It was about a special sort of man – or was it an animal – who had escaped from some nasty people over some very high mountains. The stuff of adventure.
Except that my mum seemed to have quite an unusual degree of respect for this particular individual, not because of what I saw as his very exciting adventures, but because of who he was.
He was, of course, the Dalai Lama, a confusing title for a six-year-old, especially when his story was about mountains, because although at that age one knows nothing about international politics, or oriental religion, one does know quite a lot about animals.
My mum, having been brought up in an age and an area of society which had considerable reverence for the world's spiritual leaders, of whatever religion, was much concerned about events in Tibet.
The Dalai Lama was a young man then, a stripling in political terms, but because of the special way Dalai Lamas are chosen, he was already regarded as the closest thing on earth to a god, in the sense of the old Roman emperors.
Seeing him recently when visited by that ubiquitous conversationalist Michael Palin, he did seem more of a comic turn than a spiritual guru.
But that is part of the charm of this Dalai Lama, who has had to continue his solitary status outside the environment for which it was intended, in exile.
He has – astonishing thing for a spiritual leader nowadays – an impish and very public sense of humour. Monty Python was not unknown to this monk whom one might have expected to have more in common with St Cuthbert than with the Spanish Inquisition.
But, however much I might want to see with my mum's eyes, he did seem to be rather an irrelevance in the 21st century.
Not any more. Suddenly Tibet is in the news again and we hear him speaking in the measured and wise manner one would expect.
I suppose it was inevitable this would happen in the run-up to the Beijing Olympics and if the Chinese were unprepared for it then they are less canny than one would give them credit for.
All the spectres of past Olympics are raised, from Munich to... er Munich (1936 and 1972) and on to Moscow and Los Angeles.
Politics and sport never become more hopelessly entwined than in an Olympic year.
Apart from putting Tibet back into the spotlight – a spectacular country, the Roof Of The World as it was called, and one which we should be able to see more of – this has made me think how the way we see the world is conditioned by what it was like when we first became aware of it.
Older generations struggled to realise the world was no longer a place where the second most common colour on a globe after the blue of the sea was the red of the British Empire.
For me, places like Korea, Borneo, Cyprus, Tibet and Vietnam are still conflict zones and I struggle to recollect that these have been replaced by numerous others which I had seen as perfectly stable – Yugoslavia, Iran (Persia we used to call it), Sudan, Kenya, Burma, even Nepal.
The Iron Curtain has gone and the USSR been broken up into a variety of unpronounceable countries.
But all the time, Tibet was just hidden away, a sore which was bound to come out sooner or later.
It would be nice to think that it could be settled and the Dalai Lama could go home before he dies, but I doubt it.
China is a very different place from the West, and even from Russia. It is much older, with a culture as ancient as the Nile and Mesopotamia.
It may be taking on some western values, but its power will soon have overtaken that of America.
Who is to tell it what to do and what not to do?