My pre-school friend was Christine Brown, who was the nicest one of the Brown clan. Then right through school my best friend was Martha Connolly. We had a little gang called “The Fireflies”. There was Martha, Frances Sweeney, Maggie Phee and me. We would go all over getting up to mischief, like chapping doors and running away or knocking rhubarb out of random gardens (God knows why, I don’t even like the stuff)! One of our favourite haunts was going round the lochs; that’s where Martha and I learned to swim, On a Saturday afternoon we would get our pocket money and go to Coatbridge swimming baths. After, depending on how much money we had left, it was either a scotch pie and beans in the CO-OP (1 shilling), a poke of chips (9d) or a bag of broken biscuits (3d) from the Rainbow Café, and then we would walk home skint.