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mountains of Asia, and on the high seas.
    This was the heritage, the mythology that still loomed large, even though by the time of Nation’s own childhood it seemed as though there was precious little left of such pioneering aspirations, particularly in the aftermath of the war that was supposed to end all wars, and that certainly – for a while at least – had ended the fictional romance of war. It was a long way from the heroic death of General Gordon, standing proud in the face of the Mahdi masses in faraway Khartoum, to the anonymous slaughter at Passchendaele, and as society struggled to adjust to that change, it seemed far less amenable to the old breed of hero. John Buchan’s novel, The Island off Sheep (1936), the last to feature his secret agent Richard Hannay, begins with our hero on a suburban train in southern England, reminiscing about the great days at the turn of the century when ‘the afterglow of Cecil Rhodes’s spell still lay on Africa, and men could dream dreams’. As he looks round the compartment at the ‘flabby eupeptic faces’ of commuters returning home from the City, he reflects melancholically on the realities of modern Britain: ‘Brains and high ambition had perished, and the world was for the comfortable folk like the man opposite me.’
    In due course, a new generation of hero emerged from the pens of Sapper and others. Wealthy young men of action, they mostly operated in the high society of London in the inter-war years, though they were happy enough to step outside society’s conventions of behaviour when justice demanded it. Stories featuring some of this new breed – Leslie Charteris’s Simon Templar, aka the Saint, and John Creasey’s Baron – were later to be adapted for television by Nation, but there always seemed to be a place in his heart for the previous generation, whose attitudes survived in the stories found in the boys’ weekly magazines of the 1930s, the likes of Wizard, Champion and Hotspur. Here the Wild West still loomed larger than the Western Front, and the only acknowledgement of the recent war came in tales not of the trenches, but of the much more glamorous exploits of the Royal Flying Corps (Nation was a big fan of W.E. Johns’s books about the air ace Biggles). The core of such magazines were detective stories, tales of exploration, and colourful adventures that featured variants on stock characters such as Tarzan and Robin Hood; there was little that couldn’t have been found in the Edwardian era, save for the emergence, towards the end of the 1930s, of some science fiction, primarily concerned with space travel, Martians and death rays.
    This adventure tradition, both in novels and magazines, dominated the reading of boys in the 1930s, and Nation’s love of it runs through his own writing. Its celebration of the spirit of adventure, of improvised resourcefulness, of the qualities of leadership, were to form the backbone to much of his own work, finding their happiest incarnation in the character of Jimmy Garland in Survivors , a joyously triumphant throwback to the world of Buchan. ‘He’s acting like a character from a boy’s own adventure story,’ snorts one of Garland’s enemies. Indeed he was, and no one was more aware of it than Nation, whose writing resonated with echoes of this world.
    Given his voracious reading (‘I read everything that was available to me’), it wasn’t long before Nation was making up his own stories, ‘mostly with me as the hero’. Such a quality was not always appreciated in a society dominated by the very literal values of the church. ‘I was always believed to be a terrible liar,’ he said in later life. ‘Nowadays they would say, “He’s got a wonderful imagination,” but in those days I was just “that liar”.’ On one occasion in school, the class was set the standard writing