THE BRISTOL ROAD is the main artery out of Birmingham from the city centre to the Longbridge car works, Bromsgrove and the south. During my days at secondary school I travelled along it every day on my way to school and back again after school had finished. In the earlier years I went by tram, until the City Council, in its unwisdom, replaced the electric trams with polluting, gas-guzzling buses. The last trams ran in 1953, though some sleek modern trams were reintroduced to Birmingham in 2015. Whether by tram or by bus, I would alight at Edgbaston Park Road, which led off the Bristol Road to the right, up a hill to the main school entrance.

As the 1950s began, my eyesight, which up to that point had been perfect, began to deteriorate as I became more and more shortsighted. It was some time before I had my eyes tested, even though by the middle of 1951 the landscape was seriously indistinct. Eventually the condition was recognised and I was able to wear glasses. But the first morning that I wore them at breakfast, I had the fright of my life. When I started to drink a cup of tea, the steam from the cup clouded my glasses. This was a wholly new experience for me, and momentarily I wondered if I was losing my sight.

One of the voluntary extra-curricular activities at the school was the CCF (Combined Cadet Force). I never joined it, despite some of my friends trying to persuade me that since after leaving school I would have to do national service for two years, I should have some preliminary military training to make national service easier. My response to this was that if I was subjected to military training at school as well as in national service, I should merely be doubling the agony. I was happy belonging instead to the school scout troop, which enabled me to go camping in Wales, the Lake District, various parts of England within reach of Birmingham, and in 1950 the French Alps at La Grave. We were not allowed to join both the scouts and the CCF, so I opted to remain in the former.