He was always lucky, and he knew it: lucky in the secure rural intimacy of the upbringing described in Cider with Rosie; in the love of some passionate, clever women, whose guidance and support get rather less than their due in As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning; and in having survived the Spanish civil war — the subject of A Moment of War — despite seeing action (though on his part this involved more seeing than action) in the terrible last battle of Teruel, and being imprisoned three times as a suspected spy.