren love your books, you're a brilliant observer of other people, so can I ask you, when you got together with Trish, was it strange being with a girl, you having... Was it easy and natural? Because I, as a boy, let's say I was having a midlife crisis or suddenly was free, I wouldn't know where to begin with a male.

• 1:01:19Speaker 03

  I...

• 1:01:21Speaker 03

  I was a little shy at first, but easy and natural is exactly the way it was. And many people seem to think now that I must have been repressed or something. I don't think I was. If she'd come along, if I hadn't been married much, much earlier, I mean, who knows?

• 1:01:45Speaker 02

  Yes. People would assume that you were a closet lesbian.

• 1:01:48Speaker 03

  No, I wasn't.

• 1:01:49Speaker 02

  You actually always were, you got married because that was the period. But you're actually convincing me that it was real with Miller when it happened. Then there was a change in your life.

• 1:01:59Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:01:59Speaker 02

  You met somebody, actually this is working, and it's been easy.

• 1:02:03Speaker 03

  A friend of mine said, I think, "You're a Trishian", which Trish rather likes, but I do embrace, I embrace the whole gay thing, but I, I mean, I don't think it really matters whether you're gay or straight.

• 1:02:23Speaker 02

  You write a lot in your books, the ones I've read, about the kind of experience you had as a child. Do you write about gay characters, this sort of thing in your stories?

• 1:02:33Speaker 03

  Well, I have started to. I've, I've had this idea, and then waited for somebody to like it, and they didn't for a while, and then an editor actually suggested it, and of course I practically bit her hand off, to have some of the little girl characters that I'd written about in the 1980s, 1990s, and the beginning of the 200s, 2000s,

• 1:03:01Speaker 03

  realising that some of them would be in their late 30s or even early 40s. And I thought, why not write adult novels about one or two of my favourite characters? And then, hopefully, they would work if you'd never, ever read a Jacqueline Wilson book, but if you had read one or two of these books, and you really remembered it from your childhood, and then to find out about them many years later and what was happening. And so I've had two of the books now, adult books, which both were nicely successful. I'm working on a third,

• 1:03:42Speaker 03

  and it's a joy, so I can play around.

• 1:03:47Speaker 02

  I'm going to start on these later books now, because I know your children's children's work, which I know has touched the lives of children, and that must be for you hugely satisfying. Have you got a story or some, a moment where you feel one of your books has touched a child's life in a meaningful way that you know about?

• 1:04:05Speaker 03

  I've had lovely, lovely feedback, and I, even funny ones, too, in the story of Tracy Beaker, which that, well, not necessarily the book, the very, very popular and ongoing television series really made people know my name and then carry on and be popular. I had a letter, half and half of it, written by two little boys in care, and they say, "We both love Tracy Beaker", and they'd been watching the television series, I think, and they clearly thought Tracy a real person.

• 1:04:48Speaker 03

  And they said, "We want to marry her. Which one are you going to choose?" And then they'd both drawn portraits of themselves, and I just thought that was so funny and so lovely. And also, many children really thought, "Oh, it must be such fun being in a children's home", because the telly version, obviously you can't show some of the really sad and tragic things that happen. And even in the books, you can touch vaguely on things, but you can't really be too traumatic for children.

• 1:05:25Speaker 03

  And so it was lovely to feel that I'd raised the status of children who haven't got conventional family backgrounds.

• 1:05:36Speaker 02

  When you were made a dame, what year was that?

• 1:05:40Speaker 02

  The real question is, was your mother still alive?

• 1:05:42Speaker 03

  Oh, no, she wasn't. I had, I had, when I got the first, would it be a CB?

• 1:05:51Speaker 02

  A CB, yes.

• 1:05:53Speaker 03

  She was still alive then, but she was really, she was in a wheelchair then, and I knew it would be very difficult if I took her. She would think it complete nonsense, and she was never proud of me, unfortunately.

• 1:06:15Speaker 02

  Even when you became a commander of the Order of the British Empire, invited to Buckingham Palace to be honoured?

• 1:06:20Speaker 03

  No, she would, she would, but she would have, she got to that stage when she said out loud everything that she thought. And it would have been incredibly difficult. She knew I was going, she never really said anything about it, and so I didn't either. She, she just, she would just have said something like, "Well, why on earth are they giving that to you?" I mean, she never really, she never read a single one of my books, because somebody asked her why, and she said, "Well, why would I want to read a children's book?" I mean, she's a strange woman.

• 1:06:59Speaker 02

  Because it's because of her that you were able to write the books in part, it's because of that childhood of yours.

