Paul Scott was born on 25 March 1920, not in some exotic outpost of empire but in the front bedroom of a rented semi-detached house in the north London borough of Southgate. There was a sense of dispossession from the start, or at least there were some unfortunate comparisons to be made: his father, Tom Scott, was a commercial artist who could recall his family 's heyday in the north, and whose studio was less successful than that of his cousins, the Wrights, who catered for more upmarket clients in Richmond. Paul and his elder brother Peter were sent to the Winchmore Hill Collegiate, a private school with a good local reputation, but Paul nevertheless felt and minded the economic strain under which the household operated. In The Bender (1963), he writes about a father who ‘painted pictures for Christmas cards, chocolate box covers and calendars’ and tried ‘to maintain the standards of a gentleman even in a suburban, terraced villa’, but was generally ‘much in arrears’ with his second son's school fees (p. 20). Here, then, was someone well equipped to appreciate the struggles of ex-colonials to hold on to their dignity under post-independence conditions in India.

Visits to the two family studios did more than make Scott sensitive to economic pressures: they led to his boyhood hobby of producing, with his brother, amateur films drawn in Indian ink and passed through ingenious home-made projectors. The slow, painstaking process trained him to work patiently towards long-term goals; it also directly encouraged the literary aspirations inherited from his mother Frances, a woman from a working-class background who had burned her unpublished novels the night before her wedding. By the age of 9, Scott was inventing plots and dialogue for characters modelled on the cinema stars of the day. From here it was an easy step to discovering ‘the power of words without pictures’ (MAM 154), although verbal images would always provide essential starting points for his writing, and punctuate his narratives.

However, it would be many years before he could enjoy the luxury of becoming a full-time writer. Tom Scott lost his precarious foothold in residential Southgate during the Depression, and temporarily moved the family in with his two unmarried sisters on Southgate High Street.