' I don't want to dust and polish. And I don't want to work on a farm. I want to write poetry, great poetry, as great as Shakespeare.'
Those are the words of 16-year-old Janie as she comes to the end of a seven-year stay at an Aberdeenshire orphanage. The story of Janie is the story of the writer Jessie Kesson whose remarkable autobiographical novel The White Bird Passes is republished tomorrow.
The first part of the programme is a dramatisation of her childhood as described in the novel; a childhood of poverty, street games, vice, gossip, the squalor of the slum tenement and the rigours of an orphanage, all of which she survived with extraordinary resilience.
In the second part JESSIE KESSON , as she is today, relates her unusual upbringing to her distinctive work as a writer and her task as a social worker in London. featuring with IRENE SUNTERS , JEAN FAULDS
DAWN MASSIE , BINKIE DARLING ROSE MCBAIN , JAMES KENNEDY
EILEEN MCCALLUM , MARJORIE DALZEIL IAN STEWART , SHEILA DONALD
JOANNA KEDDIE , MARY RIGGANS GEORDIE HAMILTON
JOAN FITZPATRICK , W. H. D. JOSS RON PATERSON , DAVID MOWATT BILL RIDDOCH and DEREK ANDERS
Film editor POLLY MOSELEY
Photography NORMAN SHEPHERD Designer ALEC GOURLAY Producer JAMES HUNTER Written and directed by MIKE RADFORD BBC Scotland