I was clearly very comfortable living in Stradbroke as a child and I remember trying to drag all the furniture out of the removal van when my parents made us move. Our home was an old, wattle and daub worker’s cottage from the ye olde days and had beams in the ceiling that my dad was only prevented from banging his head on by about an inch. It had a thatch roof and… ghosts.

I recall being in the dining room, about age five, and at the bottom of the stairs leading up to mum and dad’s bedroom I saw a legion of white silhouette men disappearing through the curtain at the bottom. I ran to the kitchen in terror, explaining the ordeal to my confused parents.

I was very young but it wasn’t the only rather creepy thing that happened there. I was sitting in my room and had a book open on my lap called ‘Bramble Farm.’ There was a picture of a cat and I swear, unless this is false memory syndrome, that it hissed at me and seemed to move. I threw the book down, immediately shocked, and when I looked up there was one of the white silhouette men, sitting momentarily on my brother’s bed opposite me.

The only other spooky occurrence I can remember was sleep-walking one night and feeling that the curtains on the hall windows were blowing inwards, into the corridor. I found myself in the lounge at the far end, hugging a pillow, thinking that it was my dad, before I woke up, utterly bewildered.

Despite ‘the ghosts,’ this was the home where I used to put snails in a box, try to feed them lettuce and make them complete an assault course; it was the home where I used to jump off the telephone table and try really hard to fly by flapping my arms. I also used to pile cushions up on a chair and tie string to the backs, climb on and pretend it was a horse or camel. I feel bad for kids today who missed out on such things. They can’t possibly be having as much fun on their gadgets.