The most ancient of all my memories, accumulated over nearly 90 years, is one of annoyance. “What a stupid name – why didn’t they call it something I could pronounce?” I refer to the advent of my younger sister Barbara when I was about two and a half years old. My mother was sitting on a short-legged, cane-seated chair known as “the nursing chair”, feeding the new arrival and trying to get me to pronounce its name. I was not quite aware of what it was, although it appeared to be alive and making odd little noises, but my annoyance was compounded by a sense that no longer was I the focus of my mother’s attention and that things were not to be the same ever again. However this hostility was not to last as soon she turned into a sensible human being and we became buddies. “BaBa” she remained for many years though. This difficulty with names was not all one-sided. For many years she referred to me as “Jindo” although neither of us knew why.

This was taking place towards the end of 1926, probably September/October of that year as she was born on 1st September. The seasons meant nothing to me then as it was always summer in our house which was in Petherton Road, Highbury in North London. It was a delightful place for a child in those days with no motor traffic to speak of and a double avenue of trees down the middle of the road, making it a sort of leafy dual-carriageway with no cars. What traffic there was consisted mainly of tradesmen: the baker, the milkman and the greengrocer all with horse-drawn carts. There were a few other occasional traders, carters delivering and collecting parcels, scissor- and knife-grinder and the occasional door-to-door salesman known them as peddlers. There was also the coalman who would deliver a ton of coal in black, tarred sacks from a fearsome steam-locomotive with a burning coke oven under the driving cab. Each sack would contain 112lb (60k) of coal which would be lifted from the lorry and expertly shot from the sack into a coal-hole, normally covered with an iron disc in the pavement, to arrive in the cellar below.