I am three years old, and I want to be Queen Victoria's train-driver.
No matter that I have missed the bus by a hundred years. I can daydream for hours about the Royal Queen, gazing at pictures of her carriage in the royal train.
My train.
I have regular temper-tantrums, too. Oh, what fun it is, to lie on the floor, screaming and foaming at the mouth. Some people have no respect for the railway timetable.
'He'll be in the loony-bin before he's twenty-one, you mark my words,' predicts Great-Aunt Beryl.
'Oh, don't be ridiculous,' says my mother. Next day, she and my father take their barking three-year-old up to London, to see a child-psychiatrist.
The shrink gives me some coloured blocks, so he can watch me play.
Only I don't want to play with the blocks. I want to tell him about the Royal Queen, and my job as her train-driver. Mum and Dad must be thrilled about this. After all, I could have told him I was Jesus, or Napoleon. Whereas instead I have plumped for a nineteenth-century railway-worker on a special contract.
Fortunately, the shrink is a switched-on fellow, and an idea occurs to him.
'This child is bored,' he declares, twiddling his chubby thumbs. 'What he wants is books.'
And so I am given all the books I want, even though the only ones I really like are the ones about the Royal Queen. And after a while I decide that I don't want to be the royal train-driver after all.
I want to be a Spitfire pilot in the Battle of Britain.
The advantage of 1940 over 1870 is that I am now only about thirty years too late. I haven't yet twigged that I would need perfect eyesight to be a Spitfire pilot. I'm far too interested in having a pair of tortoiseshell NHS specs like my friend Hancock. So I read nightly under my blanket and stare at my bedside lamp until my retinas ache, in an attempt to strain my eyes. After a while, all I can see on the page is a green-red glow the shape of a lightbulb filament.
Books are good, because they allow me to drive trains and meet the Royal Queen and fly Spitfires in my head. And they provide an excuse for creeping downstairs to the kitchen, where my parents are eating their supper.
'Daddy, what does naïve mean?' I ask, peeking round the door of the kitchen to take in the warm smell of garlic and the candle-glow that envelops them.
Some nights they allow me to join them for a few minutes, with a crust of French bread and some watered-down red wine.
'Wine-and-water is what French children drink,' says my mother, topping up my glass with water from the tap, as if it were Ribena. Mum loves France. Her favourite cookbooks are by Elizabeth David, which I think is a funny name, because you don't know if it's a boy or a girl.
For herself and Dad, Mum cooks recipes from French Provincial Cookery which look brown and forbidding, but whose rich smells come from another world to the Bird's Eye fish fingers and frozen peas that my brothers and I have for our tea, after Blue Peter and Captain Pugwash.
My father's culinary gift lies in his appreciation. He venerates my mother's cooking as if she were the Galloping Gourmet, and he always says her latest creation is really first-class.
I like the Galloping Gourmet, but not as much as I like Douglas Bader or Stanford Tuck. I like Achilles and Hector, too, and Don Quixote, Biggles, Mary Plain, Peter Rabbit and all sorts of other animals that can talk. And the more I read, the more clear I become about what I really want to be.
I want to be a hero.
But I don't tell anyone about it this time.
Wanting to be a hero feels like a guilty secret, when you're short and plump and not much good at anything except reading and screaming. So I keep it to myself, and count the days to my twenty-first birthday, hoping that Great-Aunt Beryl made a mistake.
But I'll admit it now: I've wanted to be a hero ever since.
Deep down, perhaps all men do.
The question is, how does one train to be a hero, assuming one is not gifted with all the attributes of an Achilles, a Captain Scott, or a Skywalker? There is no Ladybird book on the subject. And evening classes in Heroism have yet to catch on in the home counties. I am not talking about the kind of shining hero who rushes in to save children from burning buildings, or flailing women from floods. Nor am I talking about being a public hero, fęted for great deeds. I have in mind a quieter sort of hero. Someone you almost don't notice when you pass them in the street. The kind of person who, through the way he or she lives their life - bravely and simply and openly - can somehow be a force for good.
