First Generations, by Mary Tamm, Fantom Publishing, £12.99

She’s best known as Doctor Who’s ‘time lady’ sidekick, Romana, and actress Mary Tamm has done a fair bit of time travelling herself since growing up in Bradford’s Estonian community.

As well as starring with Tom Baker in Doctor Who in the 1970s, Mary has appeared in the film The Odessa Files. She was also in Coronation Street and, more recently, has appeared in EastEnders.

The title of her autobiography refers to her role as a first generation time traveller in Doctor Who, and her family background in Bradford.

The book is an affectionate recollection of her childhood and early acting days here, her film and TV career and glamorous life partying with the likes of Richard Burton.

Mary’s Estonian parents arrived in Bradford in 1945. The family lived at Cliffe Villas, Manningham, and the nearby Estonian Club was the community focal point.

“There was always music and dancing, card-playing, lively discussion and drinking,” writes Mary.

She recalls customs of Estonian life. “On New Year’s Eve, my father would fill a bucket with water, then heat a ladleful of tin over the fire until it was molten. He would hurl the liquid metal into the water where it solidified into a grotesque shape. We’d all peer in and try and interpret what it resembled. Whatever it was would augur our fortunes for the year ahead. Russians are notoriously superstitious.”

Anyone growing up in Bradford back then will remember the smog Mary describes.

“When it was foggy, natural elements combined with polluted air to produce a thick miasma which we referred to as ‘killer smog’. I loved these times. Walking home from school became an exciting experience. You couldn’t see a hand in front of you and no sound was heard, except muffled screams of the giant oblong snails that were the trolley buses, their horns attached to overhead wires, headlamps glowing eerily.”

Mary won a scholarship to what was Bradford Girls’ Grammar School. She recalls her first day, surrounded by hundreds of girls, longing to hear the sounds from her previous school, Lilycroft Primary.

“But nothing moved. Or spoke,” she writes. “Then suddenly, commotion. Six hundred chairs scraped as we sprang up like cocked pistols. Miss Black, our headmistress, had entered. My first glimpse of her struck terror into my heart. Tall and dressed in black, hair in a severe bun, she glided up, viewed the assembly, picked up her hymn book and nodded to the pianist. This routine would become as familiar to me as breathing, but now it was hypnotic.”

While she has fond childhood memories, Mary pulls no punches about the ugly side of life for Eastern Europeans in Bradford after the war.

“I witnessed my mother being spat at in the street, and my seven-year-old friend was pushed down a flight of stone stairs as punishment for her ‘funny’ accent. Feelings were running high after the war; Estonians were seen as collaborators. But no-one mentioned the inhumane ethnic cleansing that Stalin exercised over the Baltic states, where tens of thousands were sent to Siberia, the worst swear word imaginable in our household.

“My father lost four brothers to Stalin’s Gulags. He left his country behind, never to see it or his family again. I only saw him cry once, when a letter arrived telling of his father’s death.”