 Back in the lounge of the house, where she has lived for 36 years, Jean sits on her armchair in the corner, a little way back from the tiled fireplace, on either side of which are small stained glass bay windows. One for the owl and one for the pussy-cat of Edward Lear's poem. She is talking of how she was brought up in Liverpool with her brother, Ken, 82, and her parents, whose full names she does not wish to give. Jean is the guardian of her own past. Even when you are famous, some things are private. For example, Alexander is actually her father's middle name. "I was born in Rhiwlas Street (one of the old Welsh streets in the Princes Park area)," she says. "My father was an electrical engineer who worked for shipbuilders all over the country. If he came back home with his toolbag, it meant he was going away on the midnight train to Glasgow or Sunderland or Barrow-in-Furness. "We wouldn't see him for a couple of months." Times were tough, but most people were decent, honest and respectable. "If you couldn't afford something, you did without," she recalls. There was a tin bath in front of the fire, where Jean spent her early childhood. Later, she lived in houses on Harrowby Street and Arnold Street, both of which had plumbed baths. Jean began her education at Upper Park Street School, from which she went to Granby Street School, where one of her classmates was Lita Roza, the superb big-band singer, who still lives under the shadow of her biggest hit, How Much Is That Doggie in the Window? "I was reading before I went to school," says Jean, "Our mother taught us. I remember reading a shortened version of David Copperfield when I was six." By today's standards, life might have seemed spartan, but there was plenty of fun. Jean and Ken were taken to the Rialto cinema by their grandfather, who would guide them through the smoke to the front-row, complaining how it affected his chest. Then, inexplicably, he would light his own pipe. Basil Rathbone and Ronald Coleman were among her favourites of the screen, which towered before her. | 
