Reading age?
I was reading fluently from the age of two. I remember when I was four sitting on the knee of my great-grandfather, who was a pastor of the Plymouth Brethren, and reading the Christian Herald to him. When we lived in the Shankhill [in Belfast] I went to Nettlefield, an elementary' school which a few years later produced a footballer you may have heard of, George Best. The teachers used to make me sit at the front and read to the class or describe the story of a film.

Apart from that, master Higgins, how did you enjoy the film?
I have a great cinematic knowledge. My step-grandfather, a wonderful rogue, was a salesman and at one point was selling Paramount News. He would take me into the cinemas and I used to see a quarter or third of all the movies. In the mid-Thirties there was a lot of trouble in Belfast and when he took me to see King Kong, an IRA man blew up the foyer.

A big break?
We moved to Leeds and I went to a school where you wore a blazer and could take School Certificate. I got nothing. I was a complete failure. The headmaster gave me a flogging for the heinous crime of throwing a snowball at the clock on the old stable block. There was no glass on it and the snowball made the hands go backwards so that break lasted for a full 30 minutes. He gave me nine strokes on my backside and said, "Get out!" When I got to the door he said, "You're useless. You're never going to make anything of yourself."

Jack of all trades?
I left at 151/2 and did some miserable jobs, then did my National Service, when the Army discovered I had an IQ of 147. I came out at 21 and took a number of jobs while I worked in the evenings at my A-levels in European Political Science, I think it was called, and Classics. I was supposed to be learning to be a road engineer and a man called Frank Agutter used to take me out to hold his tape measure; if he had known that his granddaughter Jenny would be the star of The Eagle Has Landed ...

Lighting the candle at both ends?
I took a diploma at a teachers' training college. I'd no money so at half-past nine in the evening I would go out to work until 5am and grab the early morning bus back. I started teaching and then realised I needed a degree, so I signed up at the LSE for an external BSc in Sociology. It was a three-year course but I did it in two years in my spare time, sitting up to write essays until 2.30am. I taught for six years in a comprehensive and then spent four years lecturing at [the then] Leeds Polytechnic. As the writing started to pick up, I retired.

Does the story stand up?
When I was given an honorary doctorate at Leeds Metropolitan, I told the story about the headmaster and got a standing ovation. Afterwards a chap walked up to me and said, "I went to the same bloody school and the headmaster told me I'd never amount to anything. I'm a visiting professor at Leeds and a professor at Manchester University."