Singer Barbara Dickson, who releases a new album next month and takes up a United Kingdom tour in the late spring, talks about Dunfermline, the home town she has recently revisited.
Musicians, says Barbara Dickson, never claim a home. "They're wanderers. They call wherever they are home. But Dunfermline was my home until I was seventeen and left for Edinburgh. Like all moments in my life, the memory is blotted out. It's hazy. If it were a vivid recollection I don't think I would ever have the courage to try anything new again."
Apart from flying visits home, she never really lived there after that. By the time she was 25 even her parents had moved from the pleasant, comfortable home in Ochil Terrace to live in Southport, and with their departure all Barbara's reasons to go back were removed. But she has been back, quite recently in fact, and loved every short moment of it. She left unknown and here she was, going back, a celebrity, without a doubt Dunfermline's own local hero, to open a new housing estate on the edge of the town where she grew up.
"It was enough of a visit to see that everything seemed much smaller. But that was an illusion. When I was small my father never had a car so we went everywhere by bus. It just took much longer to get from one side of town to the other, and therefore, to a child's eye, everything seemed so much bigger. It's still a beautiful town. The old walled part remains preserved. There are, inevitably, a few new buildings but for all that it's still recognisable as my childhood home."
An ordinary enough life, outwardly an ordinary enough girl, but while she appeared to have average ambitions at Wood Mill High School - indeed recognisable ones ("Girls got married and then had children and were on the shelf if this hadn't been achieved by the time they were twenty") - inside she was secretly, romantically ambitious but continued to hug her dreams to herself.
"To reveal such ambitions would have been to expose myself to ridicule. Nothing like fame or success happened to people like me. I was very straightforward. That was my family for you. I have a dual background. Although my father is Scottish and I was brought up there, I also have a strong affinity with Liverpool because that's where my mother's family lived. I think I identified more with my mother's side of the family, because Scottish families are close but not demonstrably so. I preferred the open, more visible relationship that members of my mother's family had with each other."
In Ochil Terrace Barbara lived with her younger brother, a skilled carpenter who now lives in Canada and who is someone she misses a lot; her father, a quiet, thoughtful man and a former dockyard worker; and her mother, a seemingly realistic, outgoing woman who cared for them all.
"My parents accepted my decision to leave home when I was seventeen with perfect calm. They were not the kind who thought children stayed at home forever or that it was a betrayal to leave. They are very intelligent people. The only thing that has ever surprised me about my home life is that I never shared my mother's love of opera, which was played loudly all over the house."
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