• 1:07:04Speaker 03

  Well, this is where I'm lucky, in that if I'd had a very loving, encouraging mother and father, I would think I would still want to be a writer, because I think that's in me, but a very different sort of writer, and writing much more cosy, reassuring books, but they wouldn't have had that slight edge to them. And then I was lucky with my timing, too, because if I was writing, say, in the 1950s, my sort of book would never have been published.

• 1:07:41Speaker 02

  Three more questions.

• 1:07:42Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 1:07:42Speaker 02

  I want you to give me, Jackie, a moment of joy, particularly for her earlier years, just a real incident, a moment of joy.

• 1:07:51Speaker 03

  I think the moment of joy was when

• 1:08:00Speaker 03

  I'd been quite anxious about Trish meeting Emma, Emma meeting Trish, and they liked each other immediately and got on together. And I was really joyful then, because it meant a great deal to me.

• 1:08:15Speaker 02

  A moment of sadness?

• 1:08:18Speaker 03

  A moment of sadness.

• 1:08:19Speaker 02

  I mean, when your mother went, when your father, well, did you know when your father died, did you go to the funeral, did you?

• 1:08:24Speaker 03

  Oh, yes, I went to the funeral, which was bizarre because of the two girlfriends there. But I have no idea whether this was true or not, but both of them took me to one side and said, "Oh, your father was so proud of you and often talked about you." Well, I didn't think that at all, and I have no idea to this day whether they, if this was really true, in which case that is very sad, or whether they were just being kind. My mother's funeral...

• 1:08:58Speaker 02

  Were you sad at your father's funeral?

• 1:09:00Speaker 03

  I was...

• 1:09:03Speaker 03

  I think total honesty makes me, say, relieved. My mother's funeral, um, sounds so, so, this is sad. She didn't really have any friends then, but I invited all the people that had cared for her because I only went there once a week, twice a week, and organised things and did things. And the nitty gritty of it all and the personal care was done by other lovely people. And right up until almost the end, she was taken out to different antique fairs and everything as well, just though she'd long since lost it, knowing what she was doing.

• 1:09:48Speaker 03

  And, but they all came to the funeral and then they all came back and we all sat round eating dainty sandwiches and they all told their stories about Biddy and what she was like. And for her eulogy at the funeral, I had asked the lovely woman vicar if she would mind if I was a tiny bit frivolous. And she said, don't worry, I've, I've had punch ups at funerals, I've had goodies, what. And so I imagined Biddy's idea of heaven, which would be the huge, huge, huge, huge antique market and that she would sort of hop from cloud to cloud, getting bargains

• 1:10:31Speaker 03

  and enjoying herself. Also, can I just say, Giles, she was very, very ill, dying in hospital for a whole fortnight. And I went every day and helping feed her a little, she suddenly became not this enormous personality, she was this shrunken little lady in discomfort. And it did make me feel tender towards her. And she did. Now, this is not a lie. This is absolutely true, though it doesn't sound like it. But Emma was there as my witness. She looked up at both of us in a moment of coherence and said, I love you. And I mean,

• 1:11:14Speaker 03

  you know, brilliant timing she had. And maybe it was true, I don't know. But it was, it was, she, she ended her life in a good way and we sent her off, hopefully in a good way. And Emma has her, her ashes. And after I'm died, and if I'm cremated, and then Trish will pass the ashes on to Emma when, when she's ill. And Emma keeps her grandma in a special cupboard. And I said, please, could I have a different special cupboard?

• 1:11:59Speaker 03

  And she has promised me that that would be true. My mum could be at one end of Emma's house and I could be another. Or she could be a theorist wherever.

• 1:12:08Speaker 02

  No, I think you want to be in separate cupboards.

• 1:12:10Speaker 03

  Separate cupboards.

• 1:12:11Speaker 02

  But I do think she did mean it at the end because she loved you in the way that she was. She was saying it from, from her perspective.

• 1:12:19Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:12:19Speaker 02

  You didn't give me, and make it concise, a moment of sadness.

• 1:12:23Speaker 03

  Sadness.

• 1:12:23Speaker 02

  We talked about those because those are obvious sad things, but a little moment, little moment of sadness. It might have to do with a pet, I suspect.

• 1:12:30Speaker 03

  I could say that the, the death of our beloved Jackson, who died, I think, four months ago, who was a rescue dog from Battersea, we had him from a puppy that could be on our hand. He was, as everybody said in their lovely, kind letters, he was a real character, which means he wasn't well behaved at all. But he was delightful and just so much part of our family. And we were distraught when he died. But he, he managed, right up until the end, to keep going, although his, his heart was failing and he had a horrible cough.

