The following article by Fionnuala McHugh appeared in the Daily Telegraph magazine in 1991
THE HOUSE WHERE I GREW UP : BARBARA DICKSON
The neighbours had turned out to watch the return of Barbara Dickson. They stood in the doorways of Ochil Terrace in Dunfermline, arms folded, reassessing the singer who had lived on this council estate for 13 years.
"The most important thing about Scottish people is that they don't like show-offs," Dickson had remarked on the journey up. "People say 'Aye, she's got a big heed,' and what they mean is she's flamboyant. For me to be in showbusiness was anathema to someone like my father."
Her father was a policeman who left the force when he got rheumatic fever and became a dockyard worker at Rosyth. Her mother is from Liverpool. "Having an English mother meant that I had one foot entrenched on either side of the border. There were these vibrant, urban roots in Liverpool and then there was my father, who was much quieter and law-abiding."
The family - she has a brother, Alastair, who is three years younger - moved to Ochil Terrace on a bitterly cold January day in 1956, when Barbara was seven. They had been living in a small pre-fab in Rosyth, long since demolished. "My mother says the plaster wasn't dry when we moved in here. I remember we had to borrow coal when we arrived. It was the middle of the winter, the garden didn't exist, and for some reason or other my mother was unhappy about coming here. But I thought it was so exciting to have a house with two floors."
She was, she says, the sort of bespectacled little girl who looks terribly solemn. "I think it's something to do with being Scottish. You look serious but you're not really." Perhaps it was also something to do with Ochil Terrace: she gives the impression that behaviour here was under constant scrutiny. The garden, for instance, soon became filled with roses and wallflowers and vegetables, though her father was not a keen gardener. "But everyone had to do that; the neighbours talked if you didn't."
And she used to play the piano at Sunday school in the church behind the terrace, though neither of her parents was a churchgoer.
That she was musical quickly became apparent. She had started learning the piano at four and a half, but hated the exams and gave it up for the guitar at thirteen. The ability to sing was a fact of her existence. "The only thing I've ever known about myself was that I could always sing better than everybody. But I was a late developer. I was quite shy and my parents didn't push me."
Her parents' attitudes to this talent were markedly different. Though she remembers sitting on the edge of the bath upstairs in Ochil Terrace and fantasising about being a film star, "my father was a very serious individual and if there's somebody like that in the house you don't dream a lot."
Her mother was more positive. "She told us the world was our oyster. She made sure that we were never afraid of anything. It's made me rather naive, I think - the big world was a shock. But she was never like anybody else's mother up here. She told me everything about childbirth when I was three. We used to make jokes about her behaving like a Jewish mother - getting into taxis with flasks of chicken soup, that sort of thing. Then about 12 years ago, we found out that she is Jewish. She had been adopted and hadn't known, and it all fell into place. She's a wonderful grandmother to my three boys."
Mr Dickson wanted Barbara to become a teacher, but she was not a natural scholar. At 16, she went to work as a clerk, statistically coding causes of death for the Registrar General. In the evenings, as light entertainment, she went to folk clubs. "This was in the mid-Sixties and folk music was very popular. People would ask if anyone wanted to sing, and my friends said I would. That sounds coy, but I didn't want to show off. It's always been a problem - I mean, it's difficult not to show off when you're performing in front of 3,000 people." At 21 she was offered a six-week engagement in Denmark and left her job. "My father really did regret my leaving the Civil Service because I wasn't going to get my pension."
Five years later she reached the West End in Willy Russell's musical, "John Paul George Ringo...& Bert". In 1983, Russell's "Blood Brothers" earned her the SWET award for Best Actress In A Musical. Now she is returning to her folk roots. "People think folk music is prissy, but in the Sixties it was radical, it wasn't Establishment.
"The key to happiness is coming to terms with your background. If it's reasonably humble there's always a part of you that thinks you shouldn't be successful. There's a very respectable part of me that wants to be solid, that doesn't want to be a gypsy."
Sitting on the front steps looking out across the Firth of Forth ("It's amazing that I don't remember that spectacular view"), she says that coming back has been a genuinely good experience. "This house has really welcomed me." And then she goes over to say hello to the neighbours to assure them that she hasn't become a show-off.
