When I was recalled from my posting at my grandmother's, at about the age of nine or ten, I had to endure with the others the trials of being cooped up in a small back yard every weekday after dinner. My solitude was severely dented. My mother tells me I used come out to the shop with my hands covering my ears, complaining: ‘The noise! The noise!’ The back yard was a place of survival of the fittest.

We often got a tuppenny wafer after dinner. Anthony devised a sort of ‘South Sea Bubble’, and the rest of us were invited to invest in it. The investment was half your ice cream every day for six or seven weeks, and the promised return at the end of that period was a train set or, in my sister's case, a doll. There was no knowing where these handsome dividends were going to come from, but those who didn't buy into the scheme were subjected to the ‘Tee dee Mun’.

The ‘Tee dee Mun’ was a ritual chant which heralded physical assault. Anthony chanted it to the air of the BBC's signature tune for ‘Music While You Work’: Tee dee Mun, dee Mun Mun Tee dee Mun … As he chanted, he raised his right hand slowly. The thumb and index finger were joined to form a circle, the way someone tasting a sauce would do it to signal perfection. As the chant came to a climax, he would bring his hand down suddenly on the recusant investor, pinching him on the shoulder or the back of the neck.

As the eldest, I had a position of responsibility in the back yard, one that I didn't always live up to. Anthony rarely threatened me, and I often intervened to prevent him from bullying the younger ones. But I, too, eventually became an ice–cream speculator, though my powers of persuasion derived from abuse of the respect in which I was held, rather than from the threat of physical force.

We developed an entire culture in the back yard. There were rituals of homage and appeasement.