Sometimes I get something like vertigo realising how long I have been on this planet. And it might not well have been so.

Sixty years ago today I was rushed to hospital with double pneumonia. My life was probably saved by antibiotics - rather primitive, and only recently released to the civilian population (first used on infected troops in the war, I understand).

I fell ill over Christmas dinner. I couldn't eat the goose. It was hard to forget that a few months earlier it had been given to me as a pet - together with its brother or sister, which landed up on my grandfather's Christmas table.

The goslings were a present from Mr and Mrs Cattle (I promise) the farmers whose house my father and aunt and I had stayed at in Somerset that spring. It was the most wonderful holiday in my all childhood.

My dad had just 'kidnapped' me from my mother and removed me from the horrible time I had been having when my parents were together. My memories are fragmented, buried most likely forever.

For the next nine months I felt very happy. I remember lots of sunshine. I rememer dancing to Beethoven's violin concerto. I remember... But it was not to last.

Of course my mother wanted me back. The one time I saw she was distant, distraught - just as I remembered her to be. Lawyers were employed. A court battle ensued, half our old neighbours gave affidavits about how bad or good my mother had been... Of course I didn't know any of this. What were the legal claims and counter claims? I will never know for sure. I was only a child.

I do know the Catholic priest who had recently converted my mother was involved. My father claimed their relationship had been inappropriate. He later told me (and I have only his word for it) he produced evidence such as he arranged to meet her in the Underwear department at Harvey Nichols. (It's by the escalator before isn't it? An obvious rendezvous point?)

Also he had some poems (romantic, but not sallacious, I've been told but who told me?) that the priest wrote my mum. A sonnet. At least one sonnet. They could have been the clinching evidence to win my custody (and remember I was very happy in my dad's custody, with his sister at his side).

But my father wanted to get remarried - and I have to speculate enjoy for the first time the joy, as opposed the brief release, of sex. Marjorie, a war widow with two children, was waiting in the wings, insisting on no sex without remmarriage.

So dad made a deal. He wouldn't produce the poems as evidence as long as my mum agreed to sue him for divorce - very much against her new religious principles. The priest, though, whose intentions as regards my mother probably had nothing to do with sex (but do I half-remember his interest in me?) was presumably pleased he would not become the centre of scandal.

Anyway, without the poems, my dad lost the custody battle. I lost. I felt I lost. When in December 1948, my dad and aunt told me I had to go back to live with my mother, I was devastated. "She does love you," they told me. "She is just not good at showing it." A bit subtle for a five-year-old.

On Christmas Day, my goose cooked but uneaten, I fell ill with pneumonia.