Despite the deprivation, this was a family who knew how to count their blessings. Living in two small rooms (what luxury), the family of four worked hard, each member contributing their mite and learning how to hold household from a young age. Molly Weir, well known Scottish actress and comedian, writes this charming, authentic autobiography of her life as a child growing up in the poor tenements of Glascow during WW1 and the following economic depression (1910-1925) in a family where her widowed mother was the sole breadwinner for her household of three children, and her Grandmother was the main caregiver. 'Poverty is a very exacting teacher and I had been taught well.' I would like very much to find the rest of the trilogy. Her estate was left to the poor and widowed in the area where she grew up. The book was written in 1970, reprinted after Ms Weir's death in 2004. I love the description of night in the wash-house. I found her narrative voice entertaining and her descriptions of life as she lived it engaging. ETA: having found the second volume of this trilogy, I discover Molly was 12 at the end of this first book. The text is a bit scrappy in parts, and there are no references to outside events to help place it in time, but that's normal when telling a child's story I don't know too many children (especially in that time) who think much about political/social events unless for some reason they affect them directly. It's just, 'Yes we were poor, dirt-poor in fact, and we knew it, but we didn't let it own us.' There's no 'Young people today don't know how good they have it!' or 'Poor me, my ambition saved me'.

She just talks to the reader, telling her story without self-pity or sentimentality. Picked it up on a sleepless night and devoured it entire in a few hours. I read Molly Weir's story of living and working through WW2 and getting her start on the BBC Radio, in a book called What Did You Do in the War, Mummy?: Women in World War II, so I was interested in her biography.

Shoes were for sunday by molly weir