Don’t get me wrong, my Dad was a very good father, and a pretty reasonable kind of a bloke, except for an over-protective attitude toward his daughters.  We saw it as a streak of Puritanism, and though we loved him dearly, at times we considered him a little Hitler.  Although my mother doesn’t figure in this narrative, I should mention that we simply adored her too.

One of Dad’s rules was that my sister and I must be home by 11 p.m. at the latest.  This meant leaving the dance early to catch the earlier bus.  We could never make Dad understand that it would be far safer to wait until the end of the dance and all come home in the same group of about 8 that we went with.  He also never understood that if we were going to misbehave, we weren’t going to wait for the clock to strike a certain hour!

Eventually of course we found a way around this unreasonable demand, without being grounded for weeks.  We’d stay to the end of the dance, catch the later bus home, then we would dash into the local fish shop, usually empty at that time.  We would arrive home past curfew time with supper in hand, and apologise for being late (“But the fish shop was crowded Dad, we couldn’t help it!”)

We never knew if he ever rumbled our little scheme, but I do know that we ate a lot of fish suppers when I was in my teens!

However, worse was to come.  Our young brother David suddenly got old enough to start going out on the prowl, and one night Dad said to David, in my presence, “Don’t forget lad, if you’re not in bed by 11 o’clock, give it up and come home!”  Dad couldn’t see why we were upset, because this was before the days of Germaine Greer, and Dad was probably still blaming the Suffragettes for all the world’s ills!