I was 16, returning from a summer fruit picking in Norfolk, and on my way home, by train, to Hull. In the carriage was a young man, maybe a little older than me, scribbling furiously in a notebook. He had unruly blonde hair and, as he turned to look at me, a beautiful smile. He helped me lift my case on to the overhead rack, an act of chivalry I was most grateful for. I thought he would return to his notebook, but he wanted to chat, and we did for the journey from Norwich to Lincoln, then over a cup of tea as we had to wait for our connections.

He was passionate about the spoken and written word and described himself as a ‘compulsive scribbler’. He read me some of his poetry, made me laugh until I cried, and I didn’t know it then, but he opened a door for me. I had just completed ‘O’ levels, English literature and language among others, and felt smothered by the constraints of verbs, adverbs, nouns, sonnets, quatrains and long Shakespearean speeches from Henry the fifth and this young man flouted every law of prose and poetry that I had been taught were sacrosanct.

‘I wish you well’ he said as we parted on Lincoln station, ‘I hope we meet again.’ But like the Tiger who came for tea, we never did.

I went back to school for ‘A’ levels and to study the great poets but all the time writing poetry, stories and prose. It was my secret. I felt it was presumptuous of me to think I could write anything worth reading so I wrote for myself.

Life intervened. More studying, marriage, babies and heartbreak and the writing petered out as a busy family time took over. Occasionally I was inspired to put pen to paper, but those words remained hidden and were lost in an unpleasant divorce. It took me nearly 40 years to find my voice again after finding a book by Les Barker, for I think that was who I met on the train that day. My memory of that chance encounter came flooding back and I began to write again.