I’ve had a very adventurous take on life compared to many girls, a very male take on life. I was an extraordinarily confident child and always related better to the boys than the girls. My best friends have been men. My husband [the author Ken Follett] says it’s because I’m very direct and focused — very tactless. He once did a personality test he came across in a book: we were sitting round the table with the family, and the most male person in the room, according to the test, was me.

Even my father treated me like a boy. I was a terrible tomboy, extremely small and thin. It was hard to tell if I was a girl or a boy. I had straight hair in pigtails, which I cut off, and I started wearing a cap and shorts, like they did in the Famous Five books. At 15 I looked 10. Most of my life it was a nuisance, but now I’m getting old, I’m glad I look younger.

I was born in Kingston, Jamaica, on Christmas Day, 1942, came to England on a banana boat when I was four, and moved to Ethiopia at nine, when my father was asked to set up the first insurance company in partnership with the emperor of Ethiopia, Haile Selassie.

I got home from school, my mother handed me a choc ice and said: “Oh, we’re going to Ethiopia.” That night was the first time I heard my parents fight.

My mother didn’t want to go, but it was an adventure for my father and he was offered a lot of money to do it. He thought: “We can go to Ethiopia, have domestic servants and I can make some money.” He went first and we followed. It was a very slow trip. My mother did that three-week journey with three children and 22 pieces of luggage.

We flew from Croydon to Paris, and from Marseilles we travelled on a very old steamboat filled with missionaries going to the Far East, who were no help and just sat around praying all day.

I remember lots of red dust and donkeys, horse carts and very beautiful people wearing white garments.

I met Emperor Haile Selassie several times because he had a grandson called Paul and wanted him to practise his English. So I was taken to play with him. I was nine and he was about my age. I thought the emperor was very small and very elegant. He always wore a military sort of uniform. He had curly hair and was slightly bald and spoke very careful English and excellent French. I was struck by how tiny he was, compared to how heavy and big his wife was.

One year he invited us to a Christmas party. He had arranged for a magician to entertain the expatriate children, and as he was watching from the throne with his wife he noticed that I couldn’t see very well. He said: “Come here. I know what it’s like being small.” And he sat me on his knee to watch the magician. I thought that was nice. As I sat on his knee, he turned to a guard behind him.

I turned around with him, being a curious child, and I saw all these men with drawn swords — disembowelling swords — behind a curtain. They were all behind us. And I realised then, even as a child, that his life was in danger.

It’s only looking back that I notice my father’s drinking during that time.

I put it down to the strain and his decision to move our family to Ethiopia. But it got worse, until one night, when I was about 15, he was at a banquet given by the emperor for Yugoslavia’s President Tito. My father was so terribly drunk that he fell into a drinks trolley during the royal toast. Drinking was rife among colonials. Everyone drank, but this was seen as a grave insult and we were all asked to leave the country.

Life here in the Commons sometimes reminds me of that time: you could — if you wanted — sit here all day drinking. People here drink very hard, and those who can’t hold their drink are despised. It’s an old-boy thing: you can drink yourself under the roof, but not under the table. It’s a male thing about being able to hold your liquor. I think this place has a high incidence of alcoholism.

My father died an alcoholic 11 years later, when he was 56. I can get very angry with people who are very drunk, and that has everything to do with my father. For a child of an alcoholic, life is very chaotic, like finding that things are not in the right place, or losing things. It leaves you with an abiding sense of insecurity.

Even now I don’t like losing anything. It’s a sense that you have to be careful or things will fall apart. I’m sure I also have an addictive personality, but I’m fortunate that alcohol makes me sick, so I don’t bother drinking.

I have many happy memories of my father. He was an extremely interesting person and told amazing stories. He made life exciting. I made my maiden speech in the Commons
on his birthday, June 2, 1997. He’d probably be pleased that I’m in here.

I know I am. But we need more women in here, because things will never change in this country unless things change in Westminster