Richard Feidler

Hi there.

It was in a place called Putney on a dreadful council estate.

We lived there for 10 years from when I was 7 to 17 and it's always been my thing that I say it was a nightmare.

Yeah, really that was why it was a bit of a nightmare because my father had trained to be a priest.

He grew up and was schooled in Belgium in a monastery but then obviously didn't.

My mother was born in India.

part of the British Raj so when they got kicked out of India they came back to England and that's how my mother and father met so pretty middle class really you would say but they had no money and they were Catholic so they had kids and I was the second and I remember we actually were homeless for I was about three but I still remember my mother screaming as we were separated from my father because the men went into a hostel and the women and the kids went into another one

And so that's how we ended up in housing because, you know, we had no housing.

It was Putney, so I went to a primary school on the estate.

They had a high school on the estate, but there were a lot of pregnancies.

So somehow my mother got me and my sister Helen to a girls' school in nearby Fulham.

So, yeah, but I still like the place.

Four.

So there was Helen, who's sadly deceased now, myself and Peter and Simon, my two brothers.

When we were very young, we were very close because we used to get beaten up a lot and I used to defend my brothers.

So because my mother also worked, we were left on our own a lot, a lot.

Oh, totally.

It was Putney Heath, literally across the road, like five minutes from where our flat was.

And I used to go there as a child to escape the family and what was going on in there, but also because it was peaceful and I would just walk for hours and be on my own for hours and had a huge imagination, loved talking to the birds.

And I'm not that much different in the terms of wanting to be in nature.