I was 10 years old and being photographed in my knickers in the middle of the dining room People were coming and going around me,” she says. “We were strange little creatures and all of this was to make society feel better.” Some children had their feet removed to fit the apparatus better. At the age of four, Lapper had an operation to make one of her shoulders fit the arm better. The 200 children at Chailey were called “strange little creatures” and, from the moment of arrival, they were filmed and photographed wearing a variety of experimental artificial limbs. She looks directly at you but it is only when she does something like stick out her tongue – as she did at age six – that you see a real child.”They wanted us to look normal and yet they made us look like Daleks,” she says. The gas cylinders got bigger as Alison grew and her real legs and feet dangle above the knee joints in her metal legs.

“I hissed whenever I moved.”"When I first saw these I was really shocked,” she says and the images do seem like something out of a Diane Arbus photo shoot. If she did survive, she’d be nothing more than a cabbage in a wheelchair. At six weeks, Lapper was sent to Chailey Heritage, an institution in Sussex, where she stayed for 17 years.It was the age of Thalidomide and Lapper had plenty of company (though she doesn’t know why she was born as she was). As an adult, Lapper retrieved these photographs and has organised them into a book Each is labelled by her exact age.

At seven months, she was already fitted with a rudimentary set of arms with little wisks instead of hands By the age of two, the arms had hooks and were gas-powered “See, there’s the cylinder on my back,” she says. “OK, I know that I don’t appear stark naked in the shops in the Venus de Milo pose. But I just think people should see beyond their own blindness.”Lapper is passionate on this subject and is willing to speak of things most people would stay silent on. It cannot be easy: the woman sitting on the floor with big blue eyes, short blonde hair and a nose stud may seem so very normal (a word she hates) but she has had a bizarre life.

At times, I feel like a voyeur when asking my questions and she cannot help but feel a bit of a specimen. But, as it becomes clear, she is rather used to that.Lapper was born in Burton on Trent in 1965 to a mother who was told her baby was ugly and probably wouldn’t live. “This is one of the reasons we’re doing it, to show people that being disabled isn’t being ugly Who says we are ugly? Deformed? Look at Venus. Who calls the Venus de Milo disabled? Nobody! But me, I’m seen as this disabled lady over there.” She mimicks the voice of a stranger pointing at her.

It took someone else to point out to me that I looked like the Venus de Milo. When you are living with a body that you are told is unattractive, disabled, ugly, you just do not think of yourself like that. Actually, let’s be honest, no woman in our society does unless you are Naomi Campbell!”We look at Lapper as Venus a little longer. It is easy, and acceptable, to stare at her in this way: objectified and beautiful, too. They are very difficult to find.” But isn’t there a Venus de Milo in the front garden? “Oh, yes, of course there is a Venus! I’ve got myself in the garden!”Alison Lapper is on first-name terms with Venus and refers to it as a person “She was really my starting point,” she says. We are looking through her portfolio and have stopped at one particular photograph in which she is naked from the waist up, her lower body draped, her hair caught up in a band round her head “This picture was just a happy accident I just had this drape and we were messing around.