The Gift of a Radio: My Childhood and other Train Wrecks

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Passenger from hell who yelled 'white children are easy to rape because white men are p******' is jailed for. There then followed three years working as the BBC's Europe correspondent based in Brussels before being posted to Washington as the chief radio correspondent in 2001. Afterwards, at Victoria Station, because we were broke, having spent our cash on the meal and the film, we asked a man for money so that we could get to our friend’s parents’ home.

His book is a careful, nuanced counterpoint to a culture in which people often seek to point unsparing fingers at the people and cultures which damaged them. In 2011, he published “Notes on Them and Us: From the Mayflower to Obama – the British, the Americans and the essential relationship”. When I saw this book in Waterstones, I thought the blurb looked interesting - apparently he did not have a conventionally privileged or happy childhood.After graduating from Cambridge and studying theatre at Yale and Harvard, he worked in Hollywood for Charlie Chaplin, broadcast letters from London for the American network NBC in 1936 and moved to New York in 1937, first as a correspondent for the Times and then for the Guardian for 25 years. And during interviews, he doesn’t try to beat anyone with a stick, but points out where the stick might be found. Alistair Cooke’s America contains phrases that do his legacy no favours: “The question of what to do with the Blacks is one of the oldest and guiltiest of America’s problems”; “Our confusion about what the Blacks want and what they are likely to get may not be praiseworthy, but it is understandable. My stepfather was diagnosed with schizophrenia, but in those days the diagnosis was a very wide one. In fact, Charles makes at least one attempt to kill himself, by taking all the Valium he had been prescribed.

Anyway, it is a mark of Justin Webb’s overall message of love and acceptance that he dedicates this book not just to his mother but also to the stepfather he had wished dead.The house was defined by silence – apart from when Charles got up in the middle of the night to play Bach at full volume, mainly to annoy the neighbours – and few friends visited, put off by Charles’ strange behaviour. This was the route that led to a polytechnic college – not quite the glittering academic career my doting mother had in mind. Play it to a child growing up in strange circumstances and you will allow him to see, to hear, the depths of his despair,” the book recounts. Having been educated in a secondary modern which turned into a comprehensive, nice is not the word I would use to describe it!

He gets picked up by a BBC car, reads the papers on the way and is at the studio in central London, ready to start, at 4am. The rest of the book is about his view of a particular boarding school and the start of his career which weren't particularly engaging, I thought. I came past the road on the train to Cardiff yesterday, which went through Bath and I looked up to try and see the house, which you can see briefly from the railway, but I couldn’t see much in the darkness,” says Justin.

Journalists are naturally nosey, forever prying and probing into the affairs of others, and yet, despite hoping throughout the book that he has made contact with Peter Woods, it’s sad to think he never did. I did not inhale, thank God, but we took some stems home and I smoked them in my room, filling it with pungent clouds and giving myself immense, unstoppable headaches.