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There was just enough natural light filtering through the skylight to work. It was quiet, except for the gentle cooing of pigeons and the occasional flit of swallows leaving their nests in the rafters to hunt insects in the evening air. Leaning over the heavily scarred oak workbench, I carefully ground the granulated weed-killer into a fine white powder with a mortar and pestle improvised from an old glass ashtray and a six-inch bolt. A brief visit to the town library had provided the correct stochastic ratio for the explosive reaction between sodium hyper-chlorate and sucrose. With a rusty set of kitchen scales I weighed out the correct amount of sugar and ground that down too. The old one-inch copper pipe was already prepared, one end crimped up using a vice, and a pencil-sized hole drilled into its midpoint and covered with a strip of masking tape. All that remained was to mix the two white powders, tip a few grammes into the pipe and tamp it down with a wooden dowel. When the tube was full, I gingerly crimped down the other end - too much violence could cause the mixture to detonate prematurely. Laying out a couple of feet of two-inch masking tape, sticky side uppermost, I carefully sprinkled out a line of the remaining white powder along its length, then rolled it up like a long cigarette. If thin and loosely packed, the fuse would burn slowly enough to let me reach cover. Rolling up the leg of my jeans, I taped the device to my shin with a couple of strips of masking tape, concealed the fuse in my sock and slipped out of the barn.

Dusk was falling on the village. Most of the population were indoors eating their evening meal and the road through the settlement was empty except for a few old cars parked at the side. There had been no rain for many months and the grass verges were parched white. I hurried past the small post office, carefully scanning the second-floor windows. The net curtains didn't twitch, suggesting that the grumpy postmaster hadn't spotted me.

The handful of middle-aged drinkers in the corner bar, probably farmers judging by their ruddy complexions and outdoor clothing, didn't look up from their drinks as I passed the window. Slipping round the side I hurried down the short hill to the red sandstone bridge across the river. A man was walking his dog towards me, but they paid no attention. Glancing over the parapet to check the river, I saw the normally swift, deep waters were slowed to a trickle between a series of pools, still except for the occasional trout rising for a fly.

Checking once more to ensure no one was watching, I slipped over the parapet and dropped out of sight. There were three arches to the bridge, supported on two small buttressed islands. Under the first arch there was a broad ledge, heavily scoured by the floods which came every winter. I clambered over the barbed wire fence built to prevent sheep from the neighbouring field straying underneath and dropped to my hands and knees to squeeze up to the stonework. I waited for a few minutes, listening - it wasn't too late to abort. Distant wood pigeons cooed gently and a nearby herd of sheep bleated sporadically. A car passed overhead, but that was the only sound of human activity.

Pulling up my trouser leg, I unstrapped the improvised explosive device and scraped at the river gravel under the arch with a piece of driftwood, creating a hole large enough to bury the pipe-bomb against the foundations. A quick tug removed the tape masking the hole in the tube and I inserted the fuse. A last check around confirmed that no one was watching.

With one flick, the Zippo's flame ignited the touchpaper. I watched for a moment, ensuring it was fizzling soundly, and scampered. There was just enough time to reach the cover of a fallen elm trunk before the device blew with a resounding bang that was much louder than expected. A family of ducks quacked away from the cover of some reeds on the muddy bank and the cooing of the wood pigeons abruptly halted.

Gingerly, just as the echo rolled back from the fellsides of the valley, I emerged from my cover to inspect the damage. The dust was still settling, but the bridge was standing. I smiled with excitement. It was easily my best bang of the summer - jolly good fun for a 13-year-old. I set off for home at the double, hoping the grumpy postmaster wouldn't collar me as I passed his house.

Father was from a Lancashire farming family and met my mother while studying agriculture at Newcastle University. In 1962 they emigrated to New Zealand with their son, Matthew, who was then less than a year old. Father got a job with the New Zealand Ministry of Agriculture as a farm adviser in Hamilton, North Island. I was born in 1963 shortly after their arrival; then in 1964 came Jonathan, my younger brother. New Zealand was an idyllic place to bring up a young family - good climate, peaceful, plenty of space - and Father wanted to stay, but my mother wanted us to be educated in England.

