I read a lot, they had a good library, a good public library and the school had a library, as I said. The... but I mostly it was outdoors, we were at the beach. We would go down to the beach for swimming and there was the bush, we did a lot of tracking in the bush, it was quite a thing, I said so. You have to take potassium permanganate with you in case you're bitten by a snake and things like that. So it was... hobbies was mostly playing after school. When we came back from school we’d played cricket on the local park and things like that. It was all no, I had no... oh yes, I made model aeroplanes of glue and paper and things like that.

[Q] What sort of books did you read, were they science books or fiction or everything?

I read a lot of fiction, Biggles, and we read The Boys' Own Paper, we read The Gem and The Magnet which were kind of things based upon Billie Bunter in English school, and it was... the whole thing was... the predominant culture was English and we had English comics and we had English newspapers. We didn't have them in the home but later on when the War had started they used to get them. So... but I read very widely and I, at one point, when I was in – close to matric, which is the last year, I actually thought I might become an Egyptologist because I... because I... I'd been... my brother and I'd been learning Hebrew on not a very in-depth level but, you know. I discovered that the... the West Semitic Hebrew Phoenician Alphabet came from the Phoenician... came from the Egyptian. So I actually began to try and teach myself Hieroglyphics, which wasn't... I did learn, I learnt to read the cartouche of Cleopatra and things like that but it wasn't very advanced. But, then I... really, I had a... there was transformation, I came across a book by Paul De Kruif called Microbe Hunters, and I discovered since then that many people have been influenced by this book, it's been reprinted. And it told the exciting story of people like Pasteur and Koch and things like that. So I decided that I would become a microbiologist and the only way to do that would be to take medicine, do medicine; there was no medical school in Durban so I went to the Witwatersrand. I should say, before we leave this topic, I read very, very widely, I read quite a lot of history. I remember reading the history of the Popes, which I can't remember why, by Ranke. I didn't know that Ranke was the greatest German historian but that was the kind of thing. And, we had a... on the stairwell of the Durban Public Library there was a painting of TS Eliot, I didn't know who TS Eliot was but the... and the painting was by Wyndham Lewis. And I discovered many years later who they were. So there was this culture diffused throughout.