A Pocketful of Holes and Dreams

The wild childhood of a Glasgow tenement urchin

Born during the Second World War in Glasgow, Christine Fraser was her mother's eighth child. Growing up with her siblings in a tiny flat, learning to avoid her hardworking, hard-drinking one-eyed father, making a menace of herself in the streets along with the other urchins, Christine lived an impoverished life but never once cared. Until she was struck down by a terrible illness.

Suddenly, her wild days of childhood were over. A long spell in hospital completely changed her life. Now she found herself dependent on others for so many of her needs. And on top of that her mother and father died.

Yet Christine was always resourceful and never once looked down. She knew that always there, if you looked hard enough, was some blue up above the chimneys.

The Frog Princess is the story of Angie Beasley's transformation from ugly duckling to beauty queen.

With few jobs around, bland food and cold weather, the best that Angie could hope for was a job at the local Findus factory.

Her family didn't have it easy. Her baby brother was a cot death and the tragedy caused her mother to turn to the Jehovah's Witness faith. Their poverty, now combined with an austere belief system, meant no Christmas, no birthdays and little joy.

But aged 16, Angie decided that she was destined for bigger things. After seeing a TV advertisement she entered a beauty pageant. And won. She went on to take 25 titles, including Miss Leeds, and her home town title Miss Cleethorpes, giving her the opportunity to model while travelling the world.

Just as Angie felt that life couldn't get any better, she got engaged to a man who trapped her in a terrifying cycle of domestic violence. When she eventually escaped him, she had lost all of her money and self-esteem. She was on the bottom rung of the ladder yet again. But Angie picked herself up, turned her talents to event management and grafted her way to becoming Director of Miss England.

Evoking the magical, lost world of the 1970s beauty pageant, The Frog Princess is Angie Beasley's real life fairytale.

The eldest of six children, Angie Beasley (nee Chapman) was born in 1963 in Grimsby. With few prospects in life beyond the local fish factories, she decided to enter Miss Yorkshire Television at the age of 16. Within eight years, Angie had gone on to win twenty-five beauty titles, leading to work in the entertainment industry. She is now the Director of Miss England Limited, and lives in Leicester with her son.

'Poverty is a very exacting teacher and I had been taught well'

The post-war urban jungle of the Glasgow tenements was the setting for Molly Weir's childhood. From sharing a pull-out bed in her mother's tiny kitchen to running in terror from the fever van, it was an upbringing that was cemented in hardship. Hunger, cold and sickness was an everyday reality and complaining was not an option.

Despite the crippling poverty, there was a vivacity to the tenements that kept spirits high. Whether Molly was brushing the hair of her wizened neighbour Mrs MacKay, running to Jimmy's chip shop for a ha'penny of crimps or dancing at the annual fair, there wasn't a moment to spare for self-pity. Molly never let it get her down as she and the other urchins knew how to make do with nothing.

And at the centre of her world was her fearsome but loving Grannie, whose tough, independent spirit taught Molly to rise above her pitiful surroundings and achieve her dreams.