I came to London after graduation and found a bedsit off Kensington Church Street, a place of antique shops; there was a tree that came up to my window on the top floor and a caged lift down to the street. Early in the mornings I walked across Hyde Park to a swimming pool at Lancaster Gate. There was no one to talk to and London was a mystery, but I loved those first times in the city, reading newspapers and going to lectures near the Albert Hall. I walked across the park as if it were made for the likes of me, people with nothing to do in the morning but contemplate what they might do next.

I saw a job in the Evening Standard. It said: ‘Assistant Editor Wanted. St Clare’s Review. Experience required. £8,000 per annum.’ My experience was two summers in a television shop back home in Scotland: still, I had an English degree and I cheered myself up on the way to the stationery shop by wondering if I was maybe overqualified for the post of assistant editor. I did some research at the local library. St Clare’s had been going since 1915. It looked after the war blinded, giving them houses and holidays and things to fill their time.

The office I first came to smelled of lemon tea and carbon paper. I was interviewed by a Wing Commander Philip Rodney. He had maps of Kent and Sussex on the wall of his private office and slipped me a Mint Imperial during the interview. ‘There’s not a whole lot to it,’ he said, ‘though you will have to be good with the old boys. That’s a must.’

‘I haven’t really edited before,’ I said.

‘Oh, never mind that, it’s not The Times or anything of that sort. Just a bit of lick and stick.’

‘I would give it my best shot.’

‘Marvellous,’ said the Wing Commander. ‘You seem like a good chap. Can you start a week on Monday?’

In this way, I began my working life in the offices of St Clare’s. The magazine was a bit of an absurdity. I would often stay late in the office with the lights of Marylebone glowing outside, and I’d hang over the layout desk, sizing photographs, writing captions, forming headlines, for a magazine that nobody was really going to read. It was like one long Monty Python sketch, the magazine for the blind, though it led other and more sensible lives in Braille and on tape, where it was read every month in a plummy voice by an actor Philip had known in the army.

The other departments were staffed mainly by ex-army officers and women in their sixties. There was an officer-corps mentality in the canteen, and some of the women brought knitting to work, and you half expected them to shout you out for air-raid drill at the drop of a stitch. Minnie Hopfield worked in Legacies. She was nearly seventy and she swore like a darts fan and smoked like hell. And yet she was Home Counties posh in the way most of them were: she loved a nice glass of wine, home-made jam, she’d been around the world.

Minnie told me the charity was insanely rich. Ex-servicemen had been leaving money to St Clare’s since the 1920s, but the generations who were blinded in war were dying out, and the money, which had been brilliantly managed by a series of chief accountants (the real bosses of the organization), was just growing and growing with nowhere to go. ‘It sounds fucking perverse,’ said Minnie, ‘but the folk upstairs were almost excited when the Falklands happened, I swear. Don’t get me wrong, dear: nobody wants a young fellow to lose his eyes, but the charity is dying and it will have to do something. The idea of some new people to benefit did seem, well…it created a bit of excitement. Make no mistake about that.’

I told her she was a terrible person.

‘That’s as maybe, but as Elsa used to say’—Minnie had been friends in the 1940s with Elsa Lanchester, and she thought that Elsa had been through everything, being married to Charles Laughton and all, and would quote her on any subject, no matter how unlikely a preoccupation for a Hollywood actress—’as Elsa used to say, “One can’t feed hens if there’s no hens to feed.”‘

However sublimated, this point had been thoroughly absorbed into the mind of the charity by the time I arrived. I would sometimes run into Sir Edmund Noble, Admiral of the Fleet and Chairman of St Clare’s, as I walked down to the strongroom to find some photograph of the wounded at Passchendaele. He was a tall, lean gentleman, high-toned and watery-eyed, and he would stop in front of you as if waiting for a salute. ‘Good afternoon, sir,’ I remember saying one of those times.

‘Are you civilian?’

‘Yes, sir,’ I said, feeling a bit of a let-down.