Brentwood

I was born in Brentwood, Essex, on 28 October 1957. I was born at home, in a house that my parents had just built. My father was an accountant with Shell; he had met my mother at the firm - she worked in a department which arranged mortgages for Shell employees. They managed to finagle a mortgage from the company, and built the house where all six of us children were born. We lived there, in deepest suburbia, until I was 16.

My earliest memory is of my older brother, Nigel, hitting me in the face with a spade when I was four. We were playing in the sandpit in the back garden, and fell out over something. The result was that he belted me in the mouth, and I ran crying indoors. My two front teeth fell out soon after.

My mother was, and is, a devout Catholic, a faith she inherited from her grandmother, who was Irish. Every Sunday we would troop off to church, where my brother and I were altar boys. My father - formally an Anglican but with a dim view of religion - stayed at home to mow the grass in our large back garden. He said it was his only two hours of peace during the whole week.

I went to a Catholic primary school - St Helen's, next door to Brentwood Cathedral - which I see from the Internet has recently been completely rebuilt. I remember standing in line with my mother, waiting to enroll in the school on the first day. The woman behind us also had sons called Nigel and Paul. She and my mother have become lifelong friends.

My first teachers were civilians, but soon I came to be taught by nuns - Sister Margaret-Mary, Sister Vincent, and Sister Rafael. They wore black habits with veils that covered their hair. After many hours of prompting, Sister Rafael eventually pushed back her veil to show the fascinated class a lock of her dark brown hair. We were agog that she wasn't bald after all.

I was good in school - I got pushed up a year - so I was always one of the younger children in the class. Later, in secondary school, I joined the fast stream to O levels, so I ended up being a year younger than everyone else in the class. That had advantages - it meant I had less pressure to go off to university straight away. But it also meant that I was the smallest, so was never the first pick for any sports team. That in turn meant I was not interested in sport. My son is very good at sport. He gets it from his mother, not me.

Sister Rafael's class saw my first love affair. I forget her name now, but I must admit I rather fancied the new girl in the class. She came from Herefordshire. Not knowing how to approach things, I concealed my affection under a cloak of rudeness - I called her a "Hereford cow". Sister Rafael took a dim view of this, and it took me a couple of decades before I was ever able to conjure up enough courage to declare my feelings for another woman.