Sarah has dug out an old envelope with “Hulton Press” stamped on the front. Inside are photographs of herself, her siblings and cousins, taken for an article in Farmers Weekly in the late 1950s. There’s a child with a hula hoop; a little boy with rosy cheeks running with his raincoat buckled up tight against the wind. In the background is a big, solid house – the family farm in Warwickshire, where Sarah grew up and where her brother still lives.

“We had two rules: Don’t play on the bales. A hay bale can kill you. And don’t go near the auger. It’s a tube for sucking up grain, and you could lose your hand in it. I don’t remember much else,” she says. “We weren’t allowed on the bales but we did go up on the stacks and mess about up there. And we rode on the back of the combine. There was a chute for the sacks to go down, and if you were fed up you’d just shoot down it.” She isn’t sure that her childhood was typical, though: “It wouldn’t have been the same if we’d been in the town. Even my friends used to come to the farm and find it a nice place to be,” she says.

The sturdy little boy in the raincoat is her cousin: “Their house was at the other end of the village about a mile away. He used to come up and down on his trike, he was that little. Completely unsupervised.

“I remember one day me and my older and younger sisters went on a bike trip; it was 12 miles each way. The youngest one can’t have been eight – her bike was too big for her and she couldn’t sit on the seat, so she went 24 miles just on her pedals. We took sandwiches. When we got there we wanted to go into a church. We let ourselves in, had a look around and cycled all the way home again. We thought we’d had a good day out. I must have been about 9 and my older sister, Bridget, must have been 10 or 11. Mum was a very unanxious mother. She gave the impression she did the occasional head-count – there were five of us so there was quite often a baby.”

Was she ever a victim of crime? She shakes her head. “I think I saw a guy in the woods, exposing himself . . . But no. Really, nothing. I was never assaulted. We were told not to talk to strange men. Kids’ fights . . . that’s nothing. We never locked the door. We would even go on holiday and leave the door unlocked, because the men would be there.

“They lock up now. My brother has security cameras. There’ve been thefts from the farm, more recently, where people drove tractors away and sent them to Romania.” Sarah, who teaches English to sixth formers, now lives in a cosy house with an Aga in the kitchen, near Winchester. Her own two daughters, now 27 and 25, had a different childhood, some of it in Belgium, but her brothers’ kids still play where they like on the farm. Their mother certainly wouldn’t let them near the combine though, she adds.

“We got the bus at the top of the drive to Leamington, then walked half an hour to school. That was perfectly normal. But I suppose it’s the traffic that’s different. And half of that is caused by people driving their kids to school.

“When my two were 11 the school bus went from the top of the down, just over there,” she says, waving behind her. “I sent them on their own, and my neighbours were shocked. I started thinking I ought to be there to meet the bus. People thought it was wrong, and it was only a quarter of a mile or maybe half a mile.” She laughs, remembering something: “We had a ballet class in the village, which lasted about a year. It was likeThe Archers. We used to have village concerts. And I remember the ballet class had to do a turn.

“We only had one and everyone called for an encore, so we had to do it again. The second time we all ended up in a hilarious heap on the floor.” She thinks her own daughters had many advantages: “I can’t swim very well. My tennis isn’t very good. I was hopeless at most forms of sport. But my kids can swim. They can play tennis. They had more musical opportunities than I did.

“I don’t think it was done, when we were young, to compliment your children. It was a matter of good up-bringing that you were rather cut down to size. You weren’t supposed to boast about it. I think that’s changed, particularly in the middle classes.” But despite this she sees good reason to be optimistic about the future.

“My girls’ friends are interesting, able people. I think they’re more confident, they’ve certainly got ambitions . . .” She thinks for a moment.

“I still think this country manages to turn out quite a lot of nice people.”

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