I can remember the time my younger brother and I pulled over a kitchen cupboard onto ourselves. I was four, John was three.

It was one of those free-standing cupboards with solid doors on the bottom, an open shelf in the middle then glass doors on top, the kind that bowed out and had a design made of lots of pieces of coloured glass. John and I opened the bottom doors, he on one side, me on the other. We joined our hands over the top of the doors and held the bottom between our knees, swung the doors to and fro and couple of times......then crash. Down it came on top of us. I was wearing a red tartan skirt and was pinned down. My mother was outside with our baby brother in the pram, she was hanging out washing. She heard the crash and came running in.

My mother, being a practical woman, had put the breakables in the top cupboard out of reach of little fingers - but not, alas, out of breaking range. The green bowl shaped like a leaf was broken beyond repair, and it was such a pretty plate.

That red skirt and green bowl are still in my memory, but not (probably fortunately as she had a short fuse) my mother's reaction.