Dundledeen had one great fear: teeth. Having his teeth attended to by any dentist was for him a source of torture. My uncle, Dundledeen had joined His Majesty's Services at the age of eighteen and fought in both World Wars. He had many tales to tell - some dreadful ones that made me bite my fingernails, but the majority were funny, like schoolboy pranks.

Supper was always a pleasant if heavy meal Laura, his housekeeper was a nice girl with red hair, good complexion and a soft Irish sing-song voice. He was lucky to have her and I think he knew that. One evening when I was visiting, Laura had cleared the table, but my Uncle showed no signs of moving. I was quite happy though to sit with him in his bright, small but elegant dining room. It was in such circumstances we had often entered into some strange conversations.

He sat opposite me, tall thin and grey, framed by the window in the dying evening light - a light that made all shapes and objects stand out in three-dimensional intensity. While observing this phenomenon I was looking across his garden, through some trees, beyond a broken red brick wall to two rows of distant roof-tops with uneven chimney-tops. I remarked "those roof-tops look like the upper and lower sets of old women's teeth." This prompted my uncle to relate a dreadful experience he had undergone at the hands of a Cairo dentist. The description of the extraction method used was too appalling for words. The evening drifted into a ridiculous conversation revolving round teeth, teething babies, milk teeth, false teeth, no teeth and finally gums.

"Don't you think it would have been much better if human beings had never had any teeth?" said Dundledeen. I visualised a gummy, toothless world in which babies would have soft pink gums as indeed they do for the first few months of life. Then their gums would harden and soon be able to gnaw through solid food - no sleepless nights with teething problems. Teenagers would polish their gums and smear them with attractive gum-sticks in blues, purples, reds or fluorescent white - imagine the advertising world!

This is your local radio station. Hurry, buy six gum-sticks and get the new rainbow-fluorescent free! Health warning - "be sure to massage your gums. Lack of gum massage can seriously damage your health."

Our conversation drifted into the surreal. A high upper gum could be the sign of great intelligence. Even and determined gums would be very aristocratic. Boys would be expected to polish their gums relentlessly so as to sport a pair just like their fathers' and the handlebar moustache would make a comeback.

In Victorian times ladies would have been expected to cover their gums in polite circles, hence the fashion for the Gum-Muff A lady's true breeding would be determined by the quality of her gum-muff. Those found in today's fashion boutiques and department stores though would be designed not for modesty but to emphasise the curves of a well-formed pair of gums and disguise the not so well formed.

The original gum-muff was just a flimsy piece of material, carefully placed over the lips and tied at the back. In medieval times ladies spent hours embroidering the edges of their gum-muffs in delicate and beautifully coloured needlework. In the Georgian period, when the wig was in fashion, gentlemen wore the gum-muff given to them by their lady, made in dream-like lace.

As the evening wore on and we drank sherry and whisky we talked of the toothless world of polar bears and elephants.

A few weeks later my uncle died and I inherited his house. Laura married an orthodontist Dundledeen was buried, aged 69, with all his own teeth.