She insisted, against the express wishes of her mother, who refused to help her, on trying to trace Roger Popham but could only ascertain that he worked with The Great Zelda Brothers’ Circus somewhere in Europe. His appearance in the background of the 1959 TV washing powder advertisement remained a mystery.

*

Pauline O’Brien became a drama student with Molly McKenzie, who became her best friend, and Juliet Lyall and Terence Blue and Emmy Lou Brown and Frances Kitson and Anthony Bonham and many others.

As soon as she walked into the small theatre attached to the old drama academy building, the smells and the memories came pouring back. They had make-up classes once a week in the small backstage dressing rooms and her mother gave her the old make-up box she used to take from theatre to theatre. When Pauline opened the box it was as if she opened a memory window. Their make-up teacher in 1959 still taught them to use the same base to catch the lights that her mother had used; a combination of Leichner sticks five and nine. The smell of the make-up sticks was as potent as ever as Pauline held them to her nose, breathed them in. And she began to laugh. It was as if laughter was tied up with the memories and the smells. Pauline O’Brien, and Frances Kitson whose father was a comedian, used to laugh together till tears ran down their cheeks, as if the profession and the make-up and their footsteps across the stage tickled them, entranced them. Because they both came from old-fashioned theatrical backgrounds it was as if they were stepping again into their childhood. They were already actresses.

Pauline told everybody at the Academy that her real father was a trapeze artist in a travelling circus in foreign climes, talked of him often, of joining the circus and flying on a trapeze too when she’d finished her training. Anthony Bonham had, like all the other students, found this fact romantic in the extreme, coming as he did from a banking background, but at that time he was involved with a Hollywood film star’s rather lumpy daughter who was in the class also. But he remembered Pauline’s exotic story, kept his eye on her.

Then finally, when Pauline O’Brien had left drama school and had become one of the new young actresses people noticed, playing the juvenile lead in a new West End play where memorably, just for a moment – her back to the audience – she had to take off her blouse and was revealed to be wearing nothing underneath, The Great Zelda Brothers’ Circus came to Blackheath for a three-week season.