JANEY: When I tell people about my life, I’m sure they think I’m making it up. I grew up in Glasgow in the 1960s, and I’m not talking about the posh bit! We had no money — we didn’t even have electricity most of the time. My parents separated, I was knocked down by a car, my father was drinking, my mother was murdered, I was sexually abused by my uncle… And after all that I married a gangster’s son.

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.

This made me quite precocious as a child. I was used to having grown-up chats with my mum and dad, and I was used to being around grown-ups in the pub, so I was never that interested in playing with Barbie dolls or anything like that. Actually, my mum would never let me have Barbie dolls, because she said it created a bad impression of women. I always had Playmobils — they were completely asexual.

There were some things I didn’t want to know about my mum’s life. I now realise my grandad wasn’t very nice to her — I know he was a nasty piece of work — but he was my protector and hero, so I didn’t want to hear it. After he passed away, they told me a few things. I’m glad they did, because it helped me understand my dad a bit more.

I don’t think my grandad knew how to love his own children, and he never showed any affection towards my dad. All he did was set Dad and his brothers against each other. When I heard that, it made me feel very sorry for my dad, but it also made me love him even more.

I’m proud of him for not turning out like that. I love him to bits. If I have man troubles, or any kind of trouble, he’s the first person I go to. He’s got a logical mind and he’ll sit down with me and he’ll say: “Maybe this is the reason things aren’t working out...” My mum is the opposite. I was once having problems with a bloke at work and she said: “Can’t we kill him? Why don’t we just go round there and cut his fingers off?

”Mum’s had to fight for so many things, she sometimes doesn’t know when it’s time to stop. There are times when we’ll be having a conversation and I can just tell that her guard has gone up. As soon as she senses anything bad coming her way, she automatically jumps up. She’s ready for a fight. I’m not sure if that’s because of what she went through or if it’s just because she’s from the East End of Glasgow, but I do think it’s a really useful thing to have in your character. I’ve definitely got it. If something happens, then I know I can defend myself physically, verbally and mentally. It has to do with old-fashioned morals: stick up for your fellow man, share your money with those who don’t have any.

There was one time, when I was 17, and I’d been out in Glasgow with my friends. We were waiting for a taxi and there was this wee, homeless man playing a piccolo. All of a sudden this drunken bloke starts beating him up, in front of the taxi queue. There was loads of big, burly blokes there, but nobody said a thing. It was disgusting. That’s when my balls come out — I started shouting at this drunken bloke, and all the big men in the taxi queue started saying something too. But it took me — a lassie out with her pals for the night in high heels — to say something in the first place. God, I’m so like my mother!