When I was young my parents didn’t have bank accounts. They both got their weekly wages in cash and always knew exactly how much money they had (or didn’t have) to spend. When the wage packets were opened a suitable number of coins were put into the separate sections of a tin box, designed specially to pay the various bills for rent, gas, electricity etc when due. My mother was a great believer in life insurance and ‘the man from the Pru’ would call in person to our house in Seacroft to collect the payments.

On one occasion he came through our front door looking as white as a sheet. While I made him a cup of tea (my mother offered him whisky which he refused) he told us what had happened. He had just come from his last customer, an elderly couple who lived just down the road. The man invited him in and immediately asked how he should go about claiming for his wife’s death. Thinking this would be about routine paperwork, the insurance man’s first question was, “And when did your wife die?” The old man nodded his head across the room and there on the floor, protruding from behind the sofa, were the feet and lower legs of a woman’s body. She had dropped dead only hours before and the poor man didn’t know what to do.

Recounting this now it seems so extraordinary that I wonder – did it really happen or was this just a story told to me, an urban myth perhaps?

Memories are tricky, always newly made and inevitably reinforced over time. But in my mind it remains real and has stayed with me ever since.

My mother later sold our upright piano to the insurance man and that was the end of any music in the house.