If I remember anything about these early years its the summer holidays those days when you caught occasional glimpses of the world that existed outside West Earlham a vague old man who lived next door to Mrs Buddery and told stories about his time in the Merchant Navy a charity fete once held at a house far away in Christchurch Road where a motherly woman doled out lemonade and tried to get me interested in something called the League of Pity  a kind of junior charity I think  only for my mother to whom subsequent application was made to dismiss the scheme on the grounds that its organisers were only after your money