I arrived here at our isolated barn in the Brecon Beacons two days before Lock Down determined to get to grips with my latest biography. This is about Christopher Burney MBE who was a wartime agent for SOE, captured in France, interrogated with torture and then spent 18 months in solitary confinement before being sent to Buchenwald concentration camp. Here he led an uprising to co-incide with liberation. He wrote two books about his experiences that became classics. I have all his papers including a touching memoir by his wife ready to research.

HOWEVER, I soon realised that this project seemed not only depressing in the circumstances but irrelevant. Like others of my age who are locked down in the plague my thoughts are on my own mortality. This means in my case that my mind goes back to childhood and the wish to tell my grandchildren about it. All childhoods are formative but mine was especially so, being dominated by an eccentric and fearsome father.

So here I am, with the aid of photograph albums and Our Holiday Book remembering those years and working out how to interest grandchildren. This is not easy. They may be interested in my life when I was their age, that is 10 - 12 but they have no frame of reference. My childhood world has disappeared and they are not interested in history lessons about it.

Of course, the answer as ever is STORIES. Story first, background second. And then plenty of pictures. I hope what I’m doing is not only providing a family archive but encouraging them to think a bit about the family genes. Can they detect any of their great grandfather’s behaviour in me and then in their father, my son?

Writing ‘My Father’ makes me just a little pleased with myself. I’ve survived 78 years with so many memories.

But how much longer?