'Nanny, why don't I have a winkle?' It was the kind of question only a four year old child would think to ask.

Nanny Perkins screwed up her face. ‘A winkle?’ Perkins was a hefty barrel of a woman, with a carved wooden face, a mountainous bosom and tree trunks for legs. She stared down at me from on high, all four feet nine of her, one hand clutching an umbrella, the other a handbag. ‘You’re wanting winkles?’ Her voice had a gentle Scottish lilt. She shook her head dismissively. ‘I don’t think your father would be wanting you to eat that sort of food. A nice sticky bun will do you, if you behave yourself.’

‘No, Nanny. A winkle.’ I pulled at her sleeve. ‘Like that.’ I jabbed a finger in the direction of a large statue at the far end of the room.

Nanny slapped my hand down irritably. ‘Hilary, don’t point! How many times must I tell you?’

I dropped my hand, shamefacedly. ‘Sorry, Nanny. But the stat...the statute.’ I struggled to articulate the unfamiliar word.

‘The statue?’ Nanny peered across at it, her eyes screwing up to make it out. Her vision was not all that it could have been. She refused to wear glasses, despite her great age. Nanny Perkins was one of the oldest women I knew, although not quite as old as her sister, Mrs Gilbraith, who had accompanied us to the museum. The statue in question was of a Greek warrior. It was a white marble nude and, despite the rippling muscles, there was no doubt as to which part I was referring. Nanny’s eyes widened as she took in the full view.

‘Mrs Gilbraith says all boys have a winkle,’ I told Nanny firmly. Nanny Perkins had left me with her sister for a moment and we had wandered into another part of the museum. My eyes had lighted on the statue on a plinth and a rather peculiar protuberance which was just above my eye level. I had pointed to it in wonder and asked Mrs Gilbraith what it was.

The old matron was not a prude and had answered my question in a typically no-nonsense fashion. ‘That, Master Hilary, is a winkle. It’s what all little boys have.’

‘A winkle,’ I repeated, fixing the word in my head. ‘What’s it for, Mrs Gilbraith?’

‘It’s what you use to go to the lavatory.’

I considered this revelation for a moment. ‘When I have a wee wee?’

‘Yes, when you have a wee wee. Now come over here, have a look at this painting.’ And she bustled me away to look at a more sober biblical scene.

Nanny Perkins was not quite as broad-minded as her sister. ‘Don’t look at it, Hilary. It shouldn’t be on display. It’s obscene.’

‘What’s “ob...obscene”, Nanny?’

‘Not for the eyes of children,’ she explained, shuffling me away from the offending article. ‘It was a mistake to bring you here. I shall be having words with my sister.’

‘But why haven’t I got a winkle, Nanny?’

Nanny flushed with embarrassment. ‘You have got a winkle, Hilary. It’s just very small. It doesn’t grow until you’re much older.’

‘But…’

‘No more questions now, Hilary, or no sticky bun for you.’

That was enough to shut me up for the time being. Yet the mind of a child does not let matters drop so easily.

We passed through into another room, where Mrs Gilbraith was examining a large biblical scene. This particular painting was an illustration of the Virgin Mary, who was completely naked. I did not know she was the Virgin Mary, but I was certain she was a woman, as she had a bosom almost as large as Nanny Perkins’. And when I looked across at her legs, there was no winkle between her thighs. That, I confess, was a source of some confusion to my four year old brain. I had no bosoms of course – no boy had them – but the woman’s bottom half looked a little bit like my own. She had no winkle and – despite what Nanny said – I did not think I had a winkle either.

Of course, I did not for a minute doubt that it would grow eventually. Nanny had said it would and Nanny knew best. She always told me the truth. She had instructed me to put a tooth under the pillow for the tooth fairy and sure enough, the next day, I found a farthing there in place of the tooth. It was the same at Christmas, with the presents at the end of the bed. If Nanny said it would happen, then happen it would. My faith was maintained not just for weeks or months, but for years.

