India Millar

I write as both myself, and under the pen name of India Millar. India isn't me, so I can be a little spicier when I am her!
In any event, both of us were children  of the 50's; born and bred  in England's industrial Yorkshire. Years later, I realised I lived in a slum for the first 16 years of my life; traditional "back to back, 2 up 2 down" terraces (don't know what one of those is? If you're aged under 60, I don't imagine you will. A "back to back" was, literally, 2 terraces of houses built together, so the back wall of one was also the back wall of another. And 2 up 2 down? Literally 1 room downstairs, that doubled as living room and dining room, together with a kitchen, and 2 bedrooms upstairs.). No bathroom. No indoor toilet (that was down the street away, and take your own toilet paper). No hot water. A Saturday bath was in a portable tin bath on the kitchen floor, filled from the copper. A real treat was a visit to the local swimming baths, which also had private cubicles with a real bath in them. With hot water!

Why didn't I know I lived in a slum? Because we all did, of course, We were all poor, so it didn't matter. When I was 16, we moved to a council house. With a bathroom. Hot water! And indoor toilet! Paradise! And how did all this influence how I write? Simple. My father died when I was 8. My mother got a widow's pension of 10 shillings (fifty new pence) a week, to support both of us. She also had 3 jobs; literally, day, evening and week-ends. So I spent much of my time out of school in the safety of our local library, and I learned to love books. The sight of them. The smell of them. And - of course - the words they contained. They were my first love, and will be my last. I read and read and read. Anything. And the determination grew that one day I would also be a demi-god who would put words on the page, and give enjoyment to somebody else who, like me, had nothing else in their lives but words. And now I have. Am I not lucky?