I grew up in the Second World War, in Norfolk in the 1970s.

At least that was effectively what happened, even if the chronology is a bit off, technically.

Thirty years after the end of World War Two, Norfolk (the English county) was starting to accept that it might be over.

To get anywhere at all, you had to drive through abandoned world War Two airfields with decaying concrete loading ramps poking through the wheat stubble. In the corner of fields, pill boxes, squat concrete octagonal huts still had slots for machine gun barrels to point at the German troops advancing across towards them. Someone had at least put the signposts back, though ‘foreigners’ were still viewed with suspicion.

But it wasn’t just that. I had my own total war going on with my mother, and the insidious emotional occupation that forced me into emotional covert operation. Seamus Heaney had his inner emigre. I had an my inner French Resistance.

In a way, this was fine with me. I was a 10-year-old with ambivalent feelings about reality, and I welcomed becoming a member of the Resistance. Or the British Special Operations Executive, or Lifeline, the Belgian aircrew rescuing network in the Sunday evening BBC series Secret Army.

The Second World War never seemed to have properly left. I grew up close to where Apple TV’s Masters Of The Air were fictionally based and the rash of wartime American military airfields — aerodromes, my grandparents called them — were still there. The B12s Flying Fortresses and BXX Super Flying Fortresses had given way to the Phantoms and A10s, the US’s standard issues, but I would’ve recognised them from their silhouettes anyway. I had a wartime facsimile poster on my bedroom wall.

The RAF still wanted to cling on to its finest hour and kept calling the airfields RAF bases. 1970s England descended into three-day weeks and inflation, and the politicians paid fruit machine salesmen to kill blackmailers’ dogs [link to Jeremy Thorpe]. Norfolk decided it wasn’t keen on the 1970s either. Who could blame it. Ideally, it would’ve liked to go back to the 19th century, but grudgingly compromised on 1940.

I grudgingly compromised on a cover as a schoolboy, so I could the rest of my life intact. I became a spy.

The enemy was my mother. I learned to fit round the interstices of whatever object of venom she favoured that week, spotting the emotional checkpoints at the end of the street and taking another route home. If I could blend into the occupied population, cut out the labels in my clothes, do nothing to draw her eye to me, keep my papers in order, stay faceless, I wouldn’t get bundled into the back of an emotional truck in the middle of the night and annihilated.

My main manual was the Usborne Book of Spycraft, which was peopled with cartoons of squat eastern European men in gaberdine raincoats, homburg hats and dark glasses. They demonstrated how dead drops worked, how to make disguises out of papier mache, how to use a code wheel, and how to tell the speed of a cyclist from the tracks they left. All vital skills for those of us keeping our lives out of everyone else’s way.

But there was little obvious to spy on and the books themselves were pretty vague on how to know what you should be looking for. I’d gathered that often secrets were kept in desk drawers or filing cabinets, but when I’d searched through desks and filing cabinets in our house they were disappointingly free of anything except old bills and receipts and bank statements. Later, I’d come to see how a couple of things I saw there were actual clues to something, but at seven, I had no idea.

The other problem was my lack of staff. A spy ring, the book said, was a group of spies, who didn’t know each other, because they only knew the next link in the chain. The spy knew only the courier, and the courier knew only the master spy. I loved this control of who knew what about you. Naturally, I was going to be the master spy but I needed couriers and spies, and despite my attempts to recruit friends there was just me. I had no spy ring.

I hid in the attic.

The first floor of our house (second floor to Americans) was in the roof, so the upper halves to the walls sloped inwards following the external slope of the exterior. Below about adult waist height, walls dropped down from the slope, creating a little prism of attic to the side of the bedroom between the wall and the roof. They had weird removable panels to access them when we first moved in, but I convinced my father to replace the one in my room with vertical-swinging door so I could use it as my spy office. Not that I told my parents its use — the would have compromised security. They just knew I was keeping out of their way while they shouted at each other in the kitchen below.

I only realised later that hiding made you isolated. That came later when I discovered Graham Greene, the headmaster’s son navigating split classroom loyalties like a double agent, and John Le Carré, being whoever he needed to be to keep his conman father required to keep him out of prison. Other readers commented how their characters were living in some watchful, suspicious, cramped netherworld but it just seemed like home to me. That should have given me a clue that the spy behavioiur was more than just playing.

Spies keep themselves secret so they get to do the stuff they need to and concealed under the tarred roofing-felt, I was secret too.

Spies have the time to disentangle the ambiguities and deceptions of humans, consider every possible nuance and hint for hidden meaning. I was giving myself time and space

Spies decipher the inexplicable, shifting human motivations. I had so much to decode.

Spies stay out of the firing line of sudden, vicious betrayals. I was hidden

Spies are safe because they are hidden.

Spies lose any idea of who they are when they’re not hiding.

It would take me the best part of 40 years to to come out from the attic, to stop hiding, and work out who I am. This piece is part of that emergence.