MY LAST article (M Star February 6-7) described the strawberry-picking farm camp where Betty and I worked in 1949, the year before we got married.

At the camp, we met Val Sherman, who was studying at the London School of Economics and was a member of the Communist Party’s national student committee.

Twelve years earlier, aged 17, Val had volunteered to fight in Spain with the International Brigades against Franco’s fascism.

By the time he died in 2006, he had moved from communism to Thatcherism, advising and writing speeches for Sir Keith Joseph and Mrs Thatcher herself.

He was knighted in 1983, as Sir Alfred Sherman.

Eventually he fell out with the Tories and died unloved by most of the right and all of the left.

While we were at the farm camp, the local strawberry-pickers went on strike for higher wages, and all the students, of course, joined them.

Sherman, fearful of photographs in the local press, hastily shaved off his beard.

I don’t remember much else. I think the strike only lasted a day or two, and I’m sure it was successful.

During the farm camp, I visited my uncle, who was a fellow of Pembroke College, Cambridge, and dined with him at the college’s high table.

The other two guests that night were a director of the Bank of England, which had been nationalised three years previously, and EM Forster.

Callow youth that I was, I had no idea who he was. Now that I have read most of his novels, I bitterly regret my ignorance.

My meeting with Forster was not the only time that callow, ignorant Chris met someone famous he had never heard of.

A few years later, after Betty and I had moved from Bristol to London, our solicitor Richard Turner, who was a member of our local Communist Party branch, gave a house-warming party when he and his wife Eileen moved from Ladbroke Grove to a flat in Pembridge Mews, also in west London.

Among the guests was the composer Malcolm Arnold, who had come straight to the party from a rehearsal at the Royal Festival Hall.

He regaled us with his favourite limerick:

There was an old man of Madras,
Whose balls were made out of brass.
In stormy weather
They clanged together
And sent sparks up the poor man’s arse

After the party, he gave us a lift back to our flat in Holland Road. He told us that he had recently returned from a music festival in Prague, and I asked him what instrument he played. Oh dear! Stupid me!

While I am dropping names, Freddie Mercury also lived at 100 Holland Road … but many years after we did.