For me, this is the quintessential children's song - and the favourite one from my childhood. You may not know it, but you can get a flavour of it either here: http://www.xs4all.nl/~carly/?M=A) or here.

There have been modern versions, but if you can, try and listen to the most famous recording, which was made by a child star of the 1950s called Mandy Miller. Unusually, she was associated with very serious, even tragic parts. She gave an outstanding performance in a film called Mandy about a deaf girl and how she is slowly taught to communicate. When she was eighteen, she retired, became an au pair in New York, married an architect and settled down to being a housewife and mother. What I love about the song particularly is the incredibly proper 1950s pronunciation, and also a certain wistful note she manages to put into the song. It should be a happy song, and yet I always, because of the way she sang it, found it terribly sad. She had a way with wist, that girl, possibly unmatched by any singer until Neil Tennant came along.

The song should be happy. Nellie is in a circus, a popular star who performs the tricks they have taught her. But then she hears the call of the wild, the head of the herd, and she slips her iron chain and heads off for the jungle finding, the song implies, true happiness there. In a way, I suppose, you could relate it to the way Mandy Miller herself turned her back on fame.

I always liked sad things when I was a child. Still do, actually - I'm hoarding 'Grave of the Fireflies' for sometime when I am feeling really miserable! But my favourite book of all was 'Ned the Lonely Donkey', a tale about a poor little lonely donkey who had no friends at all until the last page when he found, I think, a cute little foal to play with. I ignored the foal ending and just wallowed in the misery of Ned on his own.

I was a strange child. When taken out to buy toys, if I spotted one with a torn ear, or a twisted paw, I would always buy that one on the grounds that it was so sad because no-one else would want it. And the odd thing was, I would really, really want the lovely, perfect toy - but I would still buy the imperfect one because I couldn't bear the thought of its rejection.

I'm not sure whether this was just an overly developed sense of social justice at a ridiculously young age, or something to do with the fact that I was an only child. Admittedly, a very spoilt only child who was the focus of a extended family of loving adults.