"I look back on my life in Broughton Astley with fondness. I suppose it was my period of growth. I was able to do so many things that had been denied to wartime town children. I swam in the River Soar, which seemed a terribly daring thing to do. Swimming had previously been limited to Nuneaton swimming baths, a twenty-five yard diameter open-air circular pool, sandwiched between the slaughterhouse and the sewage works. I waded through the village brook with my shoes on, buried innumerable boxes of hidden 'treasure' in the fields, searched for and found many fossils, flint axes and arrowheads in the stony fields around. I shot rats with my air-rifle, got bitten badly by a farmer's dog and fell in love with Shirley Somebody-or-other,
who didn't even know I existed. I lit a fire of old boxes in a field and drove my father's motor-scooter through it, in emulation of some daredevil I had seen in a travelling circus show. I stole bare-back rides on grazing ponies and learned to skin a rabbit, etc., etc."
