When my brother and I were younger, we were lucky enough to have our father build a tree house for us in an old beech which towered above a remote corner of our back garden. Timothy and I spent hours on end in that thing, and for the most part I only have happy memories of it – apart from one particular day.

It was the long school summer holiday, we were eight and 10 respectively, and we were bored out of our minds. I’m pretty sure it was Timothy who suggested running doorbells – he was two years older than me and almost always the source of trouble. Anyway, this seemed like a pretty fun idea to me. Most of our neighbours had plenty of shrubs in their front yards, so there was plenty of cover for mischievous children!

For a few minutes we caused fairly harmless havoc throughout the street, ringing the doorbells and scurrying to the cover of the bushes. Unfortunately, around five ‘knocks’ in, our luck ran out. The owner of the house, instead of being innocently occupied elsewhere, was on the very point of coming through the front door with a package and we had only gotten about 12ft away in our flight when the door opened and he saw us. If we had been actually at the door, we could probably have bluffed something, but our intent was crystal clear.

The guy yelled something inaudible but clearly angry, put the package in his car and began to advance towards us. We needed no further bidding – we took to our heels and disappeared around the corner. A few streets later, we were back home, and were sitting on the garden wall, discussing the close shave, when the guy reappeared at the top of our streets.

We rushed into the garden and up the rope ladder into the tree house. We lay there quietly, hearts beating double, looking down at the ground from our hidey-hole. Inevitably, Mother eventually appeared in the garden, with the guy himself in tow. She had evidently seen us climbing up to the tree house.

“You two! You come down here right now! I want a word with you.” Timothy put his finger to his lips in an order to me to stay quiet, maybe in the vain hope that Mother would think she had been mistaken. She and the man spoke quietly for a moment, then I heard him say more audibly: “Well, I’ll leave you to deal with them.” We couldn’t hear Mother’s reply but they went back into the house and he presumably took his leave.