Why British author Simon Winchester would sleep with one of his critics’ wives, his love of Hong Kong, and why he got prison time during the Falklands war
- Author and journalist Simon Winchester has worked all over the world, covered Watergate, and spent many happy years exploring China from his Hong Kong base
I was born in London in 1944 and sent to boarding school at the age of four-and-a-half, which was young even by the exacting standards of the English middle classes in those days.
It was a tough regime – there were a lot of beatings and we weren’t addressed by name but by number. I was Number 46.
My father had had a tough time of it in the war, and I think he found my presence disruptive when he came home having been interred in a prisoner-of-war camp. They never had any other children.
I don’t think being sent away to school had any great lasting effect on me, although I did suffer some mental problems at university.
Electric shocks
It started when I was working – overworking, rather – at Oxford. I woke up one morning and found I could not understand what people were saying or do something as simple as buy a newspaper. I thought I was going mad.
