Quite recently I’ve received messages by phone, letter and e-mail from people whom I had completely forgotten. The first occurred some months ago when I received a letter from an old friend, one that I do remember, and he asked me if I’d be interested in writing a piece for his local paper, over there in Welsh Wales, look you. It seemed that someone had brought up the fact that there’d been a gliding school up the Conway Valley during the last war and that I, in my youth, had been involved.

You see, during the war years, some misguided people, apparently not conscripted into the mines nor the armed forces, for some reason or other, formed a cadet corps and thus landed the job of teaching us spotty youths the noble art of crashing gliders.

Anyway, the editor of the said paper, one Daffydd Jones, remembered me as being a star crasher of gliders - the best example of which was my ignominious descent into the local river - and wanted me to get in touch. “We had great weekends up the valley there,” he wrote, “chasing girls in the local pubs and messing about with those Daglings and Kirby Cadets.”

I recalled vividly the Dagling and Cadet gliders but, for the life of me, I could not recall any Daffydd Jones.

I remembered the instructor who landed his plane upside down and, when we rushed to the rescue, shooed us away, then pulled the release on his harness and fell on his head, and I recalled the bank-manager/commanding officer who permitted me to drive the pick-up-wrecks car, as long as I stayed off the roads, but of Daffydd Jones I had no memory at all, and that bothered me.

And then, out of nowhere, I received an e-mail from someone called Ken who claims he was my best mate whilst we were fooling around, pretending to be Physical Training instructors in the R.A.F. over sixty years ago. Apparently someone he knew had spotted the name Warland in what was probably a climbing magazine and asked if this might be Ken’s old mate, of whom he’d spoken many times. Anyway, as far as I can fathom, Ken traced the magazine and wheedled my e-mail address out of the editor, and Bob’s your uncle.

So now I’ve got another problem. I can’t remember any Ken but, nonetheless, I worried about him because we must have done something memorable together back in the days of yore. I thought back very hard and remembered Cyril Gottlieb, with whom I’d bunked in those years. Cyril used to take his uniform home and have the creases sewn into it. He also loved to jive with two, preferably blonde, young ladies because, he explained, when the fun was over, he’d have to marry a black-haired Jewish lass.

And there was Shirley Thomas Lane, whom you could address as Shirley if you didn’t even grin, the WAAF corporal who always wanted to wash my frequently off-white P.T. sweaters for me, and the flight sergeant, a professional wrestler, who threw us all over the gym then drove home at night with his motor-cycle loaded with coal lifted from the camp bunkers. But no Ken comes to mind.

And even more lately when I had a call from a man who claimed I had been his favourite teacher, who’d inspired him no end, who’d encouraged him to write and who’d taught him high-jump, Western Roll, already. This fellow said he’d been trying to trace me and that he was a plumber, a qualified pilot, a sky-diver, a scuba-diving instructor and had been married to the same lovely wife for forty-one years.

This last snippet in information stopped me dead while I did the math and worked out that I’d taught this man in grade eight, more than forty-five years ago. I felt better for not recalling the guy.

Maybe, I keep telling myself, I have an alter ego out there who folk keep thinking is me. It must be this way otherwise I’d remember at least one of them.