Conditionally add columns in SQLite

I've seen enough answers to know you can't easily check for columns in SQLITE before adding. I'm trying to make a lazy person's node in Node-Red where you pass a message to SQLITE which is the query. Adding a table if it does not exist is easy.

msg.topic='create table IF NOT EXISTS fred (id PRIMARY KEY);'; node.send(msg);

it occurred to me that adding a table which had the names of the fields would be easy - and if the field name is not in the table.... then add the field. BUT you can't add multiple fields at once - so I can't do this...

msg.topic='create table IF NOT EXISTS fred (id PRIMARY KEY, myfields TEXT);'; node.send(msg);

The problem with THAT is that I can't add this in later, there's no way to check before adding a field it the table exists!

This is what I WANT

msg.topic='create table IF NOT EXISTS fred (id PRIMARY KEY, myfields TEXT);'; node.send(msg);

msg.topic='if not (select address from myfields) alter table fred add column address text';

I just cannot think of any way to do this - any ideas anyone (the idea is that the node-red node would input a table, field and value and if the table didn't exist it would be created, if the field didn't exist it would be created, all before trying to add in the value).