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I was one of that last generation of children born and brought up abroad in what it was then still possible to call the Empire. Our parents were the people who ran the Empire in the Middle and Far East, in Africa and all over the world and the War put a rapid and final end to it.

I was born and brought up in Cairo, where my father worked. One afternoon in 1942 he came home early from his office and told my mother and me that he had just come from a meeting at the British Embassy, where he and the heads of all the British households had been told to get their wives and children out of the country as quickly as possible.

Rommel and the Germans were only a few hours away. All over Cairo there was a frenzy of activity as secret papers were burnt and floated through the streets, headquarters were decamping and military vehicles dashed through the crowded streets in a panic. It came to be known as the Flap.

No-one had yet heard of a small desert railway station called El Alamein.

At midnight that night, my mother and I sat on the terrace of Shepheards Hotel waiting for a bus to take us across the desert to Suez. (My father was staying behind.)I was quite excited. After all, I was only eight and had never been up that late before. I'd been allowed to bring one toy with me and I brought a toy ambulance, complete with wounded soldier to fit into the back.

At Suez, we were all crammed on to the RMS Andes. We were to spend the next two months on board her, travelling down to CapeTown and all the way up to Greenock on a journey that must have been a nightmare for parents but which we children thought was great fun.

From Cape Town we sailed in convoy and were apparently shadowed by U-boats most of the way. There was lifeboat drill and we all slept with a small suitcase packed by our bunks with enough to keep us warm were we torpedoed.

After reaching England, I was put in to a West Country boarding school and, to a small boy, a muddy rugger field in Somerset seemed an awfully long way from Tutenkhamen's gold and the climb to the top of the Pyramids.

I didn't see my father again for five years.

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