Will Harris on childhood career paths

What did you want to be when you grew up? If you listen to my mother, my secret ambition as a child was to be a mad scientist; the kind that lives in a storm-wracked tower on a howling moor and meddles with the laws of nature for a living. I naturally have no memory of this, and to this date my only comment on the story has been to ask why, if it’s true, she never thought to send me to a child psychologist (“To a child…?” she splutters. “It was Coventry in 1985, darling. Recession?”).

“If you listen to my mother, my secret ambition as a child was to be a mad scientist”

What I do remember – and this is something my mother seems to have blanked from her memory – was wanting to be a nun. This, from what I can tell, was set off by an ill-advised trip to the cinema to watch Sister Act at the age of nine, after which I insisted all my little friends should address me as Sister Mary William. If I’m to take any solace from this, it’s from the knowledge it probably wasn’t a life of servitude and quiet contemplation that attracted me, so much as the opportunity to jive on stage and wear a wimple with impunity.

What was showing at the cinema any particular week seemed to be a recurring theme in my juvenile career aspirations. Two years later, if memory serves, I wanted to be a witch (Hocus Pocus this time: another dance routine, another funny hat), then a palaeontologist (Jurassic Park), and finally Santa Claus (Miracle On 34th Street). Thank God I’d grown out of it by the time they released Pocahontas.

“What I wanted to be changed quite a lot,” says H, when I ask her, “but basically it was a policeman. Emphasis on the man. I was disgusted when I was told I’d have to be a WPC. I believe I said, with a snort of haughty derision, ‘Urgh, you can’t be a policeman in a skirt. You’d never catch the baddies’. So I changed my mind to vet… well, until I discovered it involved cutting up animals. That’s when I changed to policeman on horseback, or if I wasn’t any good at that, police dog handler. It was all very specific.”

“It says a lot that we both went for jobs with a distinctive wardrobe,” I muse. “It just goes to show, you never know what the future holds. The other day, I was waiting for a bus and staring at this poster for Titanic. You know they’re showing it again, only this time they’re showing it in 3D? Just think if, back in ’97, I could’ve seen myself sitting there; seen how much the world would change.”

“Waiting for a bus, babe,” H breathes on her glasses, polishes them with the hem of her shirt. “It’s hardly Blade Runner, is it?”