According to Google Maps, West Claremont Street is precisely 13 minutes’ walk from where I’m sitting in my desirable Edinburgh flat. 13 minutes? It’s 60 years and almost a lifetime away. You can’t even find ‘West Claremont Street’ in Google Maps nowadays: it’s been renamed Saxe Coburg Street, and rather more upmarket than when I lived there half a century ago.

Not having had a ‘memorable’ life, I’ve never written any sort of memoir, but realising where I was exactly sixty years ago had me thinking about my own journey. I lived at 1, West Claremont Street, but it wasn’t my family home, because we didn’t have a home at all. We were homeless.

How we came to be homeless isn’t so remarkable: my dad’s business failed and he’d had to sell our house to pay off his debts. Homelessness then granted no right to a council house, so we landed up in a couple of spare rooms in my uncle’s Stockbridge flat. Those two rooms, plus a share of the bathroom, were all we had – in all those thirty months, I never once set foot inside the kitchen. (My brother was once allowed in to dissect a sheep’s eye that he’d brought home from school. It’s not something you can do on the living room carpet.)

I remained at the same school in Duddingston, a journey that involved changes of buses in Princes Street both ways. Stockbridge could be rough back then. I was randomly beaten up one Sunday afternoon in St Stephen Street by three older boys, which taught me to cross to the other pavement in future. My mum ordered me to ‘stay away from India Place’, which she described as a ‘slum’. These days, there’s a huge 1956 photograph hanging in the street’s Stockbridge Health Centre.

By March 1963, our Clermiston council house flat was completed and we moved in during the coldest winter of my lifetime. For years, with a solitary gas fire, two paraffin heaters and able only to afford net curtains, the house was freezing and damp with condensation. Councillors came to look at the mould growing on my bedroom wall, shook their heads, but nothing happened.

But you’d be completely wrong to feel sorry for me. If life for my parents was hard, for me, it was an adventure. I had a happy childhood, and liked the houses I stayed in. Blessed with an ability to handle exams, I did well enough at school to make it to university. That in turn led to the career and life that brought me to this place where I write now, just 13 minutes’ walk away according to Google Maps.

Others might judge differently, but I never felt once felt poor or deprived. I had the support and love of my family, who were prepared to make sacrifices so that I had the opportunity to be whatever I wanted. Wealth takes many forms, but those who enjoy such riches are the wealthiest of all.

Gordon Lawrie