My formative years where spent in Southern Ireland, where I went to school and learnt a bit of Gaelic that never stuck. What did stick, however, were the words of the rebel songs. I have an almost autistic memory for lyrics and melody and I can still sing “Dublin in the Green”, “Wexford Town”, “The Fields of Athenry” and many more.

Our family moved back to London and started school and I had to lose my Irish brogue overnight. At the time the IRA were bombing mainland Britain and it would have been suicide to show any kind of allegiance to Ireland or any trace of Irish heritage. So, with the speed and adaptability of youth I started to speak with a London accent.

But I never lost my disdain for the English. The Dubliners and The Wolfe Tones had taught me all about the hundreds of years of colonisation and oppression and I was thoroughly inoculated with the Irish malaise of melancholy.

My mother had kept or made many Irish friends and she also identified with the rebels. I suppose that’s what you do when your home life is a dictatorship. One of her crowd was a drinker called Billy Braden. He looked very much like an English Major, with a tweed jacket and a pencil mustache. We called him “Uncle Billy” and enjoyed his company.

Uncle Billy told me once. “Ian, you have been born British and consequently won the lottery of life”. By his tone, I assumed he was being droll, and probably he was, but many years later I learned that the phrase was a staple saying of Victorian society and at that time not uttered with the slightest hint of Irony.

Billy was not your normal kind of uncle, he would tell stories that children should probably not hear. He taught me how to make bombs at the age of fourteen. I’m not sure why, maybe he was immature and wanted to impress a child, with his mustache and tweed and secret knowledge. But the lesson was real enough and to this very day I remember the instructions exactly. The pipe, the black powder, the crimping, the crocodile clips, the wire wool, the alarm clock timer. If you wanted, I could put one together right now. And it would work.

At the time I wasn’t concerned, probably even a little proud to be included in a deeply adult conversation. Today I wonder what he was thinking of, what did he want out of it? He’s been dead for many years, so I will never know.