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at the former site of Queen Charlotte's Hospital on the tail end of the Goldhawk Road.

I was articulate and sociable from the outset, walking early, talking early just like my dad before me, but agitated, unable to rest, what they might call hyperactive today. And at some stage in the early to mid sixties I became a problem both at school and home: a disruptive influence in the class, and a trouble-maker in the streets, an eccentric loon full of madcap fun and half-deranged imaginativeness. My striking thinness was offset by the crew cuts my dad liked my brother and I to sport, and the fact that we were routinely dressed in lederhosen can hardly have moderated our unusual appearance. I'm not sure when we were allowed to shed these, and let our hair grow just a little.

From the time I was a small boy, I divided my time between the Lycee Francais de Londres, where I became bilingual while little more than a toddler, and my stomping ground of Hammersmith, Chiswick, Bedford Park and so on. I took Judo classes at the Budokwai in South Kensington, where one of my teachers, a former British international, said he always knew that it was Saturday when he heard Halling's voice. I was known as Alley Cat by the other kids at the Budokwai, after my surname of Halling, and it was a pretty apt name when you think of it. Later, I took classes at the Judokan in Hammersmith, where doubtless I tried to make life hell for its owner, a one-time captain of the British international team and a close friend of my father's, but he knew how to handle me, which was not surprising given that he'd served as an air gunner during World War II, later holding Judo classes in a POW camp. Perhaps it took a man like him to know how to control a boy like me, a little monster who could nonetheless cast spells with the beatific smile of a seraph, and then go on to break your heart...

Learn more about this author, Carl Halling.
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