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he had moved both the girls into the back seat, and at this point he unloaded them, unlikely arrivals on a hitherto entirely respectable pavement. Margaret and I watched from upstairs windows as Alan led them, chattering happily, down the short pathway to our front door. The six of us ate a cheerful lunch, in which conversation flowed freely in two languages, without any of us making the slightest reference to the oddness of the situation, in spite of the added fact that my uncle was incapably drunk. When he staggered back into the car to resume what would presumably be a terrifying journey back to London, nothing was said. I do remember asking who on earth my uncle’s friends were, and, as usual, receiving no answer.
    The 1950s began as a period of political stasis, at least as experienced by the young. If, as Doris Lessing was later to claim, Earls Court was jumping, Bexhill, like large swathes of the country, seemed to be in a sort of dormitory coma, as though John Wyndham’s triffids had just passed through and stunned the population. No sound was heard, except the tomatoes liquefying on the vine or the chickens adjusting their snooze-position in the straw. Even the cawing seagulls seemed stunned into silence after lunch. Down by the English Channel you could still goshrimping in the rock pools and come home with small fry admittedly, but fry nevertheless. Mum regularly bought Sussex dabs, a delicious kind of diminutive lemon sole, from the fisherman who sold them each morning on the beach. She made sure to clean the house first before the cleaning lady came, lest we be thought dirty. In our house we read the Daily Express , and it presented, in particular through its cartoons, a continuing view of white England in which nothing much was allowed to change. A featureless strip on the back page called The Gambols portrayed an archetypally uninteresting family which, I felt, resembled my own more closely than the characters created by the anarchic Giles. But then in 1956 the Suez crisis impinged even on a nine-year-old. There was in adults’ conversation the turbulence of a real event, and one briefly disastrous for the Hares. The SS Mooltan was once more called into service by the Royal Navy to ferry troops down towards Aden. In the wake of the self-inflicted humiliation caused by a trumped-up invasion of the canal, the popular press was in a posturing bad temper, looking for scapegoats, and in particular for anyone who did wrong by ‘our boys’. There had been some terrible failure of hygiene in the ship’s fabled kitchen which had precipitated a mass outbreak of food poisoning among the ranks. Forewarned, my mother returned ashen from the paper shop. On the front page of the Daily Sketch was a characteristically enigmatic picture of my father, in uniform, apparently at ease in his floral armchair. A screaming headline provided the exact charge: ‘The Man Who Served Our Troops Soapy Potatoes’.
    Such public visibility clearly violated our family ethic. It was at the very centre of my mother’s beliefs that you should under no circumstances do anything to draw attention to yourself. Scottish, she had a stubborn faith in education – a faith towhich I owe a large part of my subsequent prosperity – but for her the purpose of education was to burrow your way more successfully to a place of absolute security. Meaning, privacy. The front page of the Daily Sketch was no such place, even if, luckily, fellow members of the Highwoods Golf Club and Mum’s bridge partners were unlikely to take that particular paper. When I chose to become a playwright, it seemed to Mum like a tempting of the gods. It could only end badly. Why would any member of a family dedicated to survival choose to do anything so conspicuous? Life was dangerous enough even if you kept your head down. Why on earth would you stick it up? ‘I see Bernard Levin’s attacking you again,’ she would say to me