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My parents were grocers For twenty-five years they owned a shop with a green awning and crates of vegetables on the pavement outside, and they worked hard with only Sundays off to go to church, and even on Sundays they went through the accounts after lunch On bank holidays and early-closing days when other people put on their best hats and went visiting my parents would check stock: sorting vegetables, pulling wilted cabbages and rotting carrots from the bottoms of sacks and setting them aside to be sold as swill They could judge weight with their hands but they were not educated people and had little time for the things which interested me, for books or for numbers beyond imperial measures and the columns of pounds and shillings and pence I was their only child, and I have never been sure if I was a source of pride to them or a disappointment, because it is true that I was clever, that I was quick with my mind, but the academic life that I have chosen could not possibly be the one they would have thought of for me, and there is no reason to say they would have judged it better I showed no interest in the shop, ever: quite the reverse, or perhaps they wouldn’t have sold it   Two months after my eleventh birthday I passed the exam to go to the grammar school There I found that the fathers of the other children were not shop­keepers Instead they were men who rose each morning to walk up the hill to the station and take the train to city jobs They worked in banks and offices, places whose interiors were unimaginable to me They didn’t have breakfast in their shirtsleeves before walking down the stairs to put the trays of apples out, or go next door for a pint of bitter in the evening while the dinner cooked They drank wine from stemmed glasses The mothers of the other children didn’t work at all They sat on committees and collected things for the Save the Children fund and