These short days and long nights tend to encourage mulling over one’s own past.
My earliest memory is of falling over and being helped up by my uncle Rex. I still bear the scar on my knee! The tumble must have been on the driveway to Ospringe Place, on the outskirts of Faversham, the town in which I was born and where my parents rented a flat for a couple of years. My father taught history and English at Faversham Grammar School, but after a year or so went back into the Royal Air Force as an education officer and disappeared from our lives pretty well for the next three years.
My next memories were to be of the Yemen.