I got twin dolls the Christmas I was five and a half. Patsy had skin of pink rubber with white-gold hair and blue eyes. Pokahontas, my favourite, had brown skin, black hair and deep brown eyes. At night I used to sleep with one doll on the pillow either side of my head - Patsy on the right, Pokahontas on the left.

At school the next term the headteacher told us kids we should all give a toy to the collection for children who were so poor they had no toys to play with. For some reason I was so moved by this appeal that I brought Pokahontas with me to school the next day and gave her away - because she was my favourite doll whom I loved, and I wanted to make the girl who was given her feel happy - a kind of love transfer.

My teddy bear I called Nelly Blye. When I was nine and bored with childhood, I fed her to an Alsatian dog belonging to a doctor friend of my parents. I remember a song that goes “Nelly Blye piped her eye/Then she went to sleep/And when she wakened up again/Her eye began to peep”. Pipe and peep meaning cry.

No idea where the names came from, but I’ve continued to name things throughout my life since these early days.