There was a stage… when, I mean, during the first… just at the beginning of the war… we were in England, and then when the war started we were sort of stuck here. My father had to go back, and then we… later on we followed and we went through France just before the collapse of France. And we went to the Lebanon, and I was at that stage put into a school in the Lebanon because it was, sort of, still during the school term and I had to go to a school which was a quite different kind of school – French type school – totally different kind of education. I survived for a… only there for, I think, a term and I wouldn't have liked to have stayed there much longer. So my schooling wasn't that disturbed by the travelling around. That was the only time when I had a sort of bit of strange surroundings.
But the travelling, I think, as children you enjoy it. And we did the journey back from Khartoum to Cairo on our own, my brother and I – my brother's two years younger – when I was 12 and he was 10 we would do this four day journey involving one day on the train, two days on the Nile steamer, another day on the train, all on our own, with a few people helping us when we got to the station. And I think it probably develops a bit of independence and you know, resilience as you get used to that sort of thing, you're not so dependent of other people chaperoning you around. So I think it was probably helpful.
My father's position was in the… he was with the Sudan government and he was the… he took over the job in fact from his uncle before him. And the job really was more or less kind of liaison between the British government and the Sudanese, because my father went to Oxford and English educated and so he could put the British point of view to the Sudanese, and he knew the Sudanese. So was kind of the go-between… between, in the political service, between the Sudan government and the Sudanese. And then during the war he got involved with the broadcasting, you know, Sudanese radio and that side of it. So it was an interesting job and then led right up to when the Sudan became independent at the end of the war, launching that movement.
And then after the war when he came to this country he was more freelance and he tended to… he wrote, he wrote a lot of books and also did a lot of broadcasting for the BBC and taking part in writing for the media, political, on general political questions to do with the Middle East. So he was Civil Service, moving into the political area and enjoying himself writing books on the side. So it was quite a varied sort of background, but very much you know, a non-mathematical one. He studied history and nobody else in the immediate family was at all mathematical. But it meant that I had a kind of cultured background and lots of books round the house. I was introduced to, sort of, literature and music and art things in a way that perhaps my own children didn't perhaps get such exposure to.
