I once read a psychologist’s view that a happy adult is one who feels he has made his childhood dreams come true. If that is so, my later life at the rarefied top end of the equestrian and hunting world fulfilled many of the dreams, seemingly impossible, which I fostered during my boyhood in a two-bedroomed bungalow in a suburb of Bournemouth during the second world war.

By today’s average standards in bungalow land on the South Coast, we lived in straitened circumstances. My father, Aylwin Clayton, was an electrician commuting for long days by train to Southampton to work on naval shipbuilding; my mother, Norah Clayton, despite ill-health valiantly helped our meagre income by working variously as a typist and a bookmaker’s telephonist.

Hitler was already gaining power, and there was an international economic crisis when I was born in 1934. Vast sorrow and strife was about to engulf the world.

During my wartime childhood, food and clothing were strictly rationed, car travel a very rare treat. Many nights were interrupted when we dashed to our homemade air-raid shelter at the bottom of the garden during German aircrafts’ sporadic bombing of the area.

If this sounds grim, for me it was not. We were generally safer in Bournemouth than those living in London and Britain’s major production areas, which were subject to frequent heavy bombing raids.

My normally relaxed South Coast retirement town was not entirely insulated from the war. As an infant I tasted fear when a German fighter flew low over Bournemouth’s Pleasure Gardens firing indiscriminately at children as we sailed our toy boats on the Bourne Stream. My father grabbed me and thrust me into some bushes, sheltering me with his body. There were a few casualties, including a schoolmate of mine.

War over-shadowed my life from the age of five to eleven, and yet overall it was a wonderfully happy childhood. This was due mainly to the sacrifices and devotion of my parents to me, their only child. My father was generally placid, and gladly made time to take me on outings. Mother, who had slim, dark good looks, had a more meteoric temperament, and a strong right hand occasionally. She assured me I could ‘do anything’, and frequently urged me to ‘get out of doors and do something!’

My happiness was also compounded by the wonderful environment of the balmy South Coast at a time when urban development had been abruptly halted. Empty grass fields abounded around our bungalow estate, and beyond lay some of the most delectable rural landscapes in East Dorset.

My parents strived hard to ensure that, despite the shortages, life for me was as normal as possible: birthday parties, bus trips, plenty of pets, and above all freedom to roam far and wide on foot or bicycle, often with a host of neighbouring children. At the time I did not appreciate enough the sacrifices they made.

Bournemouth’s wonderful sea-shore was denied to us for most of the war, the splendid pier blown in half, and the beaches off-limits behind barbed wire, as some form of protection from a German invasion. This ensured my childhood explorations were directed inland. Barred from the sea, at my mother’s insistence I learned to swim in a tributary of the River Avon near Christchurch.

Without the distractions of computer screens and mobile phones, a visit to the Moderne cinema at sixpence a seat was approved by Mother as long as it involved a long healthy walk across a common.

I did not share my parents’ worries that food, clothes and petrol were severely rationed. I cared only about the sweet ration, which was healthily limited. Our nutrition levels were remarkably good; there was no danger of obesity among children in the 1940s.

The war had stopped house building, and our bungalow estate remained right on the edge of deeply rural Dorset. Perhaps it was an inheritance from my father’s family who were originally Quaker farmers in East Essex, but at a very early age I developed a passion for dogs, ponies and farming. My great-grandfather, a farmer and grocer in Dunmow, was a passionate foxhunter, wearing a black coat and avoiding attending meets because hard liquor was consumed.

The possibility of launching a career as an equestrian journalist from our bungalow estate during the war seemed an impossible dream.

And yet this is how it happened….

‘I want to start riding now,’ I said firmly at the age of seven. To my surprise my mother did not give the response to which, in 1942, I had become all too accustomed: ‘We can’t afford it. Wait until after the war.’

We were enjoying a luxury: tea and scones, without cream, in the garden of a cottage café on the bank of the River Stour at Longham, in Dorset, a village of delightfully rural thatch and stone cottages north of Bournemouth.

My demand was prompted by watching an elderly lady, in impeccable riding dress and bowler hat, ride past, accompanied by an equally smart little girl on a pony.

My mother said: ‘After tea we’ll find the stables in Longham and see what we can do.’

We walked up the village’s long winding street until on our right we came to a yard of loose boxes, some with horses’ heads leaning out, much to my excitement. There appeared to be no-one there, so we walked on past a grass paddock where there was a shabby notice-board proclaiming: ‘Longham Riding Stables’. We did not know it, but the lady and child we had just seen riding past did not come from this yard. They were based at the far more up-market teaching and schooling establishment run on the opposite side of the road in Longham by Miss Bush.

On our right was a double-fronted, pink-walled farmhouse with a thatched roof, all in need of renovation, as were so many war-time properties. There was a narrow, dirt path by the side leading into a ramshackle farmyard, lined with wooden loose boxes roofed in blackened cast-iron.

We peered over a water butt into an open back window of the cottage where a large lady with hair in a tight bun, and wearing a capacious pinafore – her garb at all times – was busy at the sink.

‘Mr Brown is milking; if you wait in the yard he’ll deal with you directly,’ she said severely. I do not think I ever saw Mrs Brown smile.

This was not Mr Brown’s wife; it was his mother, the dominating influence on a life virtually confined to the yard, and the riding school. It was far more down-market than Miss Bush’s, but it was available, and just about affordable.

The Brown yard was enjoying a busy war-time because there was an influx of servicemen and women stationed in the area who were hiring his horses.

Bernard Brown eventually emerged from a cattle shed. He was as near the human incarnation of Mr Toad of Toad Hall as I had ever seen: impressively rotund in girth, with a round, red beaming face and small bright blue eyes, under a capacious checked cap which I only once or twice saw him remove to reveal a pink bald head. The eyes were not as smiling as his mouth. He sported the drab cord breeches, brown boots and gaiters which were virtually the uniform of Longham Riding Stables. His fingers snapped a pair of bright yellow braces, and he opened his small, cupid-lipped mouth to surprise us with a light, mincing voice: ‘And what can I do for this young man…?’

Mr Brown was, in the vernacular of today, undoubtedly gay. I was later to be told conspiratorially by a young male stable-hand in the jargon of the 1940s: ‘He’s a queer alright, but he’s harmless…’

I had not the remotest idea what this meant. Sex education was an entirely unknown phenomenon in the learning syllabus of my junior school, nor later at Bournemouth Grammar School.

Bernard Brown welcomed to me to his yard, but I never had to be careful of any homosexual overtures. On rare occasions he would make a mildly salacious remark, such as: ‘You really can’t ride that big horse – not until your middle leg is longer.’

His tragedy, shared by many, was that he lived in a world where his sexual inclination was illegal, and if he had any sex life it had to be entirely clandestine.

Bernard Brown’s yard, a 30 minutes’ cycle ride from my home, was to become my first gate-way to horsemanship, and the hunting field. There were to be no formal lessons, but plenty of instruction and education in the practice of keeping horses, as well as riding them.

‘Yes, you can ride at ten o’clock next Saturday morning; it’s four shillings an hour,’ Bernard lisped. I decided I quite liked him, although I did not understand how such a large, formidable-looking man could speak in such a little voice. I have never ceased to be utterly grateful to dear old Bernard for my first opportunity to become something of a horseman.

My cousin Nina Clayton, who lived with us, and was a year older than my seven years, accompanied me on my first ride from Brown’s.

Nina, somewhat to her dismay, was mounted on an ancient, washy-chestnut gelding named Splash, hideously one eyed, with the vacant eyeball gaping...