My short story, the tea set, takes its inspiration from a real life tea set my maternal grandmother won at The Hoppings fairground, Newcastle Town Moor, shortly before WW2. I don’t know exactly how the set was won, but I do know it was carried home in a crate of straw and that the neighbours came out to look. I know because my mother, the real story teller in our family, told me.

At sixteen I left home to attend a theatre school and train as a dancer. Within a year the course I was on had folded and we dancers were shifted onto the adjacent year’s Musical theatre course, where the entry age had been eighteen. In effect, this meant that my fellow students were now at least two years older than me. As a teenager, that’s a big age gap.