MY PARENTS, OR ‘your parents’ as we siblings call them, had very conflicting ideas on child rearing.

My dad’s idea was to feed us, smack us and send us out to play. He trusted us to grow up without too much help. I remember going to work with him as a young child. He sat me on the back of a truck in a tangle of rope. ‘Undo that rope for me will you,’ he said, and walked into the shed. I felt so important untying those knots that I didn’t realise until he came back that he’d tied me to the truck so I couldn’t fall off.