Frances Pinsent is trying to think what she can remember of the 1960s. The Summer of Love and the birth of hippy culture must have wholly passed her by, she says.

“It used to amaze me when I heard about the 1960s, later on. I was oblivious to it,” she says. “I suppose in the 1970s my teachers were wearing incredibly short skirts. But we didn’t feel that anything was changing. It was normal. You didn’t question.

“I knew that there were students rioting, and protests. I was shocked – I didn’t want to be a student if that was going on.”

Frances’s parents were academics, bringing up their three children on the outskirts of London. Does Frances recall press coverage of any other shocking events of the time, such as the Moors Murders in 1966, or the Mary Bell case in 1968? The death of Maria Colwell at the hands of her stepfather in 1973? She looks blank. No, she doesn’t.

Her parents told her not to talk to strangers, she says. And once, when she was about 9, she was accosted on the way home from school by a youth who grabbed her gold crucifix from around her neck, but generally there seemed to be little to worry about. She roamed the streets happily from the age of 5 or so, she says, in and out of her own and others’ houses.

“I was almost totally unaware of anything going on in the world beyond my life, apart from the later Apollo missions, which didn’t seem remarkable (probably because we watched Star Trek),” she e-mails.

“The whole of my school sat around one TV to watch the investiture of the Prince of Wales in 1969. Vietnam was happening, but it was just something that you ignored on the news. The power cuts in the early Seventies had more impact, because I had to do my homework by candlelight.”

Sitting in the hastily tidied lounge of her home in Bedford – she is head of science at a secondary school and it has been a busy week – she says that she did have a desire to make a difference.

“I think I wanted to be a missionary. I went to see Mother Teresa talk at an early age. I went to a Catholic school and I was quite curious about nuns. I thought I could go off and be like them in Africa and really change the world. I didn’t want to be held back by having a family and children . . . later I talked myself out of it.”

Frances’s mother, Pat, is an expert on children’s books and spent much of her daughter’s early childhood studying, first for an English degree and later for a masters. But even though some of the old barriers that kept women in the home were breaking down, there were no ready meals, no microwaved food from the freezer.

“My mother must have been Wonder Woman,” Frances says now. “I think she dashed back and cooked. She could whisk up a cake before dinner, and she had a pressure cooker – I think that’s how she got meals done quickly.”

Her mother also found time to read to her daughter and two sons every night – separately, often with the other two hovering on the landing in hope of catching a bonus slice of someone else’s story.

There was a constant supply of the latest children’s books – Stig of the Dump, Catweazel, Bedknobs and Broomsticks, the Narnia books – but nothing for teenagers, Frances says. “I think I read a lot of adult books too young – the Brontës, Thomas Hardy. It was a huge jump. Now there’s Jacqueline Wilson.”

Her own three children and two stepchildren, now aged between 13 and 21, liked Jacqueline Wilson but when Frances tried them on C.S. Lewis, they weren’t interested: the language was so old-fashioned, they found it tedious.

While she had books, Radio 1 and television – Crackerjack and Dr Who were favourites – she spent more time amusing herself than her own children did.

“As I got older I made most of my own clothes, often without a pattern,” she says. “These would be the hours and hours that my children spend chatting on MSN, looking at Facebook and watching video clips on YouTube. The boys these days can spend whole days on a computer game. The girls spent hours setting up imaginary worlds on The Sims, and texting.”

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