I never felt judged in my parents’ world; at school I felt nothing but judgment. At school, being an only child had its drawbacks; I have never liked sharing my toys.

And I didn’t like the rating, the constant comparative system that was going on. Who is good at this, who is the best at that? The best and the worst. Always.

“Games,” that ironic synonym for sports, was the worst. In contest after contest, you could find me and my four eyes faring not too well on the playing fields of Our Lady of the Wayside. Never once was I to get the call-up: Your school needs you. Not once would I represent my school at sports. I would develop some nagging self-doubt about that.

Is there anything worse than being laughed at? I’ll take surgery every time. I couldn’t stand it—still can’t. Thank God my friends and family know me well enough today to do it out of earshot, but back then, coming last meant getting laughed at. That had to be avoided. I began to take myself out of the race.

I didn’t like coming first either—what was a boy to do?—because that meant walking to the front of class or, worse, assembly hall, to receive a prize and maybe even having to say, “Thank you, sir,” out loud in front of all those hooligans. Stepping forward to receive my Bobby Moore gift token from Mr. Lahive for my work on “The Lives of the Saints” was the most humiliating moment to date. All those eyes burning into my back, the sniggers of reproach. No thanks, I’ll pass on the prizes too. I set my sights on being in between and out of sight.

By the age of ten, in 1970, I had become a less frequent visitor to Mom and Dad’s bed (although I still remember crawling in between the two of them to read about the breakup of the Beatles. It was as unbelievable to us as the sinking of the Titanic), so I needed to find other ways to get their approval.

Particularly Dad’s.

Military model-making was the hobby du jour, supremely popular with boys of my generation and a terrific father/son bonding pursuit to boot. More sons and their fathers of the late sixties bonded over Airfix models of Centurion tanks, Spitfire planes, and Victory ships (“featuring life-like Nelson with amputated arm”) than anything, other than a leather football.

Dad set the bar for me when he constructed my eighth birthday present, the Short Sunderland flying boat, to such a degree of perfection that I knew I had to get up to speed pretty quick.

Which I did. I became addicted to making models. Maybe there was something in the glue, the “construction cement,” and the enamel paint?

Planes, boats, trucks, cars; I built ’em, painted ’em, and stuck them in little landscape surroundings known in the modeling fraternity as “dioramas.”

Every week my pocket money would go on something new to add to my collection. By Saturday afternoon I would be disturbing Dad in the garage. “Look, Dad, what do you think? It’s Monty on the road to Alamein.”

“That’s very good, lad,” he would say. “Fancy a trip to the off-licence to get some pop?”

Victory!

My tastes in model-making had no nationalistic allegiance. I was as happy building a Japanese Zero fighter or a Panzer tank as I was General Montgomery’s Humber staff car. The Graf Spee or the Ark Royal, Grummans or Messerschmitts, I didn’t care, it was all of a piece, all part of the great game: war, a battle of uniforms and battledress, crosses versus roundels. The Airfix catalogue was an astounding education and gave my generation a great primer in industrial design, as well as developing our hand-eye skills. It was as good as anything I got taught in a classroom, and it cannot be done on a Game Boy.

It was an almost exclusively masculine world. Airfix’s only concession to the female form was their Joan of Arc, which did not interest me. The only human models I built and painted were of men.