4.Spring-summer 1955. Home from home.

After Mannheim what? Probably another little German camp in Bruhl, just up the Rhine. Only the vaguest memories. The SCI archive lists several camps in Bruhl and I can’t be sure which one was mine. Nor who was there or what work we did. Only glimpses, fragments.

Big tins of US gift-aid food, orange cheese and red jam. Four-lbs or 7-lbs tins that we opened with a tin opener and ate in various combinations with nearly every meal. I can also feel the thin body of a young woman through the thin silk of a sari or sarong. We’re standing alone in a room at the top of some sort of tower, looking out over a dark town and landscape. The young woman is Dutch, a bit older than me, and I have an arm around her. The cloth she’s got wrapped round her comes from Indonesia where she spent her childhood. She’s wearing it because our camp, or whoever is hosting it, has organised some sort of international night with foreign food. Perhaps she’s helped to make the food. Now we’ve climbed the stairs to look out, and she tells me that in the war her family was forced to leave when the Japanese invaded.

Until then Indonesia had been a Dutch colony, but she doesn’t want to talk about it. I don’t know whether what weighs on her is some particular horror or a vaguer sense of paradise lost. Fools paradise, perhaps, like many of those old colonial worlds. With my own colonial relations, I remember they assumed a different style of life than ours, black servants and sundowners on the balcony when we were turning to white goods, washing machines and pasteurised milk. I had an old great uncle who retired from the Sudan to live alone in a flat off the Earls Court Road. Every evening he cooked dinner for himself, then changed into a dinner jacket before he ate it (the dinner).

I wouldn’t have thought all that as we stood together in the dark. I might have thought of Aunt Lorna and her two children who spent the war in a Japanese camp in the Philippines, but probably not my mother's sister Erica who was interned by her own government in East Africa because she had married a German gold-miner.
In their colonial history and some other ways, the Dutch and English have a lot in common. We clung to each other, this young woman and I, and her sadness as well as the warmth of her body got through to me. The mix of sympathy and lust disconcerted me and it may have been that alternating current which kept the memory aglow.

In hindsight, my sensations that night can also help me work out the time of year and which of the SCI Bruhl camps that was. In summer it would not have been so cold, in winter too cold for her to climb the tower in a single layer of silk. Spring fits and one of the Bruhl camps on the SCI list took place in early April 1955.

I did not keep a diary of my work-camp years, but did take a notebook on earlier building jobs, in Wokingham before and after leaving school. That’s one reason why I remember those first building jobs better than several later work camps round Britain. Perhaps if I’d written more letters, or phoned home, that too might have helped fix things in my mind, but long distance calls were still expensive, for special occasions and emergencies.

At school, I had lost the habit – if I ever had it – of recalling events from day to day in conversation with parents and family. That’s one of the troubles with boarding school. Letter-writing became another sort of boring homework. By the time we were sat down to write them, as part of our Sunday routine, the moment and the need to share it were lost. Our letters, mine at least, were formulaic: 'Are you well? I am. Thank you for the...Yesterday we played St Andrews, and lost 2-1.' even if it was an away match that I didn't watch.

Telling the story is essential to recall, though the story once told often takes the place of the events it describes. Damned if you don’t, damned if you do. It helps if you have been used to communicating as you go, with people close enough to trust and show and interest. Even day-schools can be too far removed. When children get home from school, they mostly dont want to talk about that other world. ‘What happened at school today?’ The answer ‘Nothing much’ unless it was something extraordinary.

With the gaps too wide to bridge, we get accustomed to partitioning our lives, right hand from left. As with home and school, so with home and work, or day and night. We live in one dream, work in another, sleep in another. In a Rilke poem, Orpheus leads Eurydice back up the long tunnel from Hades. In sight of daylight at last, he forgets his deal with the underworld and turns his head to see if Eurydice is there. And her lifeline is cut. Instead of crying out, Eurydice sinks back with a sigh of relief.

For me, as the end of school holidays approached, I could no longer forget the darkness of the term ahead... But by the time I started work on those building sites near home, this sort of tension was gone. The daily cycle ride between home and building site was almost enjoyable, with things to look forward to both ends. When I got home I could talk about the day’s events.

