Beatles and Chiefs

Featured on BBC Home Truths, this is the delightful memoir of a Beatle-mad, ex-pat Scot growing up in the north-east of England in the 1960s. Janet was the only girl in a family of boys brought up in the 'Land of Boy' - a boarding school in Durham, where her father Norman was a housemaster. Every year, this family of MacLeods made the annual pilgrimage back to the ancestral home on the Isle of Skye - seven people crammed inside a Ford Zephyr for a two day journey; 'The Romans have a lot to answer for. Their arrow-straight road rose and dipped like the sea and our stomachs heaved on each crest of the wave'. Beatlemanis, the Girls from U.N.C.L.E, suffragist great-aunts, real chiefs, Donovan-spotting, a pastry scandal and a dash of blood-thirsty clan history - Janet's tales are amusing and touching, and vividly recreate the lost world of '60s Durham and the Scottish Highlands before mass tourism.