Frank was two years older than me. We had always been companions, and unlike some brothers, he never excluded me from the things he was interested in. Though he was a farmer’s son, he was a “war child”, as I was myself. Born in the early years of the twentieth century, our lives had been changed by the Great War. Those four years stood like a monolith between the world of our parents and our own. The speed with which inventions were developing was almost alarming. Mr Reynolds, the headmaster, and Reverend Morris, the vicar, had telephones, and a public telephone box had even been installed on the quay at Aberaeron. People flew in aeroplanes. Faster and faster trains went to every part of Great Britain and all over Wales, to Anglesey in the North and Pembroke in the South, bringing things we had never had before. Bananas were the latest; Frank couldn’t get enough of them.

Everything had changed. For generations, Freebodys had been tenant farmers, along with most of the families around us. But Frank did not see himself as a farmer, and I did not see myself as a farmer’s wife. Greater, or at least new, things beckoned in this new, mechanized world. For Frank, especially. He liked films, but more than anything, he wanted to be a motor mechanic. And just like me, he dreamed. He would pretend to kick-start his battered old bicycle as if it were a motorcycle, and vrmm-vrmm his way down the lane. I laughed, but I understood.

When I was fifteen and Frank was seventeen, our parents took us to the Pier Pavilion Café in Haverth to see The Bohemian Girl, with Gladys Cooper and Ivor Novello. My da, who was fond of quoting poetry, told me on the way home that the film was “such stuff as dreams are made on”. And he was quite right. It was from that day on that films became the centre of my dreams. Not baffling, disjointed night-time dreams, but the dreams of stolen moments when I was alone. Throwing feed to the hens, I ceased to be Princess Sarah of the Hen Run and became Gladys Cooper or Gloria Swanson or Mary Pickford, scattering corn against a backdrop of American, not Welsh, mountains, my dress billowing around my legs, my hair in curls, to be noticed by Rudolph Valentino or Ronald Colman and swept into love and adventure. Most often, whether I was doing my chores or sitting on the gate, or reading, or walking to the shop, I dreamed of my favourite actress of all, the beautiful Lillian Hall-Davis.

Her name sounded upper-class, though I knew that before she became an actress in the films she had been an ordinary girl like me. When she was on the screen, I was transfixed by the way she moved and smiled and interacted with the hero. She was bold yet ladylike, sweet yet fiery, and so attractive that I never questioned that he would, of course, fall in love with her. I dreamed of her whenever I was bored, which was often. And I envied her. She had made her escape from a poor area of London and become a famous actress, a “star”, as the film magazines said. I liked the handsome men in the films, but my imagination was filled with Lillian. And when no one was looking at me, I was her.