But not music. Music, he insisted, had scarcely been born. The world of harmonics and ultrasonics lay waiting to be tapped.

After this, Nat was sent to a nursery run by nuns. He came home screaming on the first day, begging his parents never to send him to “those black witches” again. All the other children in the neighbourhood had by this time started school, but as he was younger, he was allowed to stay at home with his mother and his younger baby brother. Nat wandered around the garden examining things in minute detail. Once he cut a red admiral butterfly into tiny little pieces: the logical conclusion of much time spent studying and modifying its wing structure. He also had a “pet” butterfly: it always came back to him, but only because he had rubbed the scales from its wings.

Then Nat became a vegan; a particularly severe form of vegetarianism. His father had taken him on one of his business calls, which happened to be to a man at an abattoir. The man, dressed in dingy white overalls, spattered with blood and worse, wielded a massive carving knife (could this be relevant?) whilst in conversation. The sight of this “butcherman” and the atrocities he saw there made Nat vow never to touch meat again. To me this seems an obvious, if understandable, denial of the hunting impulse. Thousands of years of instinct surely cannot be wiped out in a single generation.

Nat was so shocked that, for five years, he had been eating the corpses of animals and had even inflicted pain upon little creatures himself that he began to construct birds’ nests and other homes for all manner of suburban wildlife. Some beasts even took to these ready-made “homes”. Cats were particularly attracted to the infant and even spoke to him in their own language, not the usual “miaows” which he informed me were reserved with disdain for other humans.

With his younger brother Nat had concocted a secret language, a common enough thing for siblings to do, though this was quite a deep and rich lore involving a vast array of fantasy figures and high-pitched obscure utterances. The brothers shunned the television, unlike their older sibling who watched it incessantly. The only memory Nat cared to disclose in which both of his brothers featured involved a “ball of fire” which chased them all round the garden. He saw it as important that it followed them exactly; but it was only a stray piece of paper, from a bonfire, blown by the wind.