For my parents as well as me, these holiday jobs of mine opened windows on blind spots. They too had been to private schools. Though socialist in principle, they had little contact with manual working life. For my mother, marriage and the war had brought what she sometimes felt as a descent into childcare and housework, for my father the call-up and basic training for the navy came as an almost welcome bread. If I talked about my working days, Martin and Richard may sometimes have been listening. Susan was too young, perhaps, and a girl, but Martin joined me on one of those building sites, and Richard came out to a workcamp in Algeria.

My workcamps in the UK, apart from one in Glasgow, were not as new and memorable to me as Mannheim before or Algeria later. As a child we'd moved a lot and I'd had an unusual sampling of manual tasks. My mother liked us to share with the chores. And, just after WW2, my prep-school offered unusual opportunities, Recently opened, Frilsham House was a private mansion that had served as a wartime hospital. Besides a vista of daffodils, now lost under the M4, the new school had a vegetable garden with fruit-cages, but no playing field or swimming bath. Conventional labour and materials were scarce, so we children were set to work. Some mornings we would shell peas or broad beans for lunch. Some afternoons we would have half an hour off games to pick soft fruit, with the last few minutes into our mouths. Less willingly, we picked flints from the newly levelled playing field.

The real achievement was digging our own swimming bath, teachers and boys working side by side like canal navvies to fill the barrows as they wheeled between us down a central ramp. The hole was not rectangular but an organic oval. Cement was reserved for reconstruction so the pool was lined with the skin of a wartime blimp or barrage balloon. By the middle of summer term, the lining went in, and we watched the pool slowly fill. Then in a triumphant opening ceremony we all jumped in.

Child labour? It didn’t feel like exploitation. Now I realise that our parents were paying for us to do this work and it added value to the school, which was the property of the headmaster. It also made a welcome change and added value to our lives.

When we moved out of London, we called the our house Field House. It wasn’t old or grand but did stand among fields, with a wood at the bottom of its own half acre of long grass. The house was red brick with some outbuildings of wood and corrugated iron. There was no bathroom and no electric light when we first moved in. We got used to stoking fires, filling and trimming oil lamps, taking care of the fragile mantle that made the Aladdin shine so white, and turned black if the flame was uneven or too high. In the lean-to that became our bathroom, we found – I say ‘we’ though Martin and I were away at school - a litter of puppies. The one we kept was already named Laddy, after the Lassie in Lassie Come Home. My father had the top of our bit of field ploughed up to make a vegetable garden. The only time I remember him swearing and hitting out was when I crept up and dropped something on his bare back as he dug. On the other side of the house, we made a lawn and later, inspired by our school swimming pool, I made Martin help me dig a pond. This was rectangular, properly shuttered and lined with concrete. Just big enough for children, until goldfish and water plants took over.

On the Wokingham building site, it was digging again, trenches for foundations, to a longer line and in different company. We had a big mixer to load and tip: one of cement to four of sand or gravel and just enough water to bind it. We stopped ten minutes early for cleaning up, washing and scraping shovels, while the mixer cleaned itself, turning empty but for clanking brickbats. I mostly worked with Ernie and Jock, one from Berkshire, the other... a Jock. Ernie was quieter, ruminative, stout as in strong. Jock was leaner, with a lined face and jaundiced view of life. They were mostly kind to me, showed me what to do and included me in the banter between them. I remember Ernie taking a pick to some hard ground and saying ‘Roll on winter.’ When I asked why he said 'More challenge, when it's frost.' Years later, at Reuters, one of the teleprinter operators I worked with would let the copy stack up till he went on line. Others would prepare a long loop to give themselves breathing space, but he preferred to tap the ticker tape out live, keep pace with the machine.

The apprentice on the Wokingham site was more of a butt for jokes. I was an alien nodding in, he was of their world and on the way up. Often he would be looking down on us, atop a trench or mound with dumpy level or marker pole. When there were gaps between jobs, or we made ourselves a gap, Jock and Ernie saw that I stayed on my feet, shovel in hand. ‘You don’t have to do anything, just look like it.’

Or they nodded me off to a hiding place behind a pile of blocks, ‘Get in there and write your notes.’ They knew I was writing about them, they seemed content with that but I dont remember them asking what or why. Words were my business, they may have felt. The working classes and the wordy class...

In the beginning was the word? No, the word may have become God, but first there had to be something to talk about, give the orders to. Words armed themselves with swords, or vice versa. Once the point was driven home, the swords were beaten into ploughshares, into cash, with a few kept for ceremonial use, as a reminder. If my work-mates accepted me, it was because, for the moment at least we were on equal terms. I might have the notebook, but they could tell me what to do, and my scribble might come to speak for all of us.