• 1:13:14Speaker 03

  And we hadn't yet had to make that awful appointment with the vet. But this particular morning, he just took himself under the kitchen table, which is where he'd often gone if he wasn't feeling well or whatever, curled up and died. And you think, yeah, well, I don't think I'll go as far as going under my kitchen table, but it would be nice to die at home, I think. And, you know, in, in my own time and in my own environment.

• 1:13:42Speaker 02

  And finally, Dame Jacqueline Wilson, what has life taught you?

• 1:13:48Speaker 03

  It's taught me that, well, I hope it soon will have taught me, that catastrophising and getting very anxious about things is a waste of time. Because the very few really frightening things that have happened to me, I never dreamt would happen. But all the many, many things that I thought, what if this happens? What if that happens? Haven't. So I think it, it's taught me that if you do something enough times, like speaking to, to big audiences or managing, even if you've got a very tiny, humiliatingly small

• 1:14:29Speaker 03

  audience, still to be able to carry it off. When this would have terrified me at one time, doing something again and again and getting used to it. And I'm not a little girl anymore, although I can be childish at times. I'm teaching me, you know, come on, stand on your own feet. You're certainly my age, you're grown up, get on with it.

• 1:14:52Speaker 02

  Well, I'm very pleased. One of my favourite children's authors has come to me and been so grown up. Jackie, thanks for your company.

• 1:14:59Speaker 03

  It's been a real pleasure, Giles.

• 1:15:07Speaker 02

  Well, that was Dame Jacqueline Wilson. My real thanks to her. I love the range of authors we've had on Rosebud, from Jacqueline Wilson through to Will Self. Do scroll back through our back catalogue because we really have spoken to some remarkable people over the last few years. And the current episodes are also being shown on YouTube. And in a curious way, it's slightly different, watching somebody speaking than just listening to them, just listening to their voices. So give YouTube a go sometime and stay with us. We're staying creative. The last few weeks, we had some remarkable creatives on Rosebud. The iconic designer, Zandra Rhodes, the lyricist, Don Black, the crime writer,

• 1:15:50Speaker 02

  Ian Rankin last week, Jacqueline Wilson, great children's writer today. Oh, a magazine editor on Tuesday, the great Dylan Jones, has he got a childhood story to share with us. And then next Friday, well, next Friday is going to be the 90th birthday of the oldest rock star in the world, who's still working. Yeah. Bill Wyman of the Rolling Stones is going to be with us next Friday on his 90th birthday, telling tales of his life and his life with the Stones. Some stories that I think you'll find you have never heard before. That's next Friday, Bill Wyman on his 90th birthday. But that's it for me for today. I really loved meeting Jacqueline Wilson. Maybe she'll be in Cheltenham. I've got to

• 1:16:35Speaker 02

  catch my train now. I really am doing this in the car park at Paddington Station. That's what I love about Rosebud. We're always on the go. Where are you listening to it? If you're, you may be in the car too. Who knows? Or you may be jogging or maybe falling asleep, wherever it is. Or if you've got a good car park story to tell. Oh, yes. Oh, yes. Let's do write to us. Because normally I do an email, but I can't find the emails on my phone here. Or rather, I can't do the recording and read the emails at the same time. So if you've got an entertaining story to tell, your first memory of something remarkable that happened in a car. I've got such a story to tell. The night I thought I was going to meet Jean Paul Sartre, he didn't turn up and we had to sleep outside a place called

• 1:17:18Speaker 02

  Dina in northern France, in the car. And the car was so small, I couldn't stretch out my legs. So I rolled down the window and my feet were sticking out of the car window all night. If you've got a car park or in your car story, share it with us. The address is quite simply, [email protected]. Next Tuesday as well, we've got an exciting announcement for you. We're going to be having a Christmas party and it's for members of the Rosebud family. If you want to join the Rosebud family, all you have to do is get in touch with us, care of patreon.com forward slash Rosebud, patreon.com forward slash Rosebud. You'll find out all about that there. For today, thank you for being with

• 1:18:02Speaker 02

  us. And remember the research done by the Queen's Reading Room, Queen Camilla's charity for encouraging the joy of reading. Even five minutes of fiction, read every day, can increase your sense of wellbeing, lower your stress, make you feel more relaxed and at ease with the world. So thank you for being part of Rosebud just now. But find five minutes today to read a good book. Cue the music.

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