I’ve never been to a nightclub and I certainly didn’t know anyone who took cocaine,” she says with a laugh. I haven’t the faintest idea what governesses really do. “I didn’t know anyone like Miss Pettigrew. By the end of the day both women’s lives have been transformed.

The action takes place over 24 hours and includes scenes at a nightclub, a succession of men visiting a lady’s flat, and the discovery of cocaine. Because of a mix-up at the employment agency, she is sent for interview with a glamorous but dissolute cabaret artiste who is seeking a new maid. It is a light-hearted, frothy but touching novel about a spinster gentlewoman approaching middle age who has been working as a governess to make ends meet. The book being reissued, Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day, was written more than 60 years ago in six weeks flat. A few weeks before that a confidence trickster had “insinuated himself into my front room” and made off with her purse full of newly delivered pension money. But such are the pitfalls of fame in your nineties that Winifred never got to see the programme on the day it went out she forgot to switch on her television in time. Last month a BBC crew came to her small terraced house to film an interview with the author, who has become something of a local star. As we look through her cuttings scrapbook at the glamorous woman in a hat and veil, she says: “It seems like a different person in there, a different life… One completely forgets what one looked like when young.”

Now one of her books is being republished and she is rather bemused by all the attention. She was feted by her publishers but then gave up writing to became a full-time wife and mother. Watson had six novels published between 19, mostly bodice-ripping rustic sagas about life in the North East – long before Catherine Cookson had published a word. “But it’s not the same as when you’re young. “Well, it’s rather nice, and most heart-warming,” says the Newcastle author, who was famous once before, in the 1930s.

But she thinks she may be just a little too old for the celebrity circus that she has suddenly been plunged into. Winifred Watson has just been rediscovered – at the age of 94. Winifred Watson was a bestselling author when she gave up writing in 1943 to raise her son 57 years on she is back in print.

Winifred watson