I was born on May 31st 1926 in Wellington, the only child of Gerald and Alma Player (née Fuller). Except for spells overseas, I’ve lived in Wellington all my life. My father was just 17 when he volunteered for the First World War. He went off, fought in the trenches, and came back. Like many men of that time, he never talked about what the war was like. It was just too horrifying. He worked in the Public Trust Office. My mother was a small-town girl from the Wairarapa. I was brought up in the time of the Depression. It was many years before we owned a radio. We never had a telephone or a car and didn’t ever own a house. We always had library books and there were a lot of magazines and comics, which all parents disapproved of, but we read them anyway