I always knew that my father was a bastard. He had left home before I was a year old. ‘And that,’ my mother always told me,’ was a great blessing’.

By the time I came to realise that most children had two parents I had a second father. Johannes Kristen had come from Copenhagen with a team of Lipizzaner horses bound for the Blackpool Tower Circus. Soon afterwards he met my mother at a party given by Charlie Cairoli – the most famous clown in the world. They were married when I was five and my mother and I moved to his substantial semi-detached house close to Blackpool’s Stanley Park.

As a circus impresario second father had famous friends. I am told that I was once bought candyfloss and ice cream by Errol Flynn and rewarded him by vomiting on his jacket. I have no recollection of that but I do remember Charlie Cairoli finding a sixpence in his bowler hat which vanished into a handkerchief before reappearing behind my left ear. More than 50 years later I still have that sixpence.

Most of my happiest early memories are of second father. He was a temperate giant who was even better with children than horses. I would ride in the passenger seat of his Lagonda peeping the horn of my own steering wheel which was fixed to the walnut dash by means of a large rubber sucker.

When I thought about first father it was in the sense of ‘disappeared’ or ‘gone away’. There were other children at school without fathers. It seemed to me that ‘missing’ was the much the same as ‘disappeared’. My friend Brian’s Dad had gone ‘missing’ in the jungle of Burma in the final month of the war and a decade later Brian still thought he might turn up.

‘Burma is a long way,’ he explained.