I had to deal with a lot of f***ing shit when I was a kid, but that was how it was, and the weird thing is, I look back and think I had a great time. Okay, there was child abuse and violence and yada-yada-yada that went off in the 1960s, but there was also a freedom and a sense of community that kids today will never understand: to be able to run around, to play up by the railway, to just hang out and have fun. I used to feel sorry for my daughter when she was growing up. I used to think: “God, you will never know what it was like back then.” This probably sounds ridiculous now, but when Ashley was a child she had to have a couple of bodyguards with her. Well, not really bodyguards, but we had to make sure somebody was watching her all the time, in case some idiot wanted to have a go at George Storrie’s granddaughter.

Ashley wasn’t what you’d call an easy pregnancy. I suffered from hyperemesis gravidarum and ended up in a coma. It’s like a severe morning sickness, where you can’t keep anything down. I had to keep going back to hospital to be fed by a drip and the doctors advised me to terminate the pregnancy because the baby was literally killing me. I hated that baby. Hated everything about it. I know some women will read this and say I was wrong to think like that, but you had to be there. This baby was evil… trying to kill me. I used to call it “the devil baby”. It was making me feel such a failure. As a woman, I couldn’t even do my job properly — I couldn’t carry my own child. I saw women around who smoked, drank, took heroin — and they were dead healthy. It wasn’t fair.

My husband, Sean, was still trying to run the pub we were looking after and he was getting pissed off that I wasn’t around to help. I remember him telling me that his mother had seven kids and she still managed to make breakfast in the morning. How come I was always in hospital or throwing up in the toilet? Cheers, y’bastard! That’s really going to make me feel better.

So why didn’t I terminate the baby like the doctors told me? I don’t know. There was something inside me that said: “This baby is going to be okay.” I knew if I did lose this baby, there wasn’t going to be another one. There was no way that I’d have been able to go through the illness a second time.

Because of everything that happened in my life, I was conscious that, as a parent, it’s easy to get things wrong. So once Ashley was born — after two f***ing days of labour! — I started mentally making a list of how I was going to sort everything out for her. You know, “She’s not going to do this, I won’t let her do this, she will do this, I’ll make sure she does this...” But it doesn’t work like that. All you can do is make sure your child is safe and happy.

For me, it was all about having fun. About playing with my baby. Getting down to her level and doing lots of stuff together. Me and Sean were still running the pub, but whatever free time I had I spent with Ashley. One-on-one time where we’d go to the beach or go to a museum. We even used to make our own little telly programmes with this old video camera we had. We used to do This Morning with Ashley and Janey.

With Ashley in the house, I also saw a change in Sean. He’d always been this cold-hearted, weird f***ing man, but having a child helped him find his place in life. He was always the first to admit that he was never going to be the perfect husband — we knew we never should have got married in the first place; we were both totally psychologically f***ed up — but at least he had a chance to be the perfect father. And he was.

There were loads of times when we were on the verge of splitting up, but how can you leave a child without its mammy or daddy? How can you say you love your child if you’re willing to see it suffer? I left Sean once and it broke Ashley’s heart. She missed him so much I went straight back. When I look at parents today and see the ease with which they walk away from their families, I think: “Don’t stand there and talk to me about love. You don’t know the meaning of the word.”

ASHLEY: Because my mum’s had such a tough life, I am very protective of her. And she’s smaller than me, which makes me want to stand up for her if there’s any trouble. If I’m being honest, my mum’s a Glasgow bird — she doesn’t need anybody to protect her. But I can at least try to make sure she doesn’t get into any trouble in the first place.

Me and my mum go out to clubs quite a lot together. Neither of us are big drinkers, but we have a real laugh, and she does have a tendency to get involved if she sees a fight. She hates it if there’s a group of blokes picking on some homeless guy or something like that. My mum’s problem is that her sense of right and wrong — her morals — is more important to her than her own safety.

As a mother, she’s very, very straightforward. She’s never bullshitted me and never lied to me. She always wanted me to know what the world was really like — that it isn’t always nice and good and everybody’s happy. I remember her telling me when I was six or seven about being abused by her uncle. She didn’t give me all the graphic details. She was just letting me know there are bad people out there. It was the same with drugs. She’d show me junkies who came into the pub and she’d tell me what being on drugs was really like.

I didn’t feel that she was burdening me with these problems, I just felt that she was making me aware of them.