Quotes About Childhood

Mine was quite a working-class childhood with very little money, and my father was out of work a couple of times, which had quite a traumatic effect.

My childhood was as heavily gendered as any you would find in a working-class household in Lincolnshire.

It was great being brought up in a Glasgow working-class tenement. It wasn't miserable, and it wasn't poverty stricken. It felt very safe, full of delights.

I was an only child. Both my parents came from working-class families in Hackney, east London.

I grew up in a family that was working-class, which taught me to be careful with money.

It was a very normal working-class family. My dad used to play guitar in a band around pubs and clubs and stuff, so we've always been surrounded by music and we all love musicals. There was really no escape from it as a child. It just manifested itself in me and my brother in that we want to be actors.

My parents both came from working-class backgrounds, my father particularly. He came from a very poor family, 12 of them lived in a little three-bedroom terrace house in Fulham, it was very small with an outside loo and a tin bath on the scullery wall.

My father never got films to our dinner table. It was never the case with us as well that our father works in films, and we know so many actors. It was like him going to work like any other father. In fact, my school friends would ask me if I have met a certain actor, and I would tell them that I haven't, which they found strange.

Since I was a child, I've been playing children. When I was little, I was the kid that you'd hire to do the reading or workshop of your new material.

I was taught to whistle as a little girl by an undertaker. I used to sit in his workshop, watching him planing wood for the coffins, and he used to whistle all the time - and eventually I started whistling, too. I can whistle anything, particularly trumpet tunes from Classic FM.

I never had the exposure to techniques and so forth that children have today with art workshops, but I always had crayons and pencils and still have work going right back to when I was five or six years old.

I wouldn't just come home from school and watch TV everyday, they had me involved in lots of local theatre. I was a very dramatic, talkative child. And that was part of my mother's creative solution - to put me in workshops and classes and children's theatre programmes.

Come away, O human child: To the waters and the wild with a fairy, hand in hand, For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.

I can still remember watching Italy win the 1982 World Cup. I was just an eight-year-old kid in Naples, my hometown, watching the games with a bunch of people in the houses of relatives and friends. I can recall that when Italy scored, we would shout and hug, even though we did not all know each other.

The first time I watched a World Cup game was in 2002. That was the first time Senegal had ever qualified for the World Cup, and it was great moment that I will never forget in my life. I was ten years old at the time, and that experience of watching my country in a World Cup is what inspired me to become a footballer.

My first-ever game was at the 1966 World Cup. The old man was a bricklayer's labourer, on a job in the north-east of England. One weekend the rest of the family went down to see him and he took me off to Ayresome Park, Middlesbrough for the Soviet Union versus North Korea.

Scoring a goal in a World Cup was my dream as a little girl. I didn't really dream of being in 'Maxim' when I was 5.

You know I was a ball boy at the Italy v. Argentina semi-final in Naples in 1990 and playing in a World Cup final is something every child dreams about.

As a kid growing up in the back streets of Dublin I used to pretend I was playing in the World Cup with my mates out on the streets, and now I will be doing it for real.

Football became my life at five or six. The earliest memory I have is of playing in my first boots, a pair of black and white Alan Balls. It was 1970, four years after the World Cup, and I scored three goals at school.

I was lucky enough that my parents knew about World Cup skiing, so since I was really little, we were watching World Cup winning runs.

I have dreamed of Brazil all my life. As a child, I had videos of Brazil, of their World Cup wins, of Pele, and of all the big players.

People have been saying life will change for us now but me? No chance. I may be a World Cup winner but I will always be the lad who played cricket with his friends and cousins in the park on Stoney Lane in south Birmingham using an old milk crate for stumps.

I remember listening to my first World Cup in 1966. I was with my parents, helping them build our house and listening to it on the radio. We still didn't have a TV back then, but fortunately the first time I listened to a World Cup Jose Maria Munoz was commentating, and he's one of the best there is.