One cold Christmas eve, a small boy stood among the tombstones in a lonely churchyard.
It was a bleak, windswept place overlooking the Kentish marches that stretched away, flat and sad, towards the River Thames.
I was the small boy - named Philip Pirip after my father, but always known as Pip. That afternoon was to shape of the rest.
My parents died when I was very young, so I had no memory of them. My idea of what they were like - square and stiff or thin and curly was taken from the words on their grave.
PHILIP PIRRIPLATE OF THIS PARISH
The sky was darkening and the wind rose. The loneliness of the place grew suddenly so frightening that I began to cry.