I was born in Faversham, Kent, my first breaths being suffused with the scents issuing from the town's two breweries (one still operates — Shepherd Neame). No wonder I've always liked a beer or three! My father taught at Faversham Grammar School, and my parents lived in a rented flat in Ospringe Place.

Just west of Faversham, Ospringe squats astride the main A2 road, and suffers accordingly. Though the amount of through traffic was lessened by the M2 motorway, Ospringe's buildings, some of them ancient, are coated with dust and other noxious and disfiguring materials deposited by a constant stream of vehicles. The village's ancient Maison Dieu was, when I last visited it in the 1960s, a gloomy, neglected museum filled with rather dull displays of Roman pottery. It closed, but was revived, reopened and no doubt much improved in the mid 1990s

Ospringe Place, then set back from the A2 in a large garden, is a fine, late eighteenth-century house, divided after WW2 into small flats, one of which my parents rented. The garden was subsequently sold for indifferent housing. When my parents visited their old flat nearly 20 years later, my mother's bicycle was still rusting in the cellar.

My only memory of Ospringe Place was of falling over in the driveway: I still have the scar in my knee.

Some very early photographs from this period can be found here.

My father, who had been a flying instructor in the RAF during WW2, rejoined as an education officer and was posted to Egypt and later Aden. My mother lived for while in Southampton, but we also spent time with her parents in Hounslow, Middlesex, where I started school.