So moving into the new house was like waking from a dream, or perhaps like being born into a new life. As the day on which we'd move in approached we'd visit the almost-finished house more and more often, and then finally came the day when we formally moved in. It was still unfurnished so we had to sleep on matresses on the floor and sit on deckchairs for a little while and there wasn't any carpet on the floor of the spare bedroom but it was finally ours. That first afternoon I unpacked my Scalectrix cars and set up a track in that spare room and raced and raced the cars until the ozone from the sparks made my nose hurt. Then the next day I started to explore. I soon found many of the friends with whom I'd spend the next five years. Next door to us lived Matthew who was just slightly older than me and his exotic and sophisticated older sister Sarah who was already in senior school. (As far as I know, Matthew was the first of my peers to die - a couple of years ago my mother saw his obituary in our local paper.) Then there was James, who was a couple of years older than me and Matthew and who lived in the house on the corner by one of the little patches of common ground on which we used to play. Because he was older than us, James was the epitome of coolness (and he had an Phillips video games system, which was amazing). Finally, yet not least, there was Louise, who was the first girl I ever met who was interesting - she was into science and science fiction and technology and was just One of Us. For a few years she was my best friend (I lost touch with her eventually, but she went on to do a PhD in laser physics at Oxford).

I quickly made lots of friends at my new school too. First, there was Alex, with whom I shared a love of computers. I was in awe of his ability to program our Commodore 64s in machine code, and he was in awe of my ability to open the case and replaced the fuses whenever the power supply blew them. (My machine had a really dodgy power supply. It kept actually blowing some of the chips so I had to take it to be repaired. Eventually, the repair shop refused to touch it again after it had blown five times, each within the month long warranty they offered on their repairs.) Then there was Jon, who introduced me to the world of role-playing games. There were the four of us stranded outside our own year: me; Joel who was sporty and fit and smart and intense; blonde, beautiful Sophie, the first girl on whom I had a crush, and whose arrogance and casual cruelty I just didn't notice at the time (during the holidays, I used to go to play tennis with James at the sports club by her house in the hopes of catching a glimpse of her); and finally my first real rival, Caroline, with whom I competed bitterly for academic success, but who was always sweet and kind and friendly, yet shy. I should've been better friends with her than I was, I think. Finally, there were the friends I made when Caroline, Joel, Sophie and I were plunged back into our own year when we hit the end of junior school and had to do the final year again. There was Sasha, the oldest ten year old I ever knew (one time she walked home with my mum as I walked with some of my other friends a hundred metres ahead of them, and when we got home my mother reported that she'd been talking all the time about how I was nicer and smarter and more wonderful than all the other boys in her class; I didn't know what to make of that). Sasha lived in the houses on the other side of the fence surrounding the common land by James' house and sometimes I'd see her there on the other side of the fence watching us play, her long, frizzy hair that contained a hundred colours on the borders of brown and blonde moving slightly in the breeze, but she'd never come over to talk - she was part of the Gang on the Other Side of the Fence, and so we lived in different worlds. Then there was Amanda, who was short and extroverted, and who also decided that I was one of the good guys. One time I broke a prop that she'd brought in for a demonstration I was doing in an assembly and it really upset me, and she spent about an hour trying to stop me crying and telling me it was okay. The other thing I remember most clearly about her was that she was the angel in our school production of Joseph and His Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat, and I had to go and help her climb down from some scaffolding, but her handbag strap became tangled with the top of the scaffold and I couldn't untangle it and the audience started laughing and I finally undid it and then when running off as fast as I could. My dad videotaped the whole thing. Finally, there was Barney, the first of my lifelong friends, but more about him later.

Now, I'm spoiled for choice. There are so many things I remember from those years, things wonderful and charming and cute and scary, and I can't possibly commit them all to print. My life was curiously divided in two - none of my friends who lived near me went to the same school, so I had a life in school and a life at home that only barely overlapped. I'd see Alex a lot and Sasha sometimes, but everyone else seemed to live out on the other side of the school and it was quite a walk to get to any of their houses. I think my closest friends were those by whom I lived. Matthew was a real outdoors type, so we'd spend hours walking to the ponds along the road by the comprehensive school and then hunting newts. The amphibians must've seen us as akin to vengeful gods intent on depopulating those little ponds. Matthew would wade around in the shallows, leaning over ready to scoop newts out of the water, and I'd be hanging from the branches overhanging the pond, alert for the stream of bubbles that announced the imminent surfacing of a newt. We must've caught hundreds of them over the years, and we became gurus to the younger kids, who'd show up with their buckets and nets intent on bagging some of their own. Matthew set up an aquarium in his garden as the new home for his catches, but I'd put them into the pond in our garden. I'd spend many long hours watching in fascination as the newts walked and swam and mated in the clear water. Sometimes we'd bring back masses of frogspawn or the long ribbons of toadspawn and spend the spring watching the slow metamorphosis of tadpoles into frogs or toads. Sometime the plants around the pond were almost overrun by hundreds of little miniature frogs. I had a curious fascination with all things amphibian. In those days, we used to drive into Bath every Saturday afternoon to go shopping and sometimes we'd go to Victoria Park, a huge area of gardens and streams and slides and swings and climbing frames on the edge of that town. I loved the swings and slides well enough, but I'd always go off into the gardens too, because I knew that there was a certain little tap under which lived a gigantic toad, and I'd always go to say hello. Whenever we drove back from Bath my dad would listen to the football results on the radio and I'd look at the new toys that I'd bought and try to read all the information on them and give myself a headache and feel travel sick and end up miserable.

James, Louise, Matthew and I had an awful lot of fun during those years. I felt like I was the glue holding them all together - I'd do things with each of them individually, but I don't think any pair of the others would. Matthew and I were like little pre-teen survivalists. We'd go off to this area of land we called the Car Park, which wasn't ever used as a car park but sort of looked like one because it was where the construction vehicles parked and all the supplies were stored when the houses were being built, and build ourselves bomb raid shelters. Over opposite the entrance to the housing estate were a few small factories and we'd go to scavange wooden pallets for the roof, and we'd drag them to the ditch along the far side of the Car Park (which used to be a stream but which had been diverted into an underground pipe when the houses were built). The pallets would form a roof, and then we'd dig earth out from under them and pile it on top to form an underground chamber. We'd waterproof it with plastic sheeting and stock it with food and drinks and Matthew would leave a penknife there and I'd contribute a compass and James, I think, a torch. We'd spend hours in there crammed in the dark spinning out stories about nuclear apocalypse and radioactive wastelands and what we'd do to survive. Every holiday we'd get better ideas and build a new, improved bunker. At one point another gang built one too and we'd have running battles and sieges, throwing huge clods of mud at each other. Other times, we'd climb the trees between the Car Park and the little patch of wasteland that we weren't allowed to play in and act as lookouts. Still other times, we'd mount expeditions through that wasteland to get to the ponds, and we'd always run in panic when the grumpy old man whose garden was next to the route we took along the banks of the stream shouted at us and we had visions of being kidnapped and murdered.