Alwyn’s schoolbooks described Northampton as a town remarkable only for its boots and shoes, and for the efficiency of the Grand Junction Canal that linked the town with the more imposing London, Birmingham and Manchester Canal, but Northampton’s fortunes as a centre of the shoe industry were already declining. The town’s Saxon name of ‘Hamm tun’ described ‘the village by the wellwatered meadow’, and there was plenty for the Smiths to explore. It was his father who introduced Alwyn to Northampton’s green places, the search for pimpernel and dewberries, the discovery of birds’ nests. Together, they went on excursions to the canal or water-meadows or rivers or to the woodlands and lake of Ashby Park, designed by Capability Brown. William exulted in water. As a young man he had come across naked louts lounging on the towpath beside the canal. Could he swim, they asked? When he said he could not, they flung him into the water. The experience made him determined to become a swimmer, and in childhood Alwyn watched his father ‘swim with the ease of the vole’. After attending Sunday chapel (church visits eased off after the Great War), his father would take him to the open-air river baths, although he never taught him to swim, perhaps mindful of Ada’s dislike of her husband being at ‘them dirty baths with all them men’.

Whenever Alwyn wrote of his mother he could conjure up little more than her general sense of disapproval. She could be niggardly or suddenly extravagantly generous, believed in reading the leaves of her teacup to see the future and graduated to seances. She once told him that he would have ‘my bumps read’ which he misunderstood as ‘have my bum spread’. He described her as ‘a country girl … a strange woman’, but it was she, not William, who recognised Alwyn’s musical talent as significant, and made up her mind that something must be done about it. Alwyn’s brother Jim also had an ambivalent attitude to his mother. ‘I was a bit frightened of her at times but would run to her if I was in trouble’, he recalled.