I've swallowed Pill whole

Odette Debono's White Sheep is a candid and compelling memoir of a turbulent mixed-heritage docklands childhood. Here, she reflects on how place shaped her writing

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Pill, in Newport

OR more than six years I have been writing my memoir, White Sheep, but the memories have always been there, ferociously strong, just under the first layer of skin, clawing and crawling their way to the surface regardless of the fight I put up to keep them contained.

That tiny, redbrick house in Pill (Pillgwenlly, Newport) where Mum, me and my two younger sisters lived from the late Sixties was the most vivid. And that is where my story began.

Images started to come to me like movie scenes, voices echoed from the past. I was not looking back with hindsight; I was nine again and the smoke from Grandma's Woodbines was affecting my lungs.

I wanted to describe every nook and cranny, every dead mouse, every emotion... everything - because the thought that all those moments would be lost forever was suddenly, and surprisingly, unacceptable to me.

I have felt, whilst writing this book, that I was a time traveller, that when I sat at my laptop a part of me left to go back and live those moments all over again. And because I was there, so is the reader - a comforting thought.