I WAS BORN on 28 November 1935. On that day Adolf Hitler placed all German males between the ages of eighteen and forty-five on the military reserve list, and the Italian Ministry of Propaganda banned musical performances originating from any country that had voted in the League of Nations for sanctions against Italy, following the Abyssinian crisis. Also in the same month Japan proclaimed the puppet state of East Hebei Autonomous Council in northern China. This preceded the outbreak of the Japan-China War in July 1937 by some two years and four months.

In other words, I was born into a world already careering downhill towards an unlimited military conflict that would cause over fifty million deaths worldwide and initiate nuclear war. Needless to say, I had no knowledge of any of this, and my parents, though they followed international events through the newspapers and by listening to the nine o’clock wireless (radio) news every evening, had more personal matters to deal with. My appearance in their lives had followed their marriage by nearly a year and a half, but my mother was already thirty-seven, and her labour was prolonged and difficult. My mother was a doctor, who had been pursuing a busy life working in hospitals for the Birmingham City Council. She had to give this up on marriage in April 1934 to my father, six years her junior, a practising dental surgeon, but in later life she resumed medical work on a part-time basis working in child welfare and ante-natal clinics. She also took over part of her father's medical practice in Birmingham during the war after he became ill with cancer of the throat late in 1942.

After my parents’ marriage they had spent a belated honeymoon over Christmas and New Year in the Italian ski resort of Sestrières in a cylindrical hotel with a continuous ramp spiralling down from top to bottom affording an entertaining track for children who would launch tennis balls at the top, allowing their friends to capture them at the bottom. During this holiday they learned to ski on skis that today would be reserved for cross-country trekking (the heels were not fixed to the skis), and they were also able to observe gloomy members of the Mussolini clan staying at the hotel.