Miss McKirdy had three daughters - one of them Barbara Kinghorn - and she taught them Scottish dancing at a convent school in South Africa. She made sure her daughters danced well and they won prizes at the Highland Games in Edinburgh. Barbara grew up dealing not only with her mother's obsession with dancing, but her father's alcoholism, one sister's slow descent into madness and another's death from cancer. This was lived out against a background of life in South Africa before the end of apartheid. Finally Barbara left South Africa for England where life was something of a shock - particularly when she found herself working as a maid for the aristocracy in between doing acting jobs.