Would my internship bring me face to face with the ghost of an ancient warrior?

What did you want to be when you grew up?

As a four-year-old, I couldn’t see past being a digger driver. Later, I wanted to play cricket for England.

But when the time came to undertake a mandatory work experience placement in the fourth year of secondary school, neither of those options was available. Two weeks in a building society or local solicitors’ firm seemed the most likely thing.

I had initially skipped over the possibility of being an intern ranger at a nearby country park, assuming perhaps that I was ultimately bound for an office job in real life. My mother persuaded me otherwise, maybe figuring the fresh air would do me good.

The first morning was not auspicious, however.

The Wandlebury Ring is an Iron Age hill fort on a range of chalk hills just south of Cambridge. The deep, outer ditch of the fort remains, largely tree covered but easily accessible – the rest of the park being a mixture of pasture and woodland.

My host for the fortnight, warden Bill, decided to show me the site and set a decent pace around its perimeter, providing as we went an astonishingly rich commentary about the park’s history, its natural abundance and topography.

As we passed a thick copse, Bill paused. “Found a dead’n in there once,” he motioned. “Suicide,” he added before heading on and returning to more genial matters.

Not long after he pointed into another patch of dense woodland. “I found another in there.”

I thought perhaps I should have gone with my instinct and tried for the bank. As a 14-year-old, this was an insight into the jobs market I hadn’t anticipated.

There was more to come, as Bill told me the legend of the ghostly knight who appears to any warrior daring enough to visit Wandlebury on a moonlit night and call out: “Knight to knight, come forth.”

And of course, there were the occasional criminal sorts who apparently had be corralled out of the park, with or without help from the police.

By the time we arrived back at the shed that was to be my base for the next two weeks, I was fairly bricking it, terrified at what I might stumble upon in the undergrowth – even if I wasn’t planning to be there in the middle of the night to meet the Iron Age warrior.

But of course – as ever – my mother was proved right in the end.

While my friends made endless teas for paralegals, or had practical jokes played on them by bored office-bound colleagues (one being told to ring the number of a local zoo and ask for Mr G Raff), I learnt how to drive a tractor, lay hedging, restore fallen sheep to their feet and a whole host of other fascinating things under Bill’s watchful eye.

I even cut hay with a scythe, as the warm autumnal sun beat down – long before Aidan Turner made it a thing. I didn’t take my shirt off though; puny 14-year-olds are best advised not to.

Seven years later, when educational life was finished, I found myself behind a desk, which is where I have stayed. But career paths can be twisty. Maybe one day I’ll take on the warrior’s challenge.