“I was born in Stromness, a small town in the Orkney Islands, on the 4th of
October 1914, two months after the beginning of the First World War, on 4th August,
one of a family of six – a girl and five boys. My father, John Brown, was a postman and
tailor and my mother, Mary Jane Mackay, was born at Strathy Point in Sutherlandshire.
She was a Gaelic speaker who, with her sister Alice, came to work as a waitress in the
Stromness Hotel at the age of sixteen. The reason why she and her sister had ventured
across the treacherous Pentland Firth was that her cousin, John Mackay, the owner of the
Stromness Hotel, had invited them across to work for him. At the age of nineteen she
had met and married my father, who, although he looked quite a young man was,
unknown to her, thirty-five years old. She never discovered his age until many years
later. My mother was a beautiful woman, tall with a wealth of dark brown curly hair,
always smiling and possessed of a hearty laugh. My father on the other hand was a small
man of five feet six inches or so with a quick wit, full of humour and a wonderful story
teller. So our childhood, although we were poor and could be described as lower middle
class, was a happy one.”