Born in Hong Kong, Vicky's growing up continues from the age of eight in England. As the middle child in a family of five, and always keenly competitive, she experiences the normal pangs of sibling rivalry, but already at an early age she is consciously developing her character in the mould of success. Her mother's gift of a doctor's play set when she is seven guides her towards finding her vocation.

As the third child in a family of five, Vicky felt she had her time cut out to attract parental attention away from her two brothers and two sisters. 'I'm the sandwich-squeeze child,' she would often say of herself. Born in Hong Kong on 23rd December 1948 of Chinese and Eurasian parents, Teddy and Susie Yip (nee Ho), it was in this city she spent her early childhood, apart from a few years in Rangoon. In 1957 it was decided that they would settle in East Grinstead and that Susie would bring the older children to England first, to get them settled into school. She was also accompanied by the youngest child Ronnie, while Betty remained behind to keep Teddy company.

By now Vicky was carving out her own special niche in the family. What she really wanted above all else was to win the love and appreciation of her family. She decided there was only one way to achieve the recognition she craved. She would be good, the best at everything she attempted: schoolwork, games, playing the piano, which she started learning at the age of eight, and anything else that appealed to her. Her behaviour too would be exemplary and indeed, everyone who knew her as a child remembers her as obedient and unselfish.

It was quite easy for Vicky to be well behaved. She had little difficulty in doing as she was told, getting on with her homework, keeping her things tidy; to her this kind of behaviour made sense. Quite apart from winning her the approval she was always seeking, it also fitted in very well with a philosophy of life that she was beginning to develop, albeit subconsciously; namely, that there were important things to be done and the only way you could achieve them was by cutting down on the trivial and the time-wasting. She was later to write that she could not honestly say that as children they were ever taught about right and wrong in a moral sense although the practice of their Roman Catholic religion, inherited from their father, featured quite prominently in their upbringing.

Vicky decided to make a virtue of being the useful member of the family. She enjoyed looking after the younger ones, Betty and Ronnie; she was adept at devising games to keep them amused but she always thought of them as charges in her care for whom she was responsible rather than as equals. It was Tina and George, her older sister and brother, with whom she wanted to play; it was their approval and acceptance that she sought. After her father, George was then the most important person in Vicky's life, and so he was to remain throughout her childhood and into early adulthood. He meant many different things to her at many times, and all of them had a profound effect on her own character and development. Older than her by a scant year, he was the one she found it natural to look up to and emulate.

George was cool, reliable and reasonable. He might get angry or upset but he would not demean himself by allowing others to see how much he cared. George was very clever and everyone was pleased with him for that because he was a boy and it would help him in his future career. Vicky admired his intelligence because she too was intelligent but no one commended her for that. Girls were not expected to be clever. Good, pretty and docile: yes, that was important because these were attributes that would help them make an advantageous marriage in due course. As it happened, Vicky was all of those things but what she prized above all else was doing well at her lessons. She loved learning and she particularly enjoyed learning from George. He was the one who introduced her to books and ideas and interesting information about the world outside their closed family circle. She looked to George as her fount of wisdom. `I wanted his wisdom to flow to me and reinforce what I felt was an inadequate personality,' she wrote as a nineteen-year-old.

George was her model and her rival and she wanted to be as like him as possible. He was a boy so she would be boyish too. A natural tomboy, Vicky was never happier than when wearing boys' clothes and devising some game where almost invariably she would be the leader taking her valiant band into battle. She might die, but she would die with honour defending a just cause. Many years later Vicky wrote with endearing candour of her youthful self that she had found that `being a martyr was one of the best ways of drawing attention to myself modestly'. Although she enjoyed playing boys' games and strove hard to identify with the opposite sex because she felt obscurely that this would put her in a more favourable light with her parents, she also remembered feeling resentful that they didn't somehow resist this tendency in her. `Innately I felt it was all wrong.' Here again is the `sandwich-squeeze child' voicing her sense of dissatisfaction with her allotted role in the family hierarchy.

Vicky was to say in later years that the only thing she could remember as belonging entirely to her when she was a very small child was a teddy bear which went everywhere with her. All the other toys and games came out of the communal chest. This enforced sharing of possessions as a child in a large family made her value all the more the many beautiful objects she acquired later, with her husband, to furnish their home. The early deprivation made her generous to her friends and their children. It became a particular pleasure for her to choose and give presents.

Vicky may not have been given dolls but she was given something else when she was seven years old which was to make a lasting impression on her. Her mother gave her a doctor's set which Vicky loved from the first moment of unwrapping her birthday parcel. She knew exactly what to do with it: don the white coat; fix the stethoscope on Betty or Ronnie; ask them what their symptoms were and prescribe them a medicine. She soon decided that it could do with some improvement. Asking people how they felt was not good enough; they were too vague in their answers or they forgot things. She resolved that one day she would invent a machine which would read off symptoms precisely and completely, enabling her to have all the information she needed to make an accurate diagnosis and prescribe the appropriate treatment.

In her adult years Vicky often spoke of the doctor's set and the influence it had on her life. From an early age she was thirsting for information, as much of it as she could absorb. As she grew older she realised that knowledge opens doors and is the key to creating change and improvement in the human condition. Through her illness she learnt something more about the value of knowledge - its capacity to banish the fear and helplessness which comes from ignorance. The future clinician, the scientist, the dedicated researcher, and ultimately the founder of Cancerbackup are all implicit in that seven-year-old's determination to discover more than just the facts about people; she wanted to understand them and help them by doing something worthwhile with her knowledge.