I arrived down here at my isolated barn in the Brecon Beacons two days before Lock Down. I was also set to continue my latest biography on Christopher Burney MBE, an SOE agent parachuted into France in 1942 who was captured, tortured and imprisoned by the Gestapo. Then followed 18 months solitary confinement followed by another 18 months in Buchenwald Concentration camp where he led an uprising to co-incide with liberation in April 1945. He wrote two accounts of the three years when he disappeared from sight, and these became classics. I have in Wales the family papers, my research notes and an unpublished memoir by his wife.

HOWEVER, soon after I arrived I realised this was not only a depressing assignment in the circumstances but also irrelevant in the midst of the plague. My thoughts turn to my own mortality and increasingly to my childhood. What do my grandchildren know about this, particularly about my dominant and eccentric father whose genes they have inherited? So I have set out on an illustrated memoir ‘My Father’ for the family.

This is not easy to write. My world of 70 years ago has disappeared and my grandchildren have no frame of reference to bring it back. They certainly don’t want a history lesson from me. However, they will be interested in what I was like at their age, 10 - 12, and how much my father was like their father, and that’s a start.

The answer, as ever with writing, is stories; begin with a story, but pitch it at the right level and hope there are pictures to go with it. Then make a point you think worth making.

So that’s what I’m doing when I’m not enjoying the spring countryside, the best time of year down here. It’s only when I turn on the news that the awful reality comes to mind. Still, my childhood began in the Second World War, and that was an even more terribly anxious time.