There was no blinding moment of revelation, no sudden realisation that I had been deceived. It was more a growing awareness. Little moments that would lodge in the back of my mind. My cousin Alice doing a handstand and me observing the flaccid line of her drawers. The baker’s boy relieving himself furtively up against a tree. He was the same age as me and his winkle was fully formed. In fact, it seemed to me at the time, it was somewhat larger than that of any statue I had seen, at least relative to his size. And so, over time, I went from considering myself to be an underdeveloped little boy, to being a boy with a deformity, and then finally to being a girl. I didn’t discuss my suspicions with Nanny, of course. I knew she would be disappointed that I had discovered the truth. It was the same with Father Christmas. She liked to pretend and I did not wish to spoil her fun.

It was not until my eleventh birthday that things came out into the open. Nanny had bought me a new set of underwear, as she did every year. It was made specially by Harringtons of the Strand. Nanny would give them all my measurements. I hated this underwear with a passion. It was a one-piece garment stretching from my shoulders right down to my knees. I wore it under everything. The tunics, the shirts, the short trousers. Looking back, I can see the logic of this. It was difficult to strip the damned things off. I could not inadvertently – or even deliberately – expose myself. Yet it posed all sorts of problems to a child, not least in matters of a delicate nature. I cannot articulate the shame I felt when I was unable to undress quickly enough in the bathroom or elsewhere. I remember one particular incident, when my father discovered a wet patch at the base of the stairs and nearly beat me black and blue.

Sir Frederick Manningham-Butler was a firm believer in discipline. He was a cold-hearted man with a prodigious temper. It was thanks to him that I was living this peculiar life in the first place, though I did not know it at the time. Sir Frederick had wanted a son and heir, to inherit his title. When my mother had expired giving birth to me, he had been absolutely furious. A second marriage was out of the question – he hated women almost as much as he hated children – and so he took the fateful decision to declare me his son. The midwife who delivered me must have known the truth, of course. She would have been paid handsomely for her silence. Whether the vicar knew I cannot say. But from that day onwards, to the world at large, I was young Master Hilary, Sir Frederick’s one and only son. And I was treated as such, particularly in matters of discipline. Father was a great believer in corporal punishment. A whip for the servants and a rolled up newspaper for the child. Nanny would often try to intercede, offering to handle the punishment herself. She would put me over her knee and spank me on the bottom, and I would be grateful to be spared my father’s wrath.

When it came to the underwear, however, as I entered my second decade, I felt enough was enough. I wanted done with it and, to my surprise, Nanny agreed. By now, my body was beginning to undergo certain changes that made these restrictions a little awkward. Happily, I had been well prepared for this, without ever fully realising it. I had never been to school, but a succession of tutors taught me most of what I needed to know, even in matters of biology.

Mr J. F. Newbold, one of my longest serving tutors, specialised in science and mathematics. He had a huge wart on his chin and a set of nasal hair that might almost have been mistaken for a moustache. He was also probably the dullest man I ever met. He could drone on and on for hours. ‘The square of the hypotenuse of a right angle triangle is equal to the sum of the square of its two shorter sides,’ he would expound, while I stared out of the window and wished for death or, at the very least, a nice glass of lemonade.

It was something of a surprise, therefore, one spring morning, when he came into the classroom looking rather furtive. ‘Today, Master Hilary,’ he said, placing his books down on the table and failing to meet my eye, ‘we will be having a lesson in biology.’ He cleared his throat. ‘The biology of the human female.’ He turned to the blackboard and quickly chalked out an illustration taken from one of the books. I do not believe my father would have approved of this, so it must have been Nanny Perkins who put him up to it. Newbold was a confirmed bachelor and probably found the whole thing even more embarrassing than I did.

‘This is the inside of a woman’s stomach,’ he stuttered inaccurately, indicating the illustration on the board. ‘This area here is known as the womb and this is where babies come from.’ He recovered his voice somewhat and did his best to make the subsequent lecture even duller than usual. It was not strictly speaking a talk about sex. There was no mention of boys, no mention of winkles. Just eggs travelling along a tube and then magically meeting a sperm – ‘a sort of tadpole,’ as he put it – before transforming itself into a little baby, which grew and grew inside the mummy’s tummy. I frowned, listening to him drone on. I was glad to be spared the stork and bush treatment, but it was all still rather vague. Where the tadpole came from and how it had got into the mummy’s tummy was not made clear. Almost as an afterthought, as the lesson drew to a close, Newbold mumbled something about blood flow, when certain related substances were ejected from the womb, adding the rather crucial fact that this would be a monthly occurrence. At this point, I was paying scant attention, thinking of lemonade and sticky buns. I was still a fiend for sticky buns, as I moved into my second decade. Yet a few of the details did lodge in my mind. And so when, a few months later, I felt the cramps and saw the first blood start to appear, I was not as shocked as I might otherwise have been.

