The first thing I remember is trouble. Not being in it, but causing it for others. In this case my sister. Twelve years older, she made a willing babysitter, so I’m told, and I daresay my mother was glad of a break. We lived near a large open space of parks, pitches, swings and ornamental ponds donated to the city forty years before I was born and beloved by its citizens to this day, albeit somewhat rundown.

In 1973 the paint on the shelters was still pristine and the foot-deep boating lake (long since drained) was big news. I was three, and my sister must have walked me there with her friend because there are three of us in the boat when my memory becomes clear. I am wearing navy blue, gold-buckled sandals and I have just enough understanding about how they fit to wriggle out of them.

I can see my foot (the right, I believe) back then even now, and I have the sense that the girls are talking to each other and paying little heed to me, so I must suppose that part of what I am about to do is a ploy for attention. What I do remember – and perhaps the reason that I remember it – is knowing, absolutely knowing, that what I am planning will cause trouble and feeling a sense of visceral, omnipotent delight at that.

Unobserved, like bound up prisoners in all those all those films I’m yet to see, I have worked my shoe and its buckle against the side of the boat to the point where I can unleash my foot from its confinement, let havoc descend and my toes wiggle free. I kick it off, laughing, believing myself to have taken control of things, and since what I see is all I know at this point, I am in now in effect and in my own mind – all powerful.

Luckily for me, the God-like toddler delusion is short lived, after a satisfying scream of surprise from my sibling there is much splashing around and the sandal is retrieved. The girls are too pleased with finding it I think to consider that I might have done this deliberately. I have a reputation as a good kid, but I know different now. More than that I have gotten away with something, tasted mischief, and savoured it consciously for the first time. I need hardly tell you it was not the last.