My father took me duck flighting with his brother and a couple of other fallas. The pools were on some rough land that was spoil from the main runway at a wartime bomber base in very rural Essex. I clearly recall lying on my back in the very small hours and looking at the moon and wondering at the enormity of the fact that there were men there. I was 10, and the only pair of duck that flew in survived. The frisson between the men on the moon and our lonely location at the end of that empty runway to the sky where a quarter of a century before young American pilots, possibly even the same ones, had flown into the same night sky caught my imagination, and there it stayed to this day.