I was born in London, in Little Venice, in fact, and my father was at University College as an astronomer, a young astronomer, and I think my parents had been married about 18 months or less when I was born so I was wheeled in my pram around Little Venice, I believe, my first encounter with the world, which I still like. I like that part of London very much indeed actually. Then my father built the Observatory at Mill Hill, which was the University of London Observatory, he was the first director of it, so among my first memories really I suppose were the building of the Observatory which was dramatic and wonderful really with its dome and the whole bit. I used to go for carpentry lessons. Every Saturday I used to pedal along in my fairy cycle along cobbled, well, actually it was rough stone, come to think of it, along the road to get there, which has now got a super highway, it’s ridiculous. About five years after it was built, it became impossible because it was a major road up to Apex Corner and so on, and then all the lights, of course, were put onto the road, and my father and I thought it was infinitely powerful. They had the lights on the, it wasn’t really a motorway, but a major road, covered with a special cowl on the top of the lights to prevent the light going up into the sky and I suppose I felt that a father who could do that, was pretty powerful, you see. He was that sort of a chap. He could make things happen like that actually. He could. I think I was really brought up looking at the universe and wondering what on earth was out there, which is what made me interested in perception. But my father was also a bit of a gypsy. His parents had a large house covered in ivy in Parkstown, full of possessions, and I’ve got rather a lot of junk here as you can see, and my grandparents were like that but sort of Victorian knick-knacks all over the place, you know. Incredible collection of stuff. My father hated possessions, he really felt that he would like to just sort of forget his family, go off somewhere, live some somewhere else at the drop of a hat and possessions tied him down. So he was both tied to the nature of the universe but also to being a free agent in his own world really and he was eccentric. He gave up Victorian values to a very great extent and he was an ardent nudist. He got very keen on nudism, which I found intensely embarrassing, I might say, at the age of seven or eight or something like that. He was very keen on it and used to go on these nudist weekends and this sort of thing, which at that time was sort of fashionable. People like Joad and people; I think they were nudists as well. It was the thing to be if you were an academic but it never appealed to me one bit and I must say still doesn’t. So I think my early life was a mixture of rather, fear of my father because he was a very dominating character who wouldn’t stand idiocy or, you know, he wouldn’t understand normal child behaviour really. Also, wrestling really with a conflict between standards that one was supposed to have in one’s school, behaviour and so on, and then the gypsy-like father who was a reputable academic and also pretty jolly zany. So it was a series of funny conflicts going on.
