I was taken, I think, to every museum and gallery in London.  A great many that have disappeared, like the old London Museum and the Imperial Institute. And you go around something like the Imperial Institute, and it had glass cases full of stuffed animals and birds, butterflies and so on. Any question you wanted to ask about any animal could be answered either in the Institute or the Natural History Museum just across the road. And nothing, nothing that wouldn’t tell you what you wanted to know about Kenya or Borneo or whatever. It was all in one museum or the other. And there is, I think, no better way of having your curiosity aroused than by seeing things about which you wish to ask a question, and then get the answer. I know it’s no longer possible, in the Natural History Museum, to look in drawers at bird skins, but there I was, at the age of seven and eight, being allowed to pull out drawers and there’s the skin of a bird. It’s been taken off the carcass. It’s not stuffed. It is just the perfect feathered outer skin of a bird. And to be able to look at those.

I mean, I don’t think they would allow it now, even if it were allowed, if you see what I mean. And they would say, no, you are too young, you must… you couldn’t… but we were trusted. I don’t know why I say 'we', I mean I know that I was trusted to look at these things without pulling the feathers out or damaging them.