At the age of eight, a friend introduced me to Guy Hamilton's 1969 film 'Battle of Britain'. This instilled in me two things: my doomed childhood ambition to be a Spitfire pilot, long since grudgingly abandoned, but also, perhaps ironically, a love for the sound and feel of the German language that has stayed with me all through the intervening decade. So taken was I with its beauty and precision that mastering it immediately became, even then, a personal Grail. I began at once, spending my last years of primary school acquiring an accent and basic grammar, along with what motley fragments of vocabulary I could pick up and retain.
It was in my final year there that I had my second affirmative exposure to German, when an outreach team from the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment gave us a series of intensive workshops on Bach's 'St John Passion'. Here I discovered Luther's Chorales, effectively the first pieces of German literature that I read and, after some effort, understood. These were a great help in expanding my vocabulary, though for a while I was a little stuck in any conversation that did not involve the Crucifixion.