Antony Starr

I had a job when I was 15 working at a supermarket, and I knocked over a stack of plastic coffee cups. In my anger, I threw one at a concrete wall, and it rebounded back into my head and cut my head open. Stupidest way to get a scar, but it's one that I have.

For a boy of ten, used to the coal bings and rust-coloured burns of Cowdenbeath, the fields and woodland of Kingswood, with its overgrown but stately avenue of copper-barked sequoias, felt like a local version of paradise.