I also remember that at my ‘Nain’s’ house in Wales we had to go ‘up the back yard’ to go to the toilet. If this was at night it presented me with a real ordeal. As I left the back door, a horrible, kid-eating, giant ogre left its lair over the hill and set off to get me. My mission was to rush up the yard, finish what I had to do and rush back to the safety of the house. This I managed to do by the skin of my backside every time. How lucky can you be? But it really put me off staying over at her house.

I also believed that swallowing chewing gum would give me appendicitis and that if I swallowed a grape pip a vine would grow in my tummy. There were, at various times, lions, tigers or soldiers under my bed so I had to take great leaps in and out of bed. What’s more, the grandfather clock in the hall had a deep well in the bottom which would suck me in if I dared to poke my head inside.

For many years I believed that my father was a chimney sweep because the factory in which he worked had a huge chimney stack and I had been told that he worked there – meaning at the factory, but I thought he worked in the chimney.  

I had an irrational fear of treading on the cracks in the footpath – I had been told by an aunt that if I did then I would grow old overnight. Somewhere along the line I must have trodden on the cracks!

Although everyone said that my brother John was older than me, I knew that I was older because my birthday was two weeks before his.

Did you have some strange ideas when you were young?

As for doing silly things – probably the most stupid was when John and I decided to annoy a wasps’ nest and poked it with brooms. We both ended up in hospital and I had 27 wasp stings. I once burned the porridge and then ate the lot because I said that I did it deliberately because that’s how I liked it. John and I also used to walk along the street talking gibberish to each other, thinking that people would thing how clever we were being able to talk another language – they must have thought we were deranged. 

I wonder what funny ideas you had when you were young, and what stupid things you did? It’s fun looking back.