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and then a founder of Surrealism, before joining the French Communist Party in 1927 and the Resistance over ten years afterwards. Described as radiant by his great friend the Surrealist leader Andre Breton in 1952, for him, the golden boy of some thirty years earlier had been somewhat coquettish in his rebellion, with an excessive desire to please born of an essential warmth and suggestibility.

I aspired to be an enfant terrible on a small scale myself at Westfield, ever seeking the centre of attention, baulking at every restraint, talking, smoking, drinking to excess, driven by a desire to be loved by everyone almost as if my sanity depended on it, while alienating those who'd gladly have devoted themselves to me and me alone. But that was never enough for me. And then there was the shadow that endlessly warred against this constant need to give and receive affection, a hidden, terrible rage significantly directed towards what I perceived as social injustice. The chief targets of my rage were dictators on the right wing of the political spectrum, indeed the political right as a whole. Throughout a decade of riot and protest in the UK, I affiliated myself with one radical lobby after the other...CND, Greenpeace, Animal Aid, Amnesty International etc., and I marched against the nuclear threat in London and Paris, lectured for Amnesty while blind drunk to a roomful of middle-aged Rotarians, and had a letter published in the newspaper of the Anti-Apartheid Movement.
While I'm not suggesting I was insincere, my righteous fury was blind to the fact that oppression stems from the sin we all share, being based on a fallacious notion of the perfectibility of Man, that has no real satisfying motive other than its own existence. In time, it started to turn inwards, and to eat away at the reserves of tenderness that meant so much to me. And my darkness was enhanced by alcohol and dissolute living, and an addiction to astrology and other occult topics, and scandalous art and philosophy. What a contrast to the noble and uplifting purposes of Christianity.

Initially I was unhappy about becoming a student again at Westfield, perhaps because it'd only been just a little over a year after my modest triumph at the Old Vic and I felt that by going back to college I was taking a step backwards in my career. After all, I'd be 30 by the time of my final year. It wasn't long, however, before Westfield started to become something of a paradise for me, not just in terms of the dozens

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