We were paid weekly, notes and change, in little brown envelopes. How much? Them more than £10, me less, maybe £7 12s 6d. Once out of the envelope, the money lost its shine, and I didn’t like the smell. On work-camps, the pocket money for long term volunteers was only 10s a week. I didn’t mind that because we got our keep and all got more or less the same, and beer cost about 6p a pint.

The other Wokingham job was with a decorating firm, on a contract for school windows. Hundreds of metal windows, which we painted with grey undercoat then glossy white. Narrow frames, glass easily smeared. First we had to scrape off dirt, lumps, loose flakes and rust. I had quite enjoyed the building work, but not this. It was holiday time and the classrooms were empty. But for my parents’ money, and their decision to send me to private school when I failed my 11 plus maths, I might have gone to that school or another like it.

In my last year at Leighton Park, we had exchange visits with a new secondary modern school in Slough. I was quite envious because it was co-ed and I liked a girl I got talking to. I felt I was missing something, not just girls but another way of being. With this girl, if only for an hour or two, I felt that she had more to her than she was ready or able to say. For my part didn’t have to blurt things out, then wish I’d said them differently. My family said they saw my lips move after I spoke, as if I were savouring my own words. But now I think it may have been a process of revision: you may need to get something wrong before you can put it right. What I found with this girl was a new quietness, watchfulness, her in my world for an afternoon, then me in hers.

On Guy Fawkes night at Leighton Park, which really was a park – a treelined half-mile along a main road into Reading – we had a big bonfire. Odd that a gentle Quaker school should burn a Catholic in effigy. Odder still that we 'Leightonians', many of us from liberal families, should describe our local counterparts as ‘Scummies.’ I'm sure that was the word I heard used to describe the boys who came in for bonfire material, or a fight, or just to watch the fireworks. What we saw in each other was not quite the 'inner light' or 'that of god in everyone.'

The foreman on the school-decorating job behaved more like a Christian. He gave himself the dirty jobs, like spraying ceilings, and made sure the kettle was boiled in time for our breaks. We had our tea and sandwiches off an improvised table in the hut. The surface was an asbestos sheet, safety was not an issue then, and the grey surface was good for drawing on. Every day, we moved our tea things to make new space for his emerging city-scape. As other people read or smoked or joked, the foreman added more buildings, roadways, trees and lamp-posts. No people, birds or dogs as far as I remember. Unlike my notes his work was open for all to see. Later I read the Ragged Trousered Philanthropist and Jude the Obscure, but I already began to realise that creative intelligence can pop up anywhere.

At one of my earlier schools I remember being impressed by a painting of huge leaves driven by wind. They looked as if they would blow out across the room and I was surprised to find that the painter was a bad-tempered bully in the form above mine. Forty years later, I was struck by another tree painting, on display in the hall of a Manchester comprehensive. This time the roots as well as trunks and foliage were visible, and they projected out of the picture into real space. I was told the artist was an Asian girl, and that she had since been removed from that school. Her elder brother told outraged teachers not to worry, she would be able to paint at home and he would supply her with materials.

So what would I have been writing in my notebook? I could find it now, but I I fin d my writing hard to read. Then as now, I had no proper plan for my writing or future publication, but I had been thinking of becoming a journalist. My great-aunt Olive, founder of a famous girls' school, had urged me to go for Law. She might have settle for the Times, but that wasn’t what I had in mind. My father read the Times on his train to London, but I rarely looked beyond the boring small print of the then front page. At school, the only paper I liked the look of was the News Chronicle. That was like a leftish Daily Mail, and the journalist who caught my eye was a foreign correspondent called James Cameron. I wrote to him and he wrote back, inviting me to lunch. ‘Give me a ring when you get to town,’ he said. In the byline mugshot, Cameron had a wolfish look, but the voice on the phone was plummy: ‘Jump in a cab,' he said when I rang from Paddington. I had only travelled in taxis with family and heavy luggage, never on my own as the quickest way from A to B.

James Cameron in the flesh was friendly, direct and humorous, ready to disillusion but not discourage me. ‘It’s a job like any other,’ he seemed to be saying, ‘but if you try somehow, you just might find....’ ‘Keep in touch,’ he said when we parted, and a year or two later I got back to him. And many years afterwards again, in Cairo and Algiers, I met women who fondly remembered their moments with the roving Jimmy Cameron.

