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I was born in Malaya in May 1935, and the outbreak of war in 1939 found me in India, at Peshawar on the North West Frontier (now Pakistan), where my father was stationed as an officer in the Indian Army. There was little evidence of the war. We lived in a big house with many servants, one of whom, Sadiq, taught me to ride a bicycle. Once there was a bombing display, at which big biplanes called B.T.s (bomber transports) dropped bombs in an open area, probably to impress the locals. My father at some point got T.B., for which at that time there was no cure. So he was given sick leave and sent with his wife and me to Kashmir, where the mountain air, it was hoped, would help him.

Kashmir was an idyllic place. We stayed for some time in houseboats on the Dal Lake. In the middle of the lake a large boat was moored, from which you could (if you could swim, which I couldn't at that time) dive off and swim, or tear around in a motor boat. We also spent some time at Gulmarg, a hill station, to reach which you could only go part of the way in a car (my father had a crimson-coloured Ford); you then had to leave the car and ride on a pony. At Gulmarg, where we lived in a hut and I attended a day school or nursery, there was a golf course, and you could walk in the woods. Once there was a gymkhana, at which I took part in a horse race with about ten other children. When the starting signal was given, my horse turned round and went the wrong way, which may explain my lifelong attachment to bicycles. We also spent some weeks or months living in tents (carried, of course, on mules or perhaps by our numerous servants), in the valley of the Sind river, a clear grey river rushing over rocks and stones from the direction of the Zoji La pass, which leads to Ladakh. My father fished in the river, with some success (there was a fish nursery which raised trout or similar fish).

My father died in March 1942. Our warships Prince of Wales and Repulse had been sunk by Japanese torpedo bombers to the east of the Malay peninsula on 10 December 1941, and Singapore had fallen on 15 February 1942. I was not aware of these facts. My mother decided to take me back to Britain (it was normal for young children to be sent back to Britain for their education), and we travelled to Bombay in a luxurious carriage on the train (it was, if I remember right, air-conditioned). The journey took over a day.

At Bombay I remember looking out over the harbour and seeing several large warships, though I can't remember whether they were battleships, aircraft carriers or cruisers. (I later learnt that an uncle of mine was in the Indian Ocean at this time, on board the battleship Ramillies, which had been withdrawn from the eastern part of that ocean in order to avoid the fate of her two sister ships. His ship later took part in the liberation of Madagascar from the Vichy French, and was torpedoed in the northern port of Diego Suarez by a Japanese midget submarine, whose crew in escaping ran their craft onto a sandbank, refused to surrender and had to be killed.)

My mother and I sailed on board a P & O liner across the Indian Ocean (the Suez Canal was closed, and the Mediterranean was full of enemy warships and submarines). The sea was a brilliant blue, in which our ship left a creamy wake, and everywhere there were flying fish, whose many colours I noted in an exercise book. Most merchant ships at this time sailed in convoys, but for some reason, perhaps because of our speed, we sailed on our own. We reached Cape Town at the end of April, and spent nine days there, perhaps because there were reports of U-boats. Then we carried on into the South Atlantic. I caught whooping cough, but recovered, probably helped by some comics which an American sailor (by now America was in the war) gave me to read. We had a comfortable cabin, but some evenings my mother would pick up some bedclothes and take me up with her to sleep on deck, near a lifeboat. Many years later I learnt that 1942 was the peak year for losses of Allied shipping to U-boats (nearly 1200 ships, totalling 5.4 million tons).

Some time in June 1942 we reached Greenock in Scotland. My mother had some friends near Montrose, on the east coast of Scotland, and took me with her to stay with them, in a big country house. For part of the time we stayed on a farm, where there were some German P.O.W.s, blond young men. Sometimes we would see Spitfires flying about, probably from the nearby aerodrome at Edzell. At Montrose, which I think had a fishing fleet, there were barrage balloons over the harbour, though I don't think the town was ever subjected to an air raid.

My mother died of pneumonia in March 1943, and I was passed on to her brother, who sent me to a boarding school at Crieff, west of Perth. Here too there was little evidence of the war, apart from the newsreels and newspapers - I remember seeing film of bodies hanging from lampposts in Stalingrad, and of the wide, bleak, white landscape on the Eastern Front. My father's family came from the south of England, and I would often go south for holidays. The train journey, from Gleneagles to Euston, would commonly last twelve hours or more, to the displeasure of an uncle who had to wait for me at Euston. The train windows would be blacked out, and sometimes the train would be kept standing for some time.

Food, during the war, was not in short supply but was much less varied than nowadays. On a holiday in Falmouth to visit my grandfather, an aunt took me to the harbour, where we found an orange floating in the sea. This was a great treat. Food was rationed, but I don't remember going hungry. We often had rabbit to eat. One autumn at school, we all turned out to help the local farmer pick up his potato harvest. Sweets, too, were rationed, and were treated as currency by schoolchildren. At school, every day we would be given a spoonful of Virol, a sweet viscous liquid.

Only rich people, in those days, had cars, and even for them there was a so-called basic ration of petrol. On station platforms you would see notices asking 'Is your journey really necessary?'

We all had gas masks, ration books and identity cards. I never had to use a gas mask in earnest. Clothing was rationed, but adequate.

So much for my contact, or lack of contact, with the war. In addition, my memories of those years are of a world that differed in many ways from today's. Most people travelled, if it was too far to walk or cycle, by bus or train (there were more railway lines then than now). To travel overseas meant a sea voyage, except for the very rich or important, who might fly. Although we thought nothing of it at the time, most people, old and young, were more active physically. At school we played organized games nearly every day (when it rained we would go for walks, and in the summer, on Saturdays, we would spend the day in the hills), and even when games were not organized we would be running about in games of our own devising. This was probably in part because there was no TV and no computers. Adults, if not in the armed forces, would usually be engaged in some kind of physical work (this country still manufactured nearly everything it needed for everyday life). Obesity was almost unknown, and fat people were figures of fun. People died of infectious diseases or old age, as they always had done, seldom of heart disease. Children were, I think, nearly always vaccinated against smallpox, but apart from that we caught whatever came along. Apart from whooping cough on the ship, I remember at school having measles, mumps, chicken pox and scarlet fever (these would affect large numbers of children at the same time). Corporal punishment at school was accepted and common, and no one thought any the worse of the culprit or the punisher. I seldom got through a term without being beaten. There were no plastic bags and hardly any plastics in general, nor any ballpoint pens (I remember being amazed by my first sight of a ballpoint pen, probably imported from America, in about 1947). There were no supermarkets, just little shops like butcher's, baker's, greengrocer's and so on. Overfishing, climate change, the extinction of species, the depletion of resources and the recycling of waste were all unknown, or nearly so. The map of the world was mostly coloured red, and its population was about two billion.

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