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        On a more practical level my father encouraged me. He found more aviation books and magazines for me. He also gave me my own workshop where I could work on my beloved model aeroplanes. Wisely, he chose one well away from the house when he learned that my rocket plane was fuelled by a substantial quantity of gunpowder that I stored in a biscuit tin beneath my bed. I singed away the downy black hairs of my adolescent moustache on more than one occasion when test-firing that rocket motor, I can tell you.
        Meanwhile, I continued my studies at school - a bit more enthusiastically now that I realized I would need at least a few academic qualifications before enrolling on a pilot's course.
        However, one of the core subjects at school was the study of the triffid: its origins, life-cycle, attributes; its dangers.
        In the early years of the colony the triffid had been demonized and held responsible for the destruction of the Old World in the middle years of what was then known as the twentieth century. Then the only talk was of how evil the plant was, how it could be kept off the island. How it could be annihilated.
        Now a more balanced view had developed. With an irony that any satirist would have found delicious we had come to depend on the triffid for oil, fuel, cattle fodder and about fifty other commodities. While the only triffids grown on the island were a few docked specimens for research purposes, we harvested vast numbers on the British mainland where they grew wild and unchecked in their millions. After being felled by heavily protected 'logging' teams, the plants were shipped to the Isle of Wight for processing. Of course, every child was still taught to recognize the plant from infancy.
        As the son of Bill Masen, the world's greatest expert on triffids, schoolmasters would always - or so it seemed to me - ask me all the toughest questions about that peripatetic plant. (As if knowledge of the triffid could be transmitted genetically from father to son. Or perhaps more appropriately, considering the botanical nature of the subject, via some mysterious process of osmosis - some hope!)
        'Masen,' Mr Pinz-Wilks might begin in those grave Oxbridge tones that would rumble out from beneath his handlebar moustache. 'Masen, would you please describe the triffid plant to the class?'
        (This question was asked repeatedly despite the many posters of the plant that hung on the wall.)
        'The mature plant stands around eight feet tall,' I would recite, parrot-fashion. 'A straight stem grows from the woody bole; er, at the top of the stem is a funnel; inside that is a sticky liquid that traps insects upon which the plant feeds by dissolving and drawing the nutrients down through the stem in a solution of sap; its sprays of leaves are green and leathery. The triffid possesses a sting that is curled into a whorl - something like a gigantic pig's tail.' (Laughs from the class; I'd shoot a grin at my friends.) 'This it can uncurl at high speed to whip at its prey. Er… uhm…'
        'And what else, Masen?'
        'Er, the sting is poisonous. Lethal if it strikes the exposed skin of a man or woman.'
        'Indeed, they can fell a cow or a horse. Any other pearls of wisdom, Masen?'
        I could tell that Mr Pinz-Wilks was less than impressed by my pedestrian recitation. By that time, moreover, I'd be shifting uncomfortably from foot to foot.
        'Perhaps, Masen, you could have begun with the plant's origins. After all, was it present when the Emperor Claudius conquered the British Isles in AD 43? Can we be so fanciful as to imagine its discovery was splashed across the front pages of Rome's Acta Diurna ?'
        'No, sir.'
        'Or did it arrive on this planet from outer space, perhaps hitching a ride on the tail of a comet?'
        'No, sir. Er… it is thought that triffids were developed by scientists in Russia, after, er, World War Two,