I was born during one of my father's long absences required by the 'exigencies of the Service' - he was a Royal Navy pilot. This meant that the family home in Alverstoke was often rented out, and my mother would translate to my grandmother's home in Barry for the duration. It was a slightly difficult birth, being both premature and backwards, so Mum had the assistance of a Cathedral Road specialist. Finally I was born in an annex near St. David's hospital in Cardiff.

And so started a long period of 'dual nationality': changing primary school, friends, scout troops and piano teachers back and forth, and trying to cope with the different sequence of the curriculum in the various schools. Welsh was picked up in very small doses when in Barry. On one occasion I threw books at the Barry teacher because I had not done fractions (the vulgar type) in England, and no-one had explained what those little lines meant. I never got the hang of asking the teacher for help, and in subsequent education did not really grasp subjects fully because of that, except where I could be totally self-driven. For mathematics in secondary school I had the great fortune to sit next to a friend who later became a brilliant academic (he set up the Oxford faculty of Materials Science without knowing a thing about the subject), and he would patiently explain his way of solving equations. He was one of seven boys from St. Athan (village school not RAF camp) who had passed the grammar school '11-plus' selection exam to become dayboys at Cowbridge, five miles away.

Farming
During our final sojourn in Barry, my father searched South Wales for a suitable smallholding that he could buy with his 'golden handshake', a redundancy payment offered to many serving officers in 1958. Farming had long been an ambition, and many remote and mysterious places were considered. My mother's preferences held sway in the end, and we settled on a fine Georgian-fronted farmhouse with a somewhat run-down set of farm buildings and some acreage which had been sorely depleted by sell-offs to neighbouring farms and for village-building.


Boarding at Cowbridge Grammar School
During my two terms as a dayboy my father decided to return to flying and give up the farm. Because the eventual domicile of the family was uncertain, initially a boarding place at Llandovery College was considered, provided I could pass the entrance exam at Scholarship level. I did not like the place at all, and I think I must have thrown the result. And so I finished up becoming a boarder at Cowbridge.
This was a most unusual institution, not to say archaic. But it was small and quite friendly - only 50 boarders alongside 300 dayboys. Two wonderful boarding masters ran most things with the assistance of a few second-year-6th prefects. The headmaster also lived in, and ruled firmly but fairly, if somewhat biased towards rugby (he had played for Wales) in preference to most other extra-curricular activities.
The boarding house was very much the centrepiece of this old school, founded in 1608, and the original single classroom of the 1608 school, the Schoolroom, was used variously as the boarders' common room, the weekday Morning Assembly, roll calls etc., and during the day became one of the junior classrooms.

Music was my real passion by this time, but it was not matched by tremendous ability. Another friend joined the boarding school already able to play all the Beethoven sonatas by heart, so my struggle to play any of them decently meant that music was to be ruled out as a career. Not having a music department in Cowbridge Grammar School did not help, but one of the boarding masters was very encouraging, and sonehow I made some progress on viola and clarinet.