Peter Clark writes: I was at Southend high school, in Essex, with Robert Nye. We all recognised his outstanding creativity. He did superbly in history and English and was pretty useless at everything else. Essays he wrote at the age of 14 and 15 were handed round to his fellow pupils for our enjoyment.
Eric Gordon writes: I started in journalism on a small Essex weekly news- paper in the 1950s and found myself working with Robert Nye, who had just left school. He must have been about 17. Our newsroom was a converted front room of a detached Victorian house in Laindon and we learned to cover weddings, deaths and the odd small local event, under the watchful eye of the chief reporter. I became friendly with Robert as both of us had strong radical views. Though our reports were often routine stuff – mainly full of names and addresses of mourners or guests at weddings – it was obvious to me that Robert had enormous talent as a writer, and I was always a little in awe of him.
Although I then lost contact with him, in the last couple of years we had corresponded about our old times on the paper.
