Bruce Dickinson - What Does This Button Do? - The No.1 Sunday Times Bestselling Autobiography

For those wishing to learn French there was Mr White. But Mr White was only interested in playing with his vast train set, which occupied half of the top floor. French lessons consisted of watching the OO-gauge Flying Scotsman whizzing round for 20 minutes.

Classes were streamed in sets A, B, C or D, from the most brilliant to the severely challenged or just plain bored. I yo-yoed from one set to another. I was always just plain bored, but was bribed to do well by the promise of a bike with racing handlebars should I leap up the pecking order.

Towards the end of my time I found myself in a class with only eight people, and we didn’t have lessons as such. We sat around, talked, argued, discussed, wrote things because we wanted to, and played practical jokes that tried to be interesting rather than just cruel. Teachers came and we spoke as equals. It was extraordinary. It felt like my brain was popping with ideas, like popcorn in a pan. Delightful.

Of course, there was a reason. The aim of this whole process was to take a fairly stiff set of exams that took a whole week in order to get into the highly competitive boarding-school system from age 12 or 13 to 18.

Big boys’ stuff.

School wasn’t the only place to get an education, however. I learnt to ride a bike, and hurtled around the neighbourhood. I had a chemistry set, which stubbornly refused to make anything of any entertainment value, and my dad taught me to play chess. We played frequently, until one day I beat him, and then we stopped.

On holidays in Great Yarmouth I spent my time surrounded by zinc buckets full of pennies. The expression ‘bucketloads of money’ was simply work in progress for an amusement arcade on the sea front. It was owned by my cousin Russell’s parents.

Every trip to Great Yarmouth ended up in the flat above the amusement arcade. It was furnished with questionable coffee tables supported by Nubian-slave statues, and a carpet that was more like a white hairy sea of synthetic tendrils that looked like it would eat you if it didn’t like your shoes. There was small talk, and then I was presented with the cast-offs from my cousins: hideous suede-fronted cardigans and other monstrosities designed to make a 10-year-old look like 50 years old.

Buoyancy was a family trait. In order to learn not to drown, my father had simply been thrown in the Norfolk Broads. I learnt to swim under his supervision, but in not quite as abusive a fashion. Somewhere, lurking in the bottom of a mouldy suitcase, is my certificate from Heeley Baths, Sheffield, listing that I, on that day, swam 10 yards in approved style. After ingesting enough chlorine to blind a First World War battalion, I squinted pink-eyed from the sunlight, relieved that the ordeal was over. My dad swam like a fish. He would swim three miles in the ocean as a boy. I, on the other hand, have always regarded swimming as thoroughly hazardous. It is merely preventative drowning. I am one of nature’s sinkers. ‘Relax,’ cry the floaters, but sadly my feet go the way of gravity and the rest follows suit.

Before we venture through the hallowed portals of an English public school, there are a few more pieces of the jigsaw to throw on the table.

I was reasonably solitary. I wasn’t interested in sport. I spent long afternoons at the weekend in the public library, browsing and daydreaming. I had discovered wargaming, and my evenings were spent researching the accuracy of the Brown Bess musket and the tactics of the infantry square, and painting my white-metal Scots Highlanders, shortly to be unleashed on an unsuspecting Napoleon.

My uncle Stewart, a teacher, had been a county table-tennis champion, so, for Christmas, a rather fine table-tennis table appeared. Dad and his brothers batted away and argued over who had won, then went off to the pub. I immediately organised the Battle of Waterloo to be refought on it the next day. It was green and it was flat – perfect. It was one of many small events that caused my father to regard me somewhat strangely, as if subverting a table-tennis table was somehow unmanly.

I had developed a wonderful set of spots as I approached the day I would leave home and take up residence for the next four years at Oundle School in Northamptonshire. Not great, but seeing as there were no girls anywhere on the horizon, not a showstopper. What made them break out into suppurating sores was the application of engine oil, burnt rubber and grime-encrusted fingernails. Just before semi-leaving home, I’d been introduced to motor racing.

Tim, a friend at school, and his elder brother Nick had a very enthusiastic father. He drove a massive Cadillac and had a huge trailer, in which was a miniature racing team for his sons. As far as I could gather, he owned a nightclub and drank a great deal of barley wine.

The karts were 100cc rotary valve, and they were very fast. I had never even turned a wheel before, but I just got in the seat, got my bump start and hurtled off towards the first corner down the long straight at Lindholme, the former RAF base.

I turned the wheel, did a 360-degree spin and stalled the engine. I did the same thing at just about every corner round the circuit before I got back to the trailer, followed by two very sweaty brothers gasping their last after chasing me round the circuit and restarting me half-a-dozen times.

We debriefed. Clearly I needed more information as to what was going on.

By the end of the day I thought I was flying: foot flat to the floor, down the straight, braking as hard and as late as I dared, the adrenalin shooting through my hands and heart. The truth is, I probably just about made it round without spinning off, but bugger that, steam engine driver, fighter pilot and astronaut – add racing-car driver to the list.

Before we go to boarding school, with all that entails, can I just have a word about religion? Something I experienced, and experimented with and had experimented upon me at four, too early an age. The outcome, though, was totally unexpected, and if God ever moved in a mysterious way, here was proof positive.

I don’t recall my baptism, but apparently I somehow managed to ingest quite a quantity of holy water. I could have drowned in the font. I am not sure that swallowing God’s special sauce caused any sort of aura to appear, but it might have been an influence on my early interest in angel wings.

School had the usual harvest festival and a bit of dreary carol singing, but it was only when I arrived at Birkdale that I was exposed to evangelical religion, bible black and fighting Satan on all fronts.

There was a cabal of zealous teachers and, by chance or design, they were the same teachers that ran school expeditions, including one to Fort William in Scotland. It consisted of 10 days’ camping, playing robust semi-military games, climbing mountains, bridging rivers, leaping from tree to tree (‘The Lumberjack Song’, anyone?) and religious brainwashing. Think Bear Grylls with no possibility of escape.

There were prayers and lectures, and every evening there was a group assembly in which 10-year-olds were encouraged to stand up and identify sins, and would be rewarded for their folly by rapturous praise, hugs and applause. I stood up and identified a fly on the wall, which was clearly a servant of Satan, because it had been distracting me from the balderdash being spouted by the part-time messiahs and full-time school teachers.

With no sense of irony at the age of 10, I was welcomed into the fold, and told that I was now evangelised. My purpose in life was to go and convert people to Christ.

Well, being a mission-oriented sort of chap, I sallied forth into the town and set about converting a couple of Highland girls by handing them a leaflet and inviting them to the campsite for a fun evangelical evening of happy-clappy hymns accompanied by bad guitar-playing and Aran sweaters.