From a youth at Saints, I was not the scholarly type. I hated homework, I hardly ever studied, and when I went to the British Council Library I wasn’t boning up on school subjects, I was reading Horatio Hornblower and the erotic stuff I could find nowhere else. In school, I was a lightweight in science and maths (there was too much regimentation there for me), but close to the top of the class in the two English subjects and French.