Glenys Newton, the winning entry in our competition with storytellers the Moth , tells her story live

I grew up in Wiltshire with my parents and two older brothers. My mum, originally from Wales, would have family to visit and we’d often go on day trips. These never went smoothly, but there was one day that was spectacularly unsmooth.

I was five when we arranged to go to Longleat safari park. As it was a special occasion, we had borrowed my Uncle Meirion’s car, a maroon Austin Cambridge. It was shiny and new and, more importantly, big, so that we could fit everybody in it. This was in the days before seatbelts and it was the norm to ram as many people into the car as possible.

We set off with Mum and Dad in the front, and us, with layers of aunts, uncles and cousins, in the back. There were nine of us in total. My mum was particularly concerned that we take care of Uncle Meirion’s car, so we were instructed not to eat our sandwiches, and to sit nicely.

On arrival, it was decided that we could not possibly drive through the monkey enclosure, in case the monkeys did any damage to the car. For us children, this was a great disappointment.

So, with a car full of grumbling children, we missed the monkeys and drove to the lion enclosure. I was sitting on my dad’s lap at the time, doing the steering wheel. We parked up and there, right by the driver’s side window, was a beautiful lion. While everyone was chatting away, I wound down the window to pat the lion on the head. My dad, with his hand over mine, frantically tried to get the window back up again, but before he could, the lion stuck its head up to the open window and roared.

While the many other occupants of the car began screaming, I sat smiling, with my hair blowing slightly in the breeze of the lion’s roar. Dad got the window up but, for whatever reason, the lions then went into a frenzy. They started to climb over Uncle Meirion’s car, leaving the imprints of their feet on the roof. One sat on the bonnet with its feet on the windscreen and I sat matching my little hands up to its great big paws, while the rest of the family flung themselves from side to side, trying to shake off the lions.

‘One lion sat on the bonnet with its feet on the windscreen.’ Photograph: Fabio de Paola for the Guardian

Looking back, I can see that there was just a sheet of glass separating us from them, and we were their dinner. But I was five, and these lions were my friends.

The lions then began to eat the tyres. My brother remembers a hissing sound when a lion punctured one of them, making the car tilt to one side. Dad leant on the horn to try to summon help. The park rangers eventually arrived (they had been taking their lunch break) and they shot the lions. I now know that they would have just shot them with tranquillisers, but to five-year-old me, they had killed them. I was devastated.

My family’s hysteria, meanwhile, started to abate as they realised that this day was not to be their last. We were ushered into the rangers’ truck and Uncle Meirion’s car was hooked up to the back, limping sadly along behind as we left the park.

It must have been a very slow news week, because this story ended up on the front page of the national papers. One had the headline A Day Out With The Newtons, with a picture of Uncle Meirion’s battered and bruised car, plus a list of all its occupants. Tyre companies then asked us to take part in adverts, which we did, with Mum, Dad and me and my brothers smiling through the middle of tyres.

They paid us in tyres, and it wasn’t long before we had more tyres than we knew what to do with. We had replaced those on Uncle Meirion’s car, newly restored by the local garage in exchange for appearing in an advert for them, too. We supplied friends and family with tyres. They were stacked floor to ceiling in the garage and, much to the bemusement of the new house owners, they were still there when we moved out a couple of years later. I hope they managed to make good use of them.

• This was the winning entry in our competition with storytellers the Moth. To see Glenys perform her story, visit theguardian.com.

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