When in the late sixties some friends came to stay as they were between homes, my husband and I had 3 young children and had not ever had a holiday. So it was arranged that the friends would babysit for a long weekend. We hitch-hiked from Norwich to Liverpool as I wished to see the newly built Cathedral.

We had both been to art school – my husband to Hornsey and I to Norwich in 1962. So we took our sleeping bags and thought that we would easily find where the students hung out and be able to doss down for the night. Somehow that did not work out and we found ourselves in a night club at 1.30 am. Getting a bit desperate, we asked a friendly Rastafarian about B&Bs. He said, don’t worry, follow me, so we trotted along behind him, wondering where we were going.

When we got to his boarding house, he knocked on the Irish landlord’s door and explained our predicament. A single bed was duly placed in the bow window of the landlord and his wife’s (she was very pregnant) bedroom. We were given bedding, etc. Ignoring us, like this was perfectly normal to share your bedroom with complete strangers in the middle of the night, they got back into bed, turned off the light, chatted for a while, then went to sleep. Quietly astonished by this, we silently slipped into the single bed in their bedroom. In the morning, they were up early serving breakfasts for their other guests.