When my sisters and I were very young we used to refuse to go to bed until our father had told us a bedtime story. So every evening for a long time he would make up a new, though simple, tale, sufficient to satisfy us and get us to retire for the night. It was a sad day when he announced that my younger sister was old enough to read for herself so there was no need for any more stories. I suspect that once he had ceased to use storytelling as a parenting tool he never gave another thought to creating any more fiction. He was a very practical person.

He did, though, encourage me to read anything that might interest me, and so I was introduced to material as diverse as Sherlock Holmes, Isaac Asimov, the “Bulldog Drummond” thrillers and anything that happened to be on his bookshelves such as Plato – including Karl Marx, from which, given that he was a habitual Coalition voter, I inferred that reading things with which one might disagree had some value. My elder sister (now a university lecturer in literature) supplemented father’s efforts with modern authors that may have escaped his notice, like Kurt Vonnegut. My mother gave me CS Lewis’ interplanetary novels (still among my favourite scifi/fantasy books) and may have also presented me with the Narnia Chronicles, but I think I discovered JRR Tolkien for myself.

As a schoolboy I often had an impulse to write fiction even when not required to do so for the school curriculum, but didn’t have the self discipline to bring a work to completion. Then at university a fellow student (Tony Penington, now a plastic surgeon at the Royal Children’s Hospital) suggested that we write a sendup of government secret service agencies. That was ambitious, since neither of us knew a thing about espionage, and when some years later I produced a complete first draft there was no clever satire, just a lot of buffoonery (subject matter which admittedly my school and university exploits well qualified me to write about). Tony pronounced it to be rubbish and said it had to be rewritten from scratch, a task which I haven’t got round to yet.

For many years the only writing I did outside of professional duties was some records of escapades from my schooldays and some party pieces for work Christmas functions, none of which had any pretence of literary value or of interest to anyone who wasn’t involved in the subject matter.