Duffy remembers an idyllic period when she was a teenager working as a Saturday girl, sweeping up in a hairdressing salon, at the same time as Penguin was publishing a series of books by modern poets at half a crown a time. “I’d be in my leather mini-skirt and boots up to here. I’d finish work, get paid, and would buy 10 cigarettes, a bottle of Hirondelle rosé and a new poetry book, and that would be the rest of my Saturday.”
From a 2007 profile of Britain’s new poet laureate, Carol Ann Duffy.