Nanny was all business. Incredibly, as it seems to me now, we still did not discuss the matter in any detail. The pretence of my sex was continued. But Nanny nevertheless provided me with the tools and the clothing necessary to deal with the “curse” – as she called it – and supervised any extra washing that needed doing. She did not need to warn me to keep all of this away from my father.

Aside from the beatings whenever I spoke out of turn, his interactions with me were fairly perfunctory. By now I think he had managed to convince himself that I really was a boy. His abiding interest was not in people but in cricket and in the races. There at least we shared a small bond. When Nanny was away, visiting relatives in Scotland, he would sometimes take me to Epsom or Newmarket, and even allow me to put a shilling on a horse of my choosing. The excitement it generated – the highs and the lows – has stayed with me throughout my life. It is perhaps the only fond memory I have of my father, him coming back from the bookmaker, brandishing a half sovereign and almost managing a smile.

I was less enamoured with his attempts to interest me in running and climbing, which he had enjoyed as a youth. I remember one holiday in Cornwall when he made me climb to the top of a lighthouse, to witness a singularly unimpressive view.

That particular holiday lingers in my mind to this day, though for an entirely different reason.

I had gone off wandering on my own, along the country lanes adjacent to our hotel. Children were allowed to wander back then, to go off for hours and do whatever they wished, without parental supervision. There was, in any case, not much to do at the hotel. I had finished that week’s Hotspur and drunk all the lemonade I could endure. And so I had ventured out for a walk, intending on heading down to the village, which was several miles away. I was not a great walker, even then, but boredom can drive one to all sorts of madness.

The first I saw of the boy was a hand grasping the top of a brick wall. This was followed a moment later by a dirty knee, a sock and a hob-nailed boot. I was standing in the lane, opposite the wall, on my way back to the hotel, and the scuffling sounds had caught my attention. At last, a face appeared, a grubby little mongrel of about eleven or twelve, with puffy cheeks and big ears beneath a cheap cloth cap. He froze at the sight of me, a cat caught in the lamp light. He looked up and down the lane, saw there was no-one else about, and then shot me a cheeky grin. His other hand came into view, grasping the top of the wall. The hand was awkwardly placed, pressing his little jacket against his chest. ‘Here, give us a hand will you?’ he called out.

I stepped forward, dubiously. The little oik was scrumping apples and he wanted me to help him. Father would have been appalled – the boy was a thief and had no business addressing his betters in such a familiar way – but that in itself was a good enough reason to help out. I was not much older than him – barely thirteen – and there was something in the boy’s shifty grin that made me laugh. I looked up and down the lane, to check that there really was no-one else around, and then lifted up my hands to take hold of the brown paper bag he was clutching. It was full of ripe green apples, a dozen or more of them, some a little bruised but perfectly edible.

Free of the encumbrance, the boy flung his second leg over the top of the wall and thumped down onto the grass verge. He looked back up at the wall and then grinned at me. ‘Thanks!’ He snatched the bag and started to run.

‘Wait a minute!’ I called out, making after him.

He disappeared around a far tree and over a fence into a small field. I stopped at the edge of the fence. The field was rather muddy. My father would not be amused if I returned to the hotel with dirty shoes. But the boy had come to a halt on the far side of the fence and was sitting on a tree stump, out of sight of the road. He met my eye as he put down the brown paper bag, removed an apple and started chomping on it. ‘You want one?’ he called out.

I let out a sigh and hauled myself over the fence. ‘I’m going to call the police,’ I said. ‘You’re an apple thief. They’ll put you in jail.’

‘Don’t talk rubbish.’ He chuckled. ‘You can’t steal apples. They grow on trees, don’t they?’

‘But people own the trees.’

‘If you say so, cock.’ He took another bite of his apple. ‘You don’t want one then?’

I reached down to the bag and pulled out an apple. It did look rather nice. I sat down next to the boy. ‘I’m still going to tell the police,’ I said, as I took a bite of the apple.

‘You grass me up, my dad will thump you,’ he said, without a trace of malice. ‘Here, you don’t half talk funny. Where do you come from?’

