AMY RAPHAEL:You were born in Radcliffe, Lancashire, in 1956to a strict Catholic family. What do you remember about yourchildhood?
DANNY BOYLE: I was very aware of my Catholic, Anglo-Irish roots. My mum came over from Ireland in the 1950s when there was a huge influx of post-war labour to the north-west of England. She was a hairdresser. We had one of those stand-up driers in the house; she’d sit underneath it to curl her hair. She met my dad at a dance in Bury in 1952 and they married in 1954. He was brought up beside a tiny farm where his dad worked, all this in Radcliffe, six miles north-west of Manchester. He left school at fourteen to be a labourer but he educated himself, which he’s very proud of.
When he had kids, he was determined to pass on that gene. In fact, both my mum and dad were desperate for me, my twin sister Maria and my younger sister Bernadette to get into good schools. They got us through the eleven-plus and into single-sex grammar schools that were also really good Catholic schools. They were quite tough schools in certain senses, but they were good schools. Having a decent education changed our lives.
When I was eleven, we moved house. Until that point we had lived in a tiny house with two bedrooms, and I had shared a room with my sisters. But once I was eleven, we were no longer allowed to share. So we were allocated a three-bedroom house on a decent council estate in another part of Radcliffe, and I had my own bedroom for the