By then I’d been given more good advice. Before or during the war in the Pacific, my father’s elder brother Gerald – Lorna's husband - had got to know a journalist called Christopher Chancellor. He went on to become Reuters managing editor and Gerald arranged for me to meet him. In his office at 85 Fleet Street. Sir Christopher, as he may have been by then, helped me off with my coat and drew up a chair for me. He asked why I was interested and told me how the agency worked. It was then a trust, serving mainly the British press, with a network of correspondents in places that no one paper or broadcaster could afford to cover. Once it may have been possible for copy-boys to rise to editor-in-chief, now I was advised to go to university and keep an open mind. Which I did and it was ten years later that I applied for job at Reuters. By then Chancellor had moved on and I did not mention our meeting. What got me the job was a degree in Arabic and a couple of freelance pieces for the News Chronicle and Guardian. I felt a mixture of moral superiority and resentment as Chancellor's son, Alex, rose quickly through the Reuter ranks and PollyToynbee, barely out of university, got in at the Observer.

My first three workcamps, in Spring 1955, took me to Birmingham, Hampshire and Glasgow. Between these short-term projects I spent time at the IVS (International Voluntary Service, UK branch of the SCI) centre in Pembridge Villas, not far from where we’d lived in Holland Park before moving to Field House. The Birmingham camp was based at a community centre in a drab suburb. All I remember about it is that Birmingham buses seemed to run round the city rather than in and out of it. People would go to neighbouring suburban centres but not into the city. A teenage boy I talked to had only ever been there once. Same with me. Like the other boys around I lacked the money and the curiosity.

Some of the campers on these short term projects were ardent believers who liked to sing from our little yellow SCI songbook. From them, and from a short history of the movement, I gathered that the founder, Pierre Ceresole, had gone to prison for refusing military service during the First World War. Afterwards he had brought French and German volunteers together to clear up some of the rubble. Not all the French and Germans were ready to forgive each other but the idea remains sound. A similar approach is being adopted by Israeli opponents of the Palestine occupation who raise funds and work with Palestinians and 'internationals' to rebuild demolished Palestinian homes. (One, which I helped to rebuild for the fourth time in 2002 has just been destroyed again, in February 2012).

My IVS/SCI badge was a pick and shovel in bas-relief on bronze, a more or less conscious tribute to the soviet hammer and sickle. I’ve got one in a little box with a Bronze Cross life-saving medal from school. The SCI anthem was a prayer to Friendship, l'Amitie: 'You, who make half our miseries disappear, come and make us live like brothers' to a mawkish melody. If the devil gets the best tunes, good causes rarely get as good as they deserve. What could be less convincing than 'We shall overcome...some day'? Once in a goodbye ceremony at the end of a workcamp, we were stood in a circle on a railway platform to sing the dreaded song. As the others held hands, I slipped away – petered out ?– to the Gents or nearest cigarette machine.

The Hampshire camp was at Le Court, a Leonard Cheshire home for disabled ex-servicemen and people with incurable illnesses. A bright and sunny place, with good food, friendly nurses and one or two patients I enjoyed arguing with. We never saw the founder, Group Captain Leonard Cheshire VC. He had been a bomber pilot, got promoted young and decorated for bravery. He played a part in both the Dam Buster raids and the nuclear bombing of Nagasaki. When war was over he turned from killing to caring, though that may be too glib. Cheshire owed his wartime reputation and promotion partly to the care he showed for his air crew. He had bombers stripped of some lethal glass-house gun turrets. That both saved lives, and made room for extra bombs or fuel.

Le Court, the building, reminded me a bit of my Frilsham prep school. Sometimes I felt uneasy. Managers, staff, patients were all in it together in the nicest possible way, but there were fault-lines, and I felt one or two of the patients were uneasy with me: bad enough to be young and disabled in a wheelchair without having to make way for smart-ass volunteers. One night, there was a dance at Le Court. What bothered me was not the privilege of four good limbs but the fact that in this rather classy setting I only had a bright green sports jacket. I wonder how some of my team mates felt with their coloured skins (see other picture, with Ben, from Ghana, tipping the barrow. He surprised me one day by pissing down the bathplug as the water ran out, but then that seemed quite reasonable.)

