I'm always good at exams, and I'm happy some of my kids inherited that. It's a great... it's a very useful skill just to be able to sail through exams. My youngest daughter just took her medical boards, and others... all the other young doctors were struggling and apprehensive and she just was not taking it particularly hard and sailing through. So it's something we seem to be born with. So I've been adaptable in that way. And then at Winchester the teachers were wise enough to leave the kids very much alone. We had rather few hours in class and we learned more from each other than we did from the teachers, especially in math and science.

[Q] And you had some fairly able people who made likewise illustrious careers.

Yes, there was a gang of four, which... which I was particularly lucky to be one of, and there was myself and, now, Sir James Lighthill who is a very distinguished aerodynamicist; and there's Christopher and Michael Longuet-Higgins who were brothers. Christopher became a theoretical chemist and Michael Longuet-Higgins is an oceanographer, and all four of us became Fellows of the Royal Society and had distinguished careers. So that was a tremendous piece of luck. We're all very different. No two of us have been doing similar things, but we did have the enormous stimulus of growing up together.