Life didn't hold much promise for ordinary little Angie.

With few jobs around, bland food and cold weather, the best that Angie could hope for was a job at the local Findus factory.

Her family didn't have it easy. Her baby brother was a cot death and the tragedy caused her mother to turn to the Jehovah's Witness faith. Their poverty, now combined with an austere belief system, meant no Christmas, no birthdays and little joy.

But aged 16, Angie decided that she was destined for bigger things. After seeing a TV advertisement she entered a beauty pageant. And won. She went on to take 25 titles, including Miss Leeds, and her home town title Miss Cleethorpes, giving her the opportunity to model while travelling the world.

Just as Angie felt that life couldn't get any better, she got engaged to a man who trapped her in a terrifying cycle of domestic violence. When she eventually escaped him, she had lost all of her money and self-esteem. She was on the bottom rung of the ladder yet again. But Angie picked herself up, turned her talents to event management and grafted her way to becoming Director of Miss England.

Evoking the magical, lost world of the 1970s beauty pageant, Angie's story is a real life fairytale with heart and humour.

» Read the first pages of The Frog Princess by downloading the Penguin Taster here

» Visit Penguin Tasters

The air in the bedroom is cold. Freezing. I pull the blankets over my chin up to my nose and the wool tickles as I breathe. It’s dark and I can’t see much, just the bunched- up shape at the foot of the bed that’s my dressing gown, and the chest of drawers against the far wall. It’s quiet, not a sound coming from anywhere, as if there’s only me here. It’s never just me, though. There’s always somebody else in the house. I lift the thick layer of blankets and slide out onto the rug at the side of the bed. I don’t put my feet on the lino if I can help it because it feels cold, even through my woolly socks. Under my pyjamas I’m wearing a vest but as soon as I’m out of bed the snug feeling I had when I was under the covers goes and I huddle for warmth in my quilted dressing gown.

The landing is darker than my room and, opposite, the door to the bedroom where Mum and Dad sleep is shut. I go downstairs, the way they’ve taught me, first one foot on a step and then the next, taking my time, holding onto the wooden banister. The carpet is worn in the middle, almost to the bare wood underneath here and there. I make sure I don’t trip.

Downstairs, I go into the front room where the curtains are open and it’s lighter. I say his name: Trevor. I have to keep looking until I find my baby brother. I pad into the kitchen where it’s cold, no kettle boiling on the stove. In the living room, the curtains are still shut and the light is on, making everything yellowy. Aunty Mabel kneels in front of the fire, getting it ready, tearing sheets of old newspaper and scrunching them into balls, pushing them into the gaps between the lumps of coal. She turns when I come in and gives me a big smile. ‘Look at you, Angela – the early bird gets the worm,’ she says. ‘Come and give me a hand, then.’

She hands me a piece of newspaper and I make it into a ball like she does, and put it in the hearth. Aunty Mabel adds it to the ones already in the grate and strikes a match, touching the fl ame to all the little bits of paper poking out around the shiny black coals. She sits back, waiting for the fire to catch, and wipes her hands on a stringy cloth that’s looped into the pocket of her housecoat. There’s a damp patch on the nylon overall where the cloth has been. The fire burns and I kneel next to her liking the sudden heat, wishing it was warm like this in my bedroom where in the morning the windows have water running down the insides. One of the things I like best on cold nights is hav-ing my bath in the tin tub in front of the fi re, Mum going in and out of the kitchen, pouring hot water from the ket-tle, adding in cold, until it’s exactly the right temperature, steam seeping into the air as I get in. My night things are put to warm by the hearth and there’s always a toasty towel waiting to dry me off when the water’s going cold and it’s time to get out.

Aunty Mabel takes a poker and jabs at the coals, sending sparks fl ying up the chimney, and puts up the fireguard. Through the black mesh of the metal guard the flames leap about while the coals shift and glow red.

I like her being here. Sometimes I stay with her round the corner from where we live in Buller Street, in Grimsby. Where she lives, a terraced house almost the same as ours, it’s even colder than it is at home. I say, ‘I can’t find Trevor,’ and she shuffles round so she’s facing me instead of the fire. The heat has made her cheeks fl ushed and her hair, more grey than red, coarse and swept straight back, makes the lines on her face deeper, more severe. She is Mum’s aunty, really, older than my other aunties, the same sort of age as my nana. She takes my hands and gives them a rub.

‘Shall we get some breakfast?’

What I really want is to find my little brother. I keep looking for him, searching the place top to bottom. ‘Where’s Trevor?’

Aunty Mabel doesn’t answer. She does up the buttons on my dressing gown, straightens the collar and gets to her feet, using the mantelpiece to pull herself up.

‘Old bones,’ she says, giving her knees a rub. She takes my hand again and steers me away from the fire and into the kitchen.

Everything I think I know about what happened to Trevor, all the memories I have, are from scraps of information given to me by other people – a drip-drip of bits and pieces over the years. That night, Aunty Mabel put me to bed. Mum was working the six to ten shift at the factory on the docks down the road. She came in from work and went straight upstairs to check on Trevor, who was eleven months old, and in his cot in her and Dad’s room. Downstairs, Aunty Mabel stoked the fi re, keeping the room cosy. My mum would be cold from packing frozen food on the production line and from coming in at that time of night.

Mum’s screams filled the house. Aunty Mabel ran to the foot of the stairs and saw Mum on the landing at the top, her face twisted in pain, a dreadful sound coming from her. She had Trevor’s still body in her arms.

Dad was on night shift at the docks and someone ran the half mile through quiet streets past houses mostly in darkness with curtains drawn to fetch him. I was scooped out of bed and taken to Mrs Pert next door. An ambu-lance turned into Buller Street and stopped outside our house, two wheels up on the narrow pavement, its blue light winking through the window. Over the road some of the neighbours came out and stood in front of their open front doors, arms crossed, white-faced, all eyes on our house. Mrs Pert, with her kind face, her grey hair in curlers, made me a hot milky drink and tucked a blanket round my legs. The blue light of the ambulance blinked on and off until fi nally the engine started up and it pulled away.

Every day afterwards the house was full of visitors – Nana and Aunty Janet and Uncle Colin and people I didn’t know, drinking cups of tea and talking in low voices, wiping their faces with hankies, whispering about Trevor, saying how terrible it was, how tragic, that there was nothing anyone could have done.

I thought maybe Trevor was lost and that if I looked hard enough I’d find him. It was November 1966, and I was only three and a half, just a couple of years older than him, but I was his big sister and I loved him. It didn’t make sense that he wasn’t there any more, laughing and making his funny little noises and fastening his arms round my neck. I was just about big enough to pick him up and give him a proper cuddle. I kept on at Aunty Mabel asking about him and she’d hug me and make a fuss and take me to stay at her house so Mum could lie down, but she never did tell me where he was.

Mum never spoke to me about Trevor. It was too painful. On the night he died she had gone to work and everything at home had been fi ne, then, without warning, while she packed fi sh on a production line, her sleeping child had stopped breathing. Cot death. There wasn’t a thing anyone could do.