This was my normal boyhood frame of mind, unrelated to geopolitical events, which I followed intently. I had begun reading newspapers during the Munich crisis the year before and got hooked on them when the Germans marched into Prague, a move I had gloomily predicted. From then on, I surveyed the slide to war with superior foreknowledge. Let Hitler do his worst: our Empire is invincible, our island impregnable, our parliamentary system strong enough to withstand ranting tyrants. My childish delusion seemed to be shared by just about every national newspaper, with the lone exception of the weekly Spectator, whose proprietor and editor, Sir Evelyn Wrench, had known Germany well for forty years and sorrowfully foretold the worst. My father took the Spectator every Friday, balanced with the left-wing New Statesman and Tribune. He seldom gave any of them more than a riffle before settling down with the hatches-matches-dispatches pages of the Jewish Chronicle, organ of Semitic communality. Unnoticed, I gathered up the weeklies, lip-reading through polysyllabic commentaries in search of political enlightenment. It was not unusual for nine-year-olds in pre-media days to read Dickens for fun and the Bible for want of anything better in the house. I was one degree more precocious than my peers, insufferably so. Scorning my mother’s sentimental novels and the pristine set of World’s Classics in the glass-fronted sitting-room bookcase, I used the political weeklies as my guide to the unseen forces that ruled the adult universe, my code for cracking the complexities of evil.

So far as Hitler was concerned, my position was one of studied neutrality. There is a childhood unhappiness that transcends great events, a misery deeper than all the world’s tragedies. Mine was a wretchedness of this order. If I read that two million were dying of famine in China, I considered them fortunate beside my well-fed suffering in St John’s Wood. Orphans, refugees and the unemployed had, at least, their status to share. I was locked in loneliness, unable to achieve meaningful human contact. Hitler and all his hordes could not, I felt, hurt me any more than I already hurt. Whatever his views on Jews, I was taking no sides in the coming war except to cheer on whichever combatant wiped out my chief enemies – starting with Johnny-Isaacs-next-door, an egregious paragon of a boy who recited Shakespeare at parental soirées and played centre-forward in the Maccabi junior league.

I, short of sight and stature, ten pounds overweight and spotty to boot, buried myself in books and shrank from friendship – not that many offers came my way. ‘Swotty Simmonds’, they called me at school. Where other boys swapped cigarette cards, I read political tracts and dreamed of running for Parliament – an ambition rendered all the more absurd by a sputtering stutter that, to my extreme discomfort, prevented me giving a fast enough answer to pedagogic paedophobes with swishing, impatient canes. Reading was my unreachable refuge from the world’s rejection.