While it possesses none of the romantic appeal of Proust’s madeleine, a cheese and onion crisp — actually, a whole packet of crisps — remains for me an always reliable conduit to the past.

The unforgettable flavour transports me back to the Norfolk seaside village of Heacham and a landscape still littered with the wrecks of houses swamped by the floods of 1953.

It was there, on a family holiday six years later, that I tasted this delicious novelty, so different from the Smith’s crisps of the day with their blue paper screw of salt. They were made by a company called AGM; the packaging was red and green.

I was only seven at the time but the memory of these crisps — which we bought from the off-sales of a pub close to the railway station after a morning’s cockling — remains vivid.

This is why I was surprised to find that admirable historian David Kynaston claiming in this week’s Sunday Times (in an article marking 50 years of the newspaper’s colour magazine) that “1962 was the years of the first flavoured crisp, Golden Wonder’s cheese-and-onion” (pictured).

The same claim is to be found on Golden Wonder’s website and elsewhere on the Internet. However, I know it to be untrue.

Kynaston — born in the same year as me, as it happens — was clearly not lucky enough to have sampled AGM crisps as a boy. But I am sure that some of my readers will remember them. Please assure me that my memory is not flawed.