Times and attitudes change.I was brought up a child of empire and was imbued with attitudes and beliefs by parents, family, school, society and friends.

We have come a long way in a very short time. I found theses two little dummy books that I made to experiment with a character that I called clumsy clot – a commonly used epithet when I was growing up.

Clumsy Clot was a name I used and never thought about until my editor explained why publishers would not be likely to leap at the chance of using the character. Was it censorship, my first brush with political correctness or an awakening to a more empathic view of the use of language?