Jacqueline Wilson: my mother slept with a gun under her pillow

Children's author says she told her elderly mother to get rid of it as she was terrified of being mistakenly shot

The children's author, Dame Jacqueline Wilson, has said her elderly mother slept with a gun beneath her pillow.

Wilson, creator of the Tracy Beaker series, told an audience at the Hay festival in Wales that she was the daughter of a character more colourful than any she had written - and that she was terrified her mother might shoot her by accident, and persuaded her to get rid of it.