I started at St. John’s in the infant school in September 1970. I can only remember one thing about my first day. During morning break I had gone into the boys’ toilets and entered a cubicle. A short while later the door to the cubicle swung inwards to reveal a largish crowd of children who had gathered to guffaw at the sight of my naked pink buttocks! The boy who had orchestrated this “entertainment” subsequently became a good friend of mine but I didn’t feel very friendly towards him as I stood there with my underpants round my ankles, flushing scarlet with embarrassment! A valuable life-lesson learnt within a couple of hours of starting school: always push the lock across when you enter a toilet cubicle!

There are a couple of slightly strange things that I remember about those early days. One was the fact that St. John’s contained about five sets of twins when I arrived, which still seems an extraordinary number for a smallish school. The other was that the infant school was permeated by a very strong and by no means unpleasant smell. I’m not sure what the origin of this scent was but, as the school was still relatively new, I suspect it was probably given off by the carpets or other furnishings. It was a very evocative odour, no matter where it came from.

My final year in the infants was spent in Mrs Sanders’ class and I remember that she could be quite strict at times and did not praise pupils lightly. I was very proud when I managed to impress her on one occasion. We had been set a creative writing assignment. Having reviewed our work, Mrs Sanders complimented me personally in front of the entire class for having used the word “meanwhile” in my story (I think the sentence was something like “Meanwhile, in another part of the forest…”). I don’t think I was intentionally trying to show off; it’s more likely that I had just read the word somewhere and chose to appropriate it for my own ends. Simultaneous depiction of multiple events in a work of literature: quite advanced I suppose for a seven-year-old!

It was probably also while I was in Mrs Sanders’ class that my younger brother briefly gained notoriety for an assignment of his own. The task his class had been set by their teacher was that hoary old favourite: paint a picture illustrating “What you want to be when you grow up”. One wall of the classroom had been given over to this artistic endeavour. The children’s efforts had been segregated along gender lines and at first glance generated few surprises: the girls all wanted to be nurses and the boys wanted to be either footballers, train drivers or astronauts. Then my eye was drawn to one painting positioned a discreet distance away from all the others, as if they had somehow disowned it. I gazed at a crudely drawn man in a mask with a sack on his back. The caption revealed that the artist was a little too close to home for comfort: “Philip Collett: Robber”. As I was later to claim at a parents’ evening that I wanted to be a writer it is difficult to say which of us siblings brought the family name into greater disrepute with our different career aspirations…