On our return in 1968 my father found work as an agricultural adviser in what was then called the county of Cumberland. My parents started house hunting in the area and discovered an old coachhouse that they both liked in a village a few miles north of Penrith. The house was not very large and was in a ramshackle condition, but it had a big garden containing some spacious outbuildings. My mother liked the large garden that would give her three young sons plenty of room to play. My father was keen on DIY and building, and saw plenty of scope for improvement. They scraped together the money they had and mortgaged themselves to the hilt to buy it and we moved in shortly after my fifth birthday. My mother started work as a biology teacher in a comprehensive school in the market town of Penrith.

At first my brothers and I attended local primary schools, but my parents wanted a better education for us than that provided by the secondary schools in the area. Matthew, being the eldest, sat the entrance exams for nearby private schools and won a scholarship to Barnard Castle, an independent boarding school near Durham in north-east England. He started there in 1972 and I followed the year after, also with a scholarship, then Jonathan two years later. Despite free tuition, it was still a considerable financial sacrifice for my parents to pay the school fees every year. It must have been quite an emotional sacrifice for them too, because we all hated the place.

Barnard Castle school was very sport-oriented, particularly towards rugby. I scraped into the school rugby and swimming teams a few times as a junior, but lost interest in later years. The disciplined regime of boarding school was unpleasant. Life was dictated by bells - bells for lessons, meals, prep, bedtime, lights-out and chapel. There were a few good times there, but my strongest memories are of being cold, hungry and slightly bored. The daily chapel services - twice on Sundays - were especially tedious.

The holidays made school bearable, particularly the long summer break. The River Eden ran through the village and many hours were spent with the local boys on the bridge, carving our initials into the parapet and pulling wheelies on our bikes. In the summer we spent long afternoons in the river, swimming and shooting the rapids on old inner tubes. Everything mechanical interested me and many happy hours were spent tinkering in my father's workshop in the big barn next to our house, fiddling with his tools and getting filthy dirty. With my father, I built a go-kart from bits of scrap-metal and an old Briggs & Stratton bail-elevator engine rescued from a nearby farmyard, and used it to tear up my mother's lawn. The go-kart was joined by an old Lambretta scooter, also immediately pulled to bits and rebuilt. There wasn't enough room in the garden to get it beyond third gear, so when my parents were out one day, I took it out on to the village road to see how fast it would go. I nearly crashed it into the grumpy postmaster's car and had to endure years of grudges from him. Returning to boarding school at the end of the holidays was grim. Unlike my brothers, who both left after O-levels to study at the local comprehensive school, I stuck it out for A-levels. The school didn't much cater for my interests and I was often in trouble for seeking stimulation from unapproved activities. We had a cheerfully irresponsible A-level chemistry teacher, Mr Chadwick, who one organic chemistry lesson demonstrated the stupefying effect of ether by gassing one of my classmates, Villiers, leaving him passed out on the floor of the laboratories. Chadwick turned a blind eye while we stole bottles of the chemical from the labs afterwards and got high sniffing it in the school grounds. He also taught us how to make explosives, whose effects he gleefully demonstrated by blowing up bombs behind the biology labs. Villiers and I stole the ingredients to make our own bombs in the sixth form kitchens. Once we made mercury fulminate, an unstable explosive which involved reacting deadly poisonous mercury and cyanide. We boiled them up in an old saucepan which, to our delight, the school jock used afterwards to make himself scrambled eggs. I bumped into him many years later in London, so it presumably didn't do him permanent harm.

Though school was not always fun, I worked hard and won a scholarship to study engineering at Cambridge University. The gap year was spent working in South Africa for De Beers in a job arranged by my father's brother, a research scientist at the diamond mining and manufacturing firm. The bright blue skies, open spaces of the high veldt, good food and wine were a refreshing contrast to Barnard Castle. One of the prerequisites to study engineering at Cambridge was to learn workshop skills, so the first few months at De Beers were spent learning to lathe, mill and weld. Then the firm gave me a fun project.

Diamonds are created in nature by the intense pressure and temperature deep in the earth's crust metamorphosing raw carbon into diamonds. De Beers theorised that diamonds could be created artificially by the intense but instantaneous temperatures and pressures created in an explosion, and they asked me to investigate. Several happy months were spent designing and making increasingly large bombs of plastic explosive, packed around a core of ground carbon. With the help of demolition experts from the South African Defence Force, we detonated them on ranges just outside Johannesburg, making some huge explosions. It was possible that we managed to make a few diamonds, but we never managed to find them in the huge craters left by the bombs.

It was a wrench to leave that job in the summer of 1981, but I was looking forward to starting at Cambridge.