The person I admired on that camp was not a brave patient or the sainted war-hero, but another boy on my team. About my age, he was tall with a bow-wave of swept back hair and some skills that the rest of us lacked. He came on placement from a borstal or approved school and was part-way through a painting and decorating apprenticeship (see picture of him blow-lamping a windowframe as Mehdi and I scrub the floor). His masterpiece was a rainbow toilet seat. He found his niche in an outdoor toilet we were doing up. He removed the old wooden seat, then sanded, primed and undercoated it. For top coat he selected a range of coloured gloss, which he applied in concentric bands, each merged into the next. A lucky horse-shoe rainbow for all who sat thereon.

What happened to him afterwards? What prompts, forces or enables people to change course? Ceresole seems to have been consistent, went to prison for his beliefs then set about putting them into practice. Cheshire turned from warrior to carer. My mother stuck to her pacifist guns even when war broke out, and her husband and brothers joined up. Her younger brother Tony was angry with her at first but sounded more understanding in the letters he wrote as the allies advanced through France. In the Ardennes, he got killed.

The Tenants, a family we knew in Wokingham, upped stumps and moved to Scotland. Peter Tenant worked in London, got to know my father on the train and my mother through Quaker meetings. He gave up his London job and moved with family to a huge run-down estate in Stirlingshire. One school holiday I hitched up to stay with them. It took a day and a night and Valerie Tennant, Peter’s wife, met me at Callander in the morning. She came in a van and we stopped on the way up a long private road to pick up a tree. I was 16 and reasonably strong, Valerie was heavier and stronger. She went round to the thick stump-end of the log, picked it up and waited for me to lift the thinner one. 'Damn,’ she said as we wrestled the log into the van. Her end secured, she bent down and kicked off what remained of her petticoat.

Life at their Invertrossach was a mix of hard graft, refinement and eccentricity. Through the day we would saw, dig or knock in fenceposts, and there was a small tractor that one of the girls taught me how to drive. At 4 pm our work on the garden and land would stop for tea in the drawing room, a sprinkling of Chinese leaves in a silver pot. Sometimes the adults dressed for dinner, and I was a bit older than the Tenant girls, almost adult. One night the Moderator of the Church of Scotland was to be a dinner guest. Even if I'd possessed a dinner jacket, I wouldn't have brought it in my rucksack. I need not have worried. As it turned out there were two old old tweedy jackets at table, one that normally served as my school uniform, the other worn by Peter to keep me company. What drew or drove the Tenants back to Scotland was a sort of greenish patriotism, the need for something more down to earth than Whitehall or the City.

After their children left home, Peter and Valerie Tenant moved again, this time to Northern Ireland, where they worked to give comfort, if not reconciliation, to Catholics and Protestants. In the image I have of them, Peter and Valerie sit facing each other across a wide open fire. It’s after dinner. Valerie smokes a pipe as she picks and pokes an embroidery hoop, while Peter darns a long woollen sock. That done, he reaches for a volume of Walter Scott and reads aloud.

Michael Sorensen, the secretary of IVS during my first two years, was another strange man. He dressed formally for such an offbeat job, often wearing a long dark overcoat, and rarely wasted words. When he talked to people, he looked before he spoke, from eyes set deep under heavy brows. Sometimes he smiled, as though through a chink in the clouds. I never knew what he did in his office, but he spun no lines, showed no ambition for himself and I trusted him.

The IVS centre in Pembridge Villas became a home from home, not unlike our old house in Clarendon Road. The tall terrace building was part-office, part-hostel for volunteers passing through. In the front office was Esma Boroughs who received volunteers like me and other visitors. He was more welcoming and talkative than Michael, small, almost shoulder-less under loose knitted jumpers. In contrast, his head was classical and his voice melodious. Staying at the hostel could be entertaining or boring according to who else was there. Adelaide must have been a refugee from Franco Spain. She was temperamental, far from home and found communication difficult, and a lot of catering got left to her. Another longterm volunteer and CO was John Burningham. We never went to the same work camps, but often met in London between them. John had a clearer sense than I did then of who he was and what he could do. He was thickset, creative and funny, looked a bit like Orson Welles and always had a girlfriend. I liked and envied him. Within a year or two he was producing lovely London Transport posters. Later he wrote and illustrated some of the best children’s books I’ve ever seen. John had an Indian friend, Homi Katrak, who often played Rastus to his Massa in a little comedy of the Old South. Homi had been, may still have been, a waiter at the Savoy and talked bitterly of the meanness he found behind the facade, not just between Upstairs and Downstairs, but within the ranks.

