A nervous traveller

My 1982 photo album is full of pictures of a well-travelled, privileged 11-year-old boy. I was at North Bridge House prep school, a cream stucco Nash villa on the north-eastern corner of Regent’s Park, north London.

That photo album shows me, unsmiling, in a ski-pass picture on a family holiday in the Tyrol in January. In April, I went on a school trip to Normandy: there’s a picture of me sitting on the turret of an Allied tank overlooking the D-Day beaches.

But the holiday that really sticks in my mind from that year was a school trip to Amsterdam in October. There are only a few blurred pictures in my album — a canal, a windmill, the Rijksmuseum and a group picture of my year with our terrifying, brilliant form teacher, David Elwyn-Jones, standing in front of a rococo calliope.

Still, I have many more mental snapshots of that trip than any others that year.