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others who never cultivated considerable natural gifts because they were never made aware of their rarity and value.
    I found most things easy.
    I could see the ball clearly in cricket, knew the classic shots from my television-watching and reading of Sir Don Bradman’s book, rehearsed them, thrilled to the experience of playing a well-timed off-drive or square-cut and seeing the bobbing ball cleaving a green path through the dew on its way to the boundary.
    I thought, ‘OK, that was great. What’s next?’
    At eight, I took up golf. That, of course, would never be consistently easy. Had I the time, I would still be regularly engaged in that eternal quest for an illusory perfection, but again I could readily strike the ball true and could readily take on board the instructor’s advice and adapt my swing as necessary. My mother’s new husband was my first such instructor. He played off a handicap of seven and gave me a great deal of patient encouragement.  
    Academically, I proved quick and slick rather than brilliant – a superior jack and sometimes minor master of all trades – save maths which defied, taunted and tormented me.
    I flirted with a hundred subjects and pastimes but fell in love with none of them. None became an overwhelming preoccupation, nor was I concerned to excel at them. They were merely amusing features of the curriculum or of daily life, and I rummaged through them and collected information and skills just as, in the holidays, I rummaged through the dust-heaps and collected stray artefacts.  
    Gradually, my academic facility, my impertinent blitheness and, above all, my sporting prowess sent me bobbing uncomfortably to the surface. After three or four years of being overawed and hesitant, I became a social animal. I was on top again.  
    I sat Common Entrance a year early. My maths was still weak, but my mother was told that I made up for this with an exceptional essay entitled ‘What I Did Last Weekend’. There was enthralling adventure and action in there – my brother and I had been staying with an aunt and uncle in Hampshire and had waded into mud so deep that we had had to abandon our embedded wellies and leap for the verge in stockinged feet – but the examiners were most impressed by my account of the table which my relatives kept – the fine wines and fabulous food. I may have gone a little overboard with the larks’ tongues and sweetmeats from farthest Araby, but I definitely conveyed the fact that they laid on one hell of a spread.  
    So I squeaked in by merit of my ability with words and love for food, wished Eden Park farewell and entered Dulwich College at the age of ten. My parents were delighted. There were Dulwich connections on both sides of the family.  
    My premature arrival was also, I think, characteristic. Others with myacumen might, with a little work, have won brilliant scholarships. I did things very easily and proficiently but was in far too much of a hurry to worry about your actual excellence. Had I stayed on for an extra year at West Wickham, I would simply have grown restless. I doubt that I would have improved my Common Entrance results by a single percentage point.
    I just mastered something and wanted to get on at once with the next project.
    I was in a hurry not because I had any more idea than a rushing river where I was bound, but just because I had exhausted the possibilities of the previous place.
    Eddying was tedious, stagnation death. Moving on, babbling and sometimes sparkling, was just what I did.

2
DULWICH
    Dulwich, alma mater of Raymond Chandler, P. G. Wodehouse and, most impressively to me, cricketer and commentator Trevor Bailey, was not terrifying at all, but I was properly terrified.
    It was not terrifying because it was well-accustomed to tending and nurturing every sort of boy yet invented, and young Farage was perhaps not quite as exceptional as he believed.
    I was terrified because it