Douglas Stewart

It drops all sort of social pretense.

And often my mother would see me not as her child, but often as her friend.

And so she would tell me things that I think mothers should never tell children.

But that energy comes in my novels now.

You know, at the time, I hated it as a kid.

But now as an adult man, I think how lucky I was in a way to know my mother as a woman, to know her as an individual and not just the role of my mother, but to hear

the romantic failures and the other concerns that were in her life.

And as a writer now, I love to sort of be in that inner world in my novels and sort of just look at that domestic scene.

Yeah, you can't talk about it anywhere.

It was often very vulgar and very frank.

And like I said, at the time as a kid, I would be horrified and I would be scandalized.

And now as an adult, I feel, wow, how lucky you were to be in that room.

I mean, I think my whole childhood was about secrets on all sorts of levels.

But, you know, my mother's drinking was a difficult thing to manage.

I was sort of thrust into a caregiving role about the age of four when I realised that my mother wouldn't always be able to take care of me and I had to look after her.

And when you would find sort of...

I learned sometimes that the best thing to do was to dispose of it or to get rid of it.

But sometimes if you did that, it just caused more trouble.

And so you had to almost just let her get on with it.

And so it very much depended on where I could judge where she was emotionally and what would come from those actions.