ABSTRACT
It was Milton who wrote: ‘The childhood shows the man as morning shows the day’, and there is no more appropriate place to start this story than at the beginning. Today the debate is about nurture or nature, environment or genes, and in my father’s case both are highly significant. It is curious that someone who has written so much about himself should have been seen, even by those who knew him well, as such a shadowy and mysterious figure right up to the end. I believe that it was because of his Welshness, perceived, over the border, as something very alien and unEnglish, wild, devious and unpredictable, a dark Celtic something that comes down with the mist of the mountains. He could not have been more Welsh.
