I was nine when this started. That was in 1964, the year my mother left us. Chess led me to Horatio - chess and my father and my absent mother and the fact that on that day, I broke the rule about not showing what you feel. My form-master of that year at the private day-school I went to was a chess enthusiast. He explained the rules to us, he encouraged us to play. He was kind to me and I admired him, more than admired: I wanted to be where he was. I suppose I was more than usually responsive to kindness just at that time. To please him I tried hard to be good at chess and I discovered that I was good. I had a natural talent, the master said.

I joined the school chess club. I took part in tournaments and distinguished myself. Shining at few things, for a brief season I shone at chess. I studied the game, I read the accounts of historic encounters, the ploys of long-dead masters, and I played them out alone. I would set out the pieces at random, then sweep them off and try to replace them from memory. At night, I would picture the chess board, go through the moves of some legendary end-game and find consolation.

A colleague of my father was there one Sunday afternoon - my father was a senior official at the Treasury. "Your father tells me you are quite a chess-player.” On his reddish face an indulgent look. "At least by his own report,” my father said with a sarcastic smile. He seemed to suggest I had boasted. Perhaps I had. “Not up to your level, Henry, not yet." Henry, Harry, Humphrey. A chessplayer ot note. Fancy a game, young man?

We played and 1 won. He still had half his pieces on the board when l checkmated him. I leasure in victory, expectation of praise - face and voice were not yet practiced enough, I suppose 1 showed my feelings too clearly. My father looked at me, but uttered no word. He went out, came back with a book from his study, brought it over for me to see. “Look here,” he said, the colleague meanwhile looking on. “Look at these people here.”

He had opened the book roughly in the middle. There were two faces, one on either side: William Pitt the Younger and Horatio Nelson. Neither name meant anything to me at the time. Later, of course, I knew them tor close contemporaries -Horatio was a year older and died three months earlier.

“Take a good look,” my father said. “These two men saved our country, they had reason to be pleased with themselves.”

He meant it for my benefit or so I like to think. He did not want me to be jubilant in victory, to overrate small achievements. He wanted to inspire me with worthy ambitions. But in his mannei and tone I sensed displeasure; he was not pleased at my success, it had disturbed his sense of the natural order.

My interest in chess did not long survive that day, the lesson in humility proved the death-blow to it. I continued to play during what was left of the term, but my heart was not in it, I lost the appetite for victory, my game fell off. In the autumn, Monty and I were sent away to boarding school and I never played chess again.