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merely very foolish and didn’t know myself by heart. At any rate, when she went to school I missed her, and I thought I should go with her too. I began to clamour to go to school. As seems incredible now, to one for whom school days were ever and always the worst days of my life, early and late, kow-towing to petty authority, learning things I never needed to know and not learning things I did, the history of an education for most of the population. But I didn’t want to be left at home. I thought I was missing out. (There’s one born every minute.)
    So an arrangement was made and I was allowed to go. I started school in my fourth year, the due age being five. But it was a disaster, even in the shelter of the beginning infants. I could not bear it. It seemed I was a very nervous infant, not cut out for a career in the infantry. What’s more I was an embarrassment to my sister. She had to stand and hold my hand in the playground, waiting for the bell (ask not for whom it tolls: it tolled for me), where the infants ran on the girls’ side of the hall. For boys and girls were otherwise segregated at play. This was not a good start for a boy, a damaging legacy, a telling indicator?
    I’d got ‘run down’ as they used to say, in that now distant world of Cod Liver Oil, Radio Malt, Virol, Minidex, and other proprietary medications, intended to put iron in the soul, treatments so numerous that being ‘run down’ must have been a national pastime in those days. In my case it was to do with nerves, the nervous system. I was ‘highly strung’ as they still say of horses and used to say of children. I suppose this would be why Elliman’s Horse Rub or Universal Embrocation was also applied to me, from time to time, and other potions, on bits of greaseproof paper, on my chest, Wych-Hazel another I seem to remember, not to mention the consumption of Hot Toddy, my father’s dire all-purpose concoction that might have put me off whisky for life, had I been less the man I am. So much do I have to thank him for.
    In response to the stress of encountering school, I developed a large scab on my bottom, as the polite expression was, necessitating sun-lamp treatment, at Dr Miller’s in the Bay. I remember the pleasant trips there to the West End on the top of the bus with my mother, and lying on the bed, under the big round Sun Lamp, and hearing my mother in another room, talking with Dr Miller, the family doctor, a Scot who drove a red Aston-Martin and between surgeries spent most of his time playing golf. Apart from my condition they’d perhaps be discussing my father’s latest psychosomatic tummy and self-prescribed fish-diet regimen.
    I had to be withdrawn. School fell back below the horizon. But I knew it existed now, and what it was, in all its horror, even when I wasn’t looking at it. I was that much less innocent now. Time acquired new meaning, for it would run out. But however shadowed by experience, I had to return to the womb of home and discover myself again, in childhood’s dreamy world, digging for coal on the top terrace beyond the gooseberry patch, among the blackcurrants, driving dinky cars through the mud, flying little silver ‘Meteors’ and ‘Canberras’ at arm’s length across the sky, that manner of diversion, or sailing to and fro on the swing, all the world below me, dreaming along. I liked my own company but I had a convivial sense of fun too and knew a joke when I spotted one. (When I burped at table, ‘just testing my brakes’ I’d declare. Oh the age of the motor car....)
    Once, up there at the top of the garden, I heard my father in conversation with Stan Valentine over the hedge. Stan was the black-sheep brother of the great Welsh Nationalist Lewis Valentine. It was said that as an infant he was so wilful his mother threw him to the end of the bed. Whatever that meant. Welsh was his first language. He liked to