For a Catholic kid in parochial school the only way to survive the beatings - by classmates not the nuns - was to be the funny guy.

I wanted to be a great white hunter a prospector for gold or a slave trader. But then when I was eight my parents sent me to a boarding school in South Africa. It was the equivalent of a British public school with cold showers beatings and rotten food. But what it also had was a library full of books.