I was born in the front bedroom of a two-up, two-down semi in Bilston, Wolverhampton, a town that was like an LS Lowry painting, all men in mufflers, and smoke and noise and industry.

Soon after my birth, my father, Jim, developed muscular dystrophy. I don’t remember him not being in a wheelchair; he was taken very ill very quickly. He was in bed in the downstairs front room for a number of years, then he went to a hospital in Birmingham where he died when he was 49. I was 10.

My mother, Chrissie, came from Scotland. During the war, she was sent to work in a factory in Stoke-on-Trent where she met my father, a tool-maker, in some canteen or backstreet full of smoking chimneys and cobbles. After they married, they lived with my father’s mother, who was a bit scary and had a council house in Bilston. My mother, the Scottish lass, still had the heather and wind in her hair, and it was all a bit grim for her, so my parents bought the house I was born in, No 6 Nelson Avenue. They paid £200, which is about what I get now from the cash machine when I go to the shops, but I remember feeling that we were quite well-to-do because we owned our house. My father earned good money when he was working.

Anyway, they tried for eight years to have a baby. Presumably, my mother conceived me in the same front bedroom where I was born in 1952. I’ve been back there, but I didn’t like to knock on the door. I’m rather intimidated by the street now, I feel too posh for it. It’s full of ebullient life and people confident in who they are, and I feel like a shadowy interloper, which shows you something about social mobility.

While my father was in hospital, my mother visited him every day. She had to get a train and two buses – it must have been so hard for her. She was good at scrimping and saving, so when he started to get ill she saved everything to pay off the house. She cleaned people’s houses, we had food, it was fine, but at the end of the week she had a threepenny bit in her purse and that was it. Luckily, there were fantastic people in the engineering union. My father was a shop steward and these wonderful blokes would have a whip-round and give her £25 or so. My dad was incredibly popular. He wasn’t like me; he was a big personality and he was missed.

I remember there was a radio, and when Jimmy Shand and his Scottish accordion music came on, I had to dance round the room with my mother to this jiggy sort of thing. The Bluebell Polka was her favourite. I’d no idea what it was all about, only that there was this mythical place called Scotland where everything was terribly wonderful, everybody was nice and the music was great. It wasn’t until we went there that I realised what it was really like.

There was a bathroom upstairs, and my mother used to boil water in the kitchen and take it up in buckets. When I was about seven, I jumped over the buckets, tripped, and boiling water went over my feet. I had to go to hospital for six weeks and my mother had to visit my father and then me.

My mother used to take my dad out in the wheelchair with a rug over him and his flat cap on. I would walk next to the wheelchair in my little Sunday clothes, and kids in the street would look because they’d never seen anything so strange: a grown-up in a push-chair. It must have been hard for him, like some terrible curse, but I never heard him complain.

When he died, my mother sold our home for about £2,000, and bought a much better house in the far north of Scotland for £950. I thought life was going to be one long holiday, but the reality was I couldn’t understand a word anybody said and I was English, which was a stigma, so I struggled to fit in. My life and my friends were taken away from me and the person I had been was screwed up and thrown in the bin.

Now, neither place feels like home. I don’t have roots. What I was, I lost when I was 10. The great manufacturing past of Britain started in Bilston and the West Midlands, and I feel a huge pride that I came from there, but I go back and see the factories and canals and football and it feels as if it should be me, but it’s not quite.

I always felt I disappointed my mother. She died in January and had always wanted a little Scotsman – for me to get married in a kilt and the kind of couthie Scottish thing that sets your teeth on edge. I suppose I want to be what my dad dreamt I would be: somebody who’s got a shed and can mend his motorbike. + James Fleet is appearing in BBC1’s adaptation of Little Dorrit, on now

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