A Silver Cross pram was the accessory of choice for young parents in 1960. For the first eleven months of my life, I rode in splendid, first-born isolation aboard my mother’s stately Silver Cross, as she wheeled me to the shops, the library and the park in our little patch of north London. And then the twins arrived, Andrew and David. Delighted as my parents were, they were not expecting another child so soon after me. And they certainly weren’t expecting fraternal twins born either side of midnight.

Now they were caring for three children aged under a year. Until I learned to walk reliably, they were de facto parents of infant triplets. The household budget would not stretch to another pram. The stately Silver Cross would have to do for all three of us. It could be managed. There would be a system. I would occupy one end while the twins squeezed in together at the other. A tight fit but needs must. Mum perfected the system, developing a strict order for the loading of infants into the Silver Cross, according to their weights — me, then David, then Andrew.

One sunny morning, Dad found himself in charge of a trip to the park. The pram was in the hall, awaiting its precious cargo. Family lore omits the reason why Dad departed from the system but depart from the system he did. Instead of lifting me into the pram first, to keep the front end weighed down, he began with David, the bigger by far of the twins, hoisting him into the handle end.

The resulting kerfuffle was immediate. The front end shot into the air and the pram skidded across the hall on its rear wheels (the brake wasn’t on, either — another fatherly omission). Luckily, Dad held on to David and averted disaster, ending up on his knees with his son in his arms and the pram half on top of them both.

My father’s usual reaction to stress involved an eruption of colourful oaths but in the telling of this story he always said that he was too busy laughing to swear. It took a while but my mother saw the funny side in the end. Dad stuck to the system from this day on.