‘From London,’ I said.

‘Are they all as posh as you there? Look at you, all done up to the nines.’

‘At least I’m clean.’

‘A bit of dirt don’t do you no harm.’

‘Doesn’t do you any harm,’ I corrected him primly. The boy really was filthy. His legs were smudged with brown. ‘You’ve cut yourself,’ I said. There was blood on his thigh.

He regarded it carelessly. ‘It’s just a scratch, init?’

I pulled out a handkerchief from my breast pocket. ‘You should put a bandage on it.’ He shook his head. ‘At least keep it clean. It could get infected. Here, let me.’ I placed the handkerchief on his leg, intending to wipe off the dirt. As I grasped the leg, I felt a sudden wave of self-consciousness. My hand was close to the top of his thigh. I rubbed the skin clean and then stopped, the handkerchief half covering the hem of his shorts. What was I doing? I looked up at the chubby face and he was frowning back at me. Strange feelings were beginning to wash over me. I felt an unaccountable urge to do something, but I had no idea what it was that I wanted. My eyes flicked down to his shorts. There was a small lump visible there. The outline of a winkle. My hand lingered for a second too long.

‘Here, get off me!’ he protested, pulling away. He could see what I was staring at. ‘You thick in the head or something?’

‘I’m sorry.’ I pulled back my hand. ‘I didn’t…’

He regarded me dubiously. ‘You ain’t queer, are you? My dad warned me about you lot!’

‘No…I’m not. I’m not…’

‘You are! You’re queer!’ He shrank back from me. ‘You keep your hands to yourself. Trying to touch me up!’

‘I wasn’t. I didn’t…’ I took a deep breath. ‘I’m not queer.’ I don’t know why I said what I said next. I just blurted it out. Sometimes, it is harder to keep secrets from strangers than it is from friends or family. ‘Only boys can be queer and I’m…I’m not a boy.’

The young lad regarded me in puzzlement. ‘What you talking about?’

‘I’m…I’m a girl.’

He looked me up and down. ‘Don’t be daft.’

‘I am. Really I am.’

‘No, you’re not.’ He chuckled. ‘You’re off your rocker.’

‘I am not. I am a girl.’

‘You’re such a liar. You can’t be.’

‘I am not a liar! I’ll show you.’ Without a second thought – which might have been wise at this point – I unbuttoned my waistcoat and the shirt underneath. I didn’t have much of a bust then, but even the budding bosom, visible through my vest, was enough to prove the truth of what I was saying.

‘Bleeding hell!’ The boy’s eyes widened. ‘You are a girl.’ He gazed at the two lumps in wonder. It was probably the first time he had seen such a thing, even in outline.

‘I told you. I really am. That was why…’

Before I could finish the sentence, his hand had shot out and grabbed the nearest breast. I recoiled in shock and slapped his wrist. ‘Keep your hands off me!’

‘You’re the one getting your shirt off!’ he pointed out, not unreasonably. He was grinning now. It was all a game to him.

Hurriedly, I pulled my shirt together and half-heartedly buttoned it up. ‘I’m sorry. I don’t know what’s come over me.’

‘You are daft,’ he said. ‘Why do you dress up like a boy?’

‘I…I…’ I didn’t really have an answer. ‘I don’t like dresses,’ I said.

‘Can’t go scrumping for apples in dresses. Girls are soppy.’

‘No, they’re not,’ I insisted. ‘Girls are just as clever as dirty little boys, and just as nasty too.’

‘If you say so.’ He looked me up and down again. ‘Give us a kiss then, if you really are a girl.’

‘I’m not kissing you! Look at you, you’re filthy.’

‘You want to. I can see it. You’re just scared.’

‘I am not scared.’

‘Yes, you are.’

‘I am not.’

‘Prove it then.’ He snickered. ‘Go on. You know you want to.’

And he was right. I wanted to. And so I did. Our lips pressed together awkwardly. If my father had seen us, he would have horsewhipped the pair of us. As I pulled back, my eyes flicked down to the boy’s shorts and I boggled at the unexpected sight. His winkle seemed to have doubled in size.

I rose up then and fled the scene.

I never saw him again but I have never forgotten the encounter. It was the beginning of a new phase in my life, one in which I would gradually come to terms with my peculiar existence.

But that is another story.