I went... I was sent to a boys' boarding school at the age of eight. From the age of eight to 18 I spent most of my time at... first at a prep school and then at Eton. And something I ought to say, I suppose, if I'm going to be honest, something that's always puzzled me, and still puzzles me, is why I did not fit in either at my prep school or at my... at Eton. Because ever since I left Eton I have never found the very least difficulty in fitting in to any society I've been part of, including working at the bench in a factory in Coventry, I mean, you know, I don't find it difficult to... to make relations with people happy. But there was something about my prep school and my... and Eton, Eton in particular, which I loathed, I couldn't make terms with it. But apart from that, they taught me - well, it's not true they taught me nothing, they did teach me something - they taught me mathematics. And Eton taught me mathematics incredibly well, and I have to be grateful to them for that. But there was no science teaching at either, absolutely none, I mean, I just learnt no science, formally, at school. I mean, I learnt some science, but I learnt it because there was a good school library, that is to their credit. And I read Jeans and Eddington and Sherrington and... and Haldane and... I read Darwin, and I read a whole mass of stuff.

[Q] You went into the school library and found these books yourself without any encouragement?

Yes, yes, essentially. Why, I don't know. I just wanted to... I found science fascinating. But nobody... I can't put my finger on anybody who stimulated that interest, any adult who stimulated that interest. They didn't inhibit it, they didn't prevent it, but they didn't encourage it. I mean, they didn't understand science, they didn't know about it. My school master thought that Latin and Greek were what mattered.