Relative values: Alan Fry (Part 1)

I don't think Stephen and I have ever agreed about anything. We've always had a turbulent relationship. I was conscious in his early years of getting in his way because I've always had a big spread of interests; everywhere Stephen looked, there was father telling him how to do it.

When Stephen was small he did virtually nothing except glue himself to the television set while our other children were out and about, doing things. On a fine summer's day he'd draw the curtains and frowst away six inches in front of the black and white screen. As a result he has an encyclopaedic knowledge of films and television from the Sixties.

Relative values

 We were always trying to cajole him into doing things is ordinary little boys did, blissfully unaware that ordinary little boy he was not. When he was about 13 he announced that he wasn't going to marry because it was silly, that he was going to be a writer, and that he'd always have plenty of money. As I was struggling to pay his school fees at the time, I was very cross indeed.

For a variety of reasons he left most of the schools he ever set foot in, which was distressing for his mother and me because we very much wanted him to fulfill whatever it was he had in him. Although we're very different, we both find it difficult to conform; I was never any good at working under people. Stephen found at school that he didn't like being forced into this mould of schoolboy. His mother always had a simple faith in him. that he'd turn out all right in the end; I suppose I didn't really.

In the times when he'd come home from school, we were virtually running a mini-school, in which I taught him maths and physics and a bit of French, and his mother, who is a historian, taught him that.