In his thespian youth he had known Pauline’s mother, a pretty young actress with a big smile, and just before the war, to the embarrassment of all concerned, he had sired Pauline while on tour with The New Morality at the Darlington Civic. Luckily for everybody Ronald O’Brien, the company manager, a very serious young man in his mid-twenties, believed himself to be in love with Pauline’s mother who had recently won the Essex junior tap dancing competitions and who in The New Morality was playing the maid.

Ronald O’Brien married the already pregnant tap dancer when the company got to Hull.

His new wife understood on their wedding night (although she did not tell this part to her daughter) that, although part of him was unable to believe his luck that the pretty actress had become his, albeit in unconventional circumstances, he believed he was doing a very honourable thing and he would expect to receive due gratitude for the rest of his life.

The rest of the story Pauline of course knew.

Ronald O’Brien was called up to serve his country; his wife continued to tour theatres with her daughter under her arm, tap dancing still. But when he returned from the war to his wife and daughter Ronald O’Brien sternly put an end to theatrics, joined an insurance company; his wife tap danced no longer.

But Pauline had always remembered (or thought she remembered but perhaps it was her mother’s memories) the smell of greasepaint and powder and used costumes, and the warmth and the laughter and the tears, in backstage dressing rooms where lights shone round mirrors and boys knocked on doors crying: five minutes please ladies and gentlemen five minutes. She always knew she would be an actress: through the dreary childhood years dominated by the cold and puritanical Ronald O’Brien some instinct in her heart told her that if she became an actress she would find that laughter and that warmth again.

When she suddenly understood that she was not the daughter of Ronald O’Brien, insurance salesman, but of a man who worked in a circus she felt as if a cold veil had been pulled from her heart. The idea of her real father became the most important thing in her life: she thought of him flying through the world, the daring young man on the flying trapeze; her mother’s completely unexpected story was the most exciting thing that she’d ever heard in her life. The fact that he was a homosexual – Pauline knew nothing about homosexuals – was irrelevant. He was very good-looking and he was very confused and I thought I could help him was all her mother would ever say.