I was born into a working class family in rural Sussex. Nothing remarkable about that, perhaps, except that my parents had moved to Sussex from Ashington in Northumberland. While my father spoke without much of an accent, my poor mother knew nothing but Geordie dialect. This meant she had enormous difficulty making herself understood and she had similar problems understanding the everyday speech of the villagers in Sussex. She was to remain virtually isolated by language all her life. Being naturally shy reinforced her isolation. She had a meagre life, though she was 87 when she died.

My father was a strict Christian. As children we, an older brother and sister and myself, were not allowed to join in many of the normal things in the village, such as football practice on Sundays, never went to the cinema, and were viewed as slightly odd because of our Christian background.

In spite of this, I was allowed a remarkable degree of freedom at least during the daytime. With the other boys of my age, all under twelve, I spent many hours playing in the fields and woods, exploring the countryside, climbing up the South Downs to lie on my back on sweet-smelling turf or to gaze for miles at the distant North Downs that marked the edge of the known world.

I was five years old when war broke out but it remained remote for most of my childhood. I watched with interest the vapour trails of the spitfires and hurricanes as they twisted and turned in the summer skies above me during the Battle of Britain. From time to time more dramatic events obtruded. There was the occasion when a German bomber, about to crash, flew low over the village and jettisoned its load of bombs. No one was hurt, but one of them landed on a small road, another in the allotments, and I remember several of my gang picking up potatoes, ready baked by the explosion and still hot, and eating them as we gazed down into the crater. Later, I counted a long column of flying fortresses as they mounted a one-thousand bomber raid in daylight. As I watched (and counted ) one of them peeled out of formation, smoke coming from one engine, and it stalled, clipped the tail of another plane, fell several hundred feet and then disintegrated in a bright flash of flame.

Just before D Day the small lanes surrounding the village were crammed with military vehicles. The men, Americans, gave us chewing gum. When they left we scoured the lanes and found, here and there, odd clips of ammunition which we took away and opened up to obtain the cordite inside and set light to it to watch it fizz.

But the days and years passed without any real sense of the passage of time, and all I have now is a series of images and unconnected memories. My sister at the age of fourteen, was heartbroken one day because our brother, one year older, was permitted to join other older children, under police supervision: a barrage balloon had lost its mooring and had come to earth on the outskirts of the village. The children were used to trample the remaining hydrogen out of the balloon, great fun – except for my sister.

At the village school I did well, a small, fat boy, I had no distractions to stop me working and reading. I read voraciously and by the time I was ten years old I was being taught separately from the rest of the pupils, and in consequence entered a year early for the 11+ examination for the local grammar school, three miles away. I remember sitting that exam in a strange school, standing about in the playground and looking at the large pub on the opposite side of the road, the Half Moon. The pub is still there, but the school has long since gone.

We only once went on holiday in all my childhood days. My father worked at the local lime kilns, earning just enough to pay the rent and other essential bills, and every Friday he and my mother would sort out the contents of his pay packet, counting coins into a series of tins for the rent, the butcher, the milkman, the groceries, the insurance man. I was fourteen before I was given any pocket money, half a crown a week. I was rich. The holiday was a week in Northumberland, staying with my mother’s sister in a back-to-back house. My uncle had been a coal miner, but an accident meant that he was now unable to work. All I remember of that holiday is that my cousin frightened me by shoving a live crab in my face as we visited South Shields one day, and that my mother was terribly upset to find her handbag had been stolen on the train. It contained all our ration books, a disaster, and we were issued with emergency ones and emergency numbers.

The village was very rural, surrounded by four farms, one of which was right next door, so I grew up accustomed to farm animals, horses and cows in particular. We even kept chicken in the back garden of our council house, and my father was an expert gardener. Very early I was accustomed to a huge range of vegetables, which I ate straight out of the ground, turnips, swedes, carrots, peas, beans, several kinds of potato, all kinds of greens, salad stuff, celery, and just about everything edible and cultivable. We were never hungry, in spite of the rationing.

For entertainment we would stage variety shows in the village hall, probably crude, but vastly enjoyed by all and sundry. One year we put on a pantomime. I was Buttons and I remember only one thing: I fell off the stage. The audience thought it was all part of the act and they laughed. I limped back and finished the show, bruises and all.

At the age of ten I moved to the grammar school and all at once I entered a different world. Only three miles from the village, yet now my life would take on a totally different aspect.

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