Property: Where I grew up - 'I got my own room and then I became a trainspotter'

Chris Donald, creator of Viz Comics, describes his childhood in Newcastle, overlooking the railway tracks

We moved into Lily Crescent, in the Newcastle suburb of Jesmond, in 1970 when I was 10. Jesmond is regarded as posh, and is just north of Newcastle city centre. My mum had been brought up in the house and grandad sold it to us because mum was diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis and her legs were going, so we needed a bigger ground floor. The house, a two-storey terrace, was built about 1870 with trees in the garden. It overlooked a railway. Moving there was a bit like the Railway Children, except my big brother looked nothing like Jenny Agutter, and still doesn't.

The house had a sitting room, dining room, living room, kitchen and utility room downstairs. When we moved in, the dining room became my parents' bedroom, and the utility room was made into a bathroom. Upstairs there were three bedrooms and a bathroom. lt wasn't massive but the rooms were quite big compared to our previous house.

My dad renovated the place in a 1970s style. There was a violent purge on all the Victorian decor. The sitting room was painted a vivid lime green and he made a false fireplace with a pretend fire, using reclaimed materials, to replace the beautiful Victorian marble one that I helped him smash and throw into the skip. The only Victorian feature that survived was an intricate plaster ceiling rose which dad took a fancy to and restored with wire brushes. He was like Michelangelo, up on a step ladder for days on end.

The furniture was a hotch potch. A horrible white melamine 1970s fitted kitchen, at low level for my mum, and lino tiles on a stone floor with painted plaster walls in the living room made it a bit like a hospital. The sitting room was our posh room, with a china cabinet and two wing chairs. And a horrible second- hand settee with biscuit crumbs stuck behind the cushions. We had a big garden, front and back. Both were narrow - about 16 feet wide - and 60 feet long. There was a strip of lawn at the front, with a flower bed. The back didn't get any sun, so it was bit messy, with an old outside loo, an oil tank, a garden shed and a coalhouse where we kept our bikes.

Jesmond is a weird mixture. It used to be very posh, all tree-lined avenues and big Victorian merchants' villas. They're all flats, hotels or offices now. There's also a lot of Victorian red-brick terraces. It's no longer the poshest part of Newcastle, but it's still the trendiest - lots of students, lecturers, basket weavers etc.

In the house there was my mum and dad, me, Simon my younger brother, and Stephen my elder brother. My favourite room was my bedroom. After my big brother went to college, my little brother moved into his own room and I got it all to myself. It overlooked the railway, and I was a trainspotter as a result. All the kids in the street were, except my brothers - they missed out badly. I recorded details of the movements of trains in a special log book I kept - a very healthy occupation, most rewarding. Later the bedroom doubled as an office and warehouse. I produced the comic in it, and distributed T-shirts and comics from there.

I spent a lot of time in the sitting room. We'd play there, and have tea there on Sundays. I remember watching Ironside while mum and dad snored. As I got older I sort of retreated into my bedroom. Looking back it was a strange house because mum never came upstairs. Home helps did the cleaning, and they just left our bedrooms alone, I was able to do my own thing. My bedroom was a sanctuary where I'd sit and ponder a lot.

My lasting memory of the house is a bit sad. It's of my mum sitting in her wheelchair at the living-room table, where she ended up sitting more or less permanently during the day, listening to Terry Wogan on Radio Two. "Do you have to have that bloody thing on, Kay?" my dad would ask. "I'm waiting for the news," she'd always say.

My brothers both left home when they finished school. I got a job in the DHSS, but stayed living at home. lt was cheap, and it never occurred to me to move out. I saved up quite a lot of money to start Viz with. In the mid-1980s the business started to expand and I took a full-time cartoonist on, Graham Dury. My dad noticed that the same bloke was turning up at the front door every morning at nine o'clock, and I had to explain that I'd given him a job, and he was working in my bedroom. Perhaps I should have asked first. But he didn't seem to mind.

When I was 25 I decided to move into a flat nearby with my girlfriend, now my wife. She was a nanny and was moving from a live-in job to a 9- till-5 job. But I still used the bedroom at Lily Crescent as an office. It was strange, turning up for work every day at the house where I'd lived for so long. I was reluctant to leave it completely, perhaps because of my mum's health. In 1987, we had to move into proper offices in order to take on more staff. Not long after that my mum began to need full-time medical care and went into a Leonard Cheshire home, and my dad sold the house. He still lives in a nearby street in Jesmond. My mum died in 1994.

I moved out of Newcastle into Northumberland at the first opportunity. We'd gone there as a family every Sunday on picnics. I'd always wanted to live in an old railway station in the country. It's rural where we live and my seven-year-old son spots tractors, not trains. My daughter is six, and wants a horse.