SUPERMARKET SWEEP
Seeing my book being sold in Tesco and Asda superstores is like winning the Booker Prize for me. Before I ‘became an author’ I never bought a hardback book and paperbacks are still my first love. Growing up I never went into a bookshop either – mainly because we didn’t have one in my hometown. But I loved reading and haunted the library in the precinct, and my mum sent off for a copy of Paddington for my birthday present. When I was a kid, me and my family cleaned the floors of Tesco and Fine Fare supermarkets in Coalville, Leicestershire. That was my job to earn pocket money. My dad also cleaned their windows for many years. You can tell a lot about people by the way they treat cleaners. Along with the nice people who apologised for wheeling their trolley over the bit you’d just mopped and those who joked, ‘You’ve missed a bit’, there were always a few who looked at you as if you were something they...