A French Moroccan woman stopped by at the IVS and quite shocked me with a joke about an old sheikh who satisfied his wives with carbon paper. There was also a Frenchman who had worked and hitchhiked round the world. One day we were to attend some event that required a long ride on the tube. I had looked forward to the journey together and he was happy to talk. Half way round the Circle line we went, with never an interesting moment. How could anyone have seen so much and thought so little?

Et tu, Greg? I once worked for a week or two in the IVS office and chanced on one camp-leader’s report about myself. After one or two plus-points, he ended ‘Frankly I didn’t like to him.’ The next secretary of the IVS was called Frank – Frank Judd, who l later became a Labour minister, for the Navy perhaps. He wasn't the man who made the report about me, nor did we like each other very much.

Michael Sorensen and Esma must have given me the benefit of the doubt. By the time I got to Govan in Glasgow, it was as work-leader on a fortnight’s decorating project. We were to clean and redecorate some old people’s flats, in tall dark tenement buildings unlike anything I had seen before. Narow entrances, long flights of cold dark stairs, toilets on landings. The old tenants mostly stayed put while we worked around them. I arrived a couple of days in advance to see what had to be done, how best to do it, and where to get advice and materials. Although I was still 18 and one of the youngest of some dozen volunteers, a little advance knowledge was all it needed to lend me authority, coupled with what little I'd learned on school windows in Wokingham. I tried to do my share of the dirty work as well as doing the rounds and delivering what was needed from place to place. When I didn’t know what to do, I said I would go and find out. We got some help from the man who had set up the jobs for us, and some from the former tradesman at the paintshop. Some of the old people slept through the day under dust sheets in their chairs. Others got us cups of tea and gave us cake. I was too busy or careless to take this chance of finding out more about the place and their lives.

Some of the people we worked around had almost nothing, just cans and crusts, bottles on bare surfaces. Others were hemmed in by accumulated furniture and bricabrac which made life difficult for us: what to pile on what, where to put paintpots, ladders and ourselves. A table or chair might collapse when moved or stood upon. A skirting board, hollowed out by dry rot, crumbled when the surface-paint was scraped. Plaster, stripped of the paper that kept it in place, would fall back onto the floor revealing expanses of old brickwork. We took to leaving the existing paintwork and paper in place, for fear of what we’d uncover. In one case, I remember cracks in a wall encrusted with little husks, generations of bedbug shells. We could rarely make a proper job of a place, but some of us – and some of the residents – didn’t seem to know the difference. So we patched and skimmed: if a job’s worth doing, it’s worth doing badly. On the one hand, I discovered how incompetent some otherwise intelligent people can be. On the other, I was encouraged to find that we could cope somehow, and by the appreciation some old tenants showed. Even good intentions better than nothing?

At the community centre where we stayed, I got to know an old shipyard worker who had not worked since he fell down a funnel. A more-or-less reformed alcoholic, he was gave me glipses of an industry in its ruthless heyday. One night I walked down to the water’s edge and climbed as far as I could up a crane. Lying on my front far out on the metal arm, I could look straight down onto the dark water. Pitch dark, with oily reflections of the lights the other side. Why climb up there? To see if I could, to see how it looked and felt up there, to talk about it sometime afterwards...As often, especially in the dark, climbing down was more difficult than climbing up.

Harmony Row was an infamous little street not far from where we lived and worked. I didn’ t hear the Row, but walked down the street on a Saturday or Sunday morning-after, the pavement and roadway a mosaic of broken glass. I hate that crackling underfoot, even now on a Swansea beach, as I walk on a patch of shells left by the tide. In Glasgow pubs, I liked the combination of pint and whisky, though not sure which to chase with which. After two, it makes no difference, but I hardly got to that. The district had a reputation for being tough, but the only time I ever felt afraid was when a man I knew came up behind my at the bar. His conventional ‘Arright. Jimmy?’ hit me like a thunderbolt.

Later, working in an engineering factory, I realised that this aggressive joviality is the product of noisy workplaces where men have to shout at each other to be heard. The habit, once formed, extends to other social settings, as does deafness among men and women subjected to the crash and grind of machinery. Or heavy music, as I tell Will, our youngest son works with that.