Richard Littlejohn seems likely to have hummed and hawed over whether to include me in his memoirs of childhood before deciding that they would, on the whole, be better Gray-free. This seems a curious omission given how closely parallel our early lives were. We attended the same school and had the same first employer in the newspaper business for whom we worked together as cub reporters. Though he is a couple of years younger than me, we were good friends from the start.

As a matter of fact, I thought we still were friends, in the way that it is quite possible to be, even for people who rarely, if ever, meet. My last encounter with Richard was affable enough. This was 12 years ago at the Atlantic Bar and Grill in Piccadilly at a party following the opening night of the musical Our House at the Cambridge Theatre. I was there as a pal of the producer; Richard (with his wife Wendy) was present as a friend of Suggs, whose band Madness supplied the inspiration and music for the show.

Though I don’t read Richard’s famously acerbic Daily Mail column very often (being a Times and Telegraph man), I do see it occasionally, usually on planes (huge numbers of copies are supplied free to British Airways). I suppose this helps to create the illusion that we are still in contact.

Richard, however, thinks differently. Admitting of one exception (not me), he writes in Littlejohn’s Lost World (Hutchinson, £18.99): “I’ve never kept in touch with anyone from Deacon’s,” the reference being to the Peterborough grammar school of that name which we both attended in the mid-1960s. I must have known it to be the case, I suppose, but I had forgotten that the pair of us went there having turned down (insanity or what?) free places at Oundle School, worth about £30,000 a year at 2014 prices. Both of us qualified for this award with top marks in the 11-plus, and both of us decided to stick with our mates at Deacon’s.

While my seven years there were fairly happy, if not academically distinguished, Richard had a very different experience. His dislike of the place, and of one master in particular, is paraded for his readers’ amusement in Littlejohn’s Lost World.

The master is a man given the pseudonym Clelland, though his identity will be obvious to anyone taught by him. His subjects were geography and sport. Having qualified to teach, he returned to the school at which, shortly before, he had won all the glittering prizes. I fell foul of him on my first day on the rugby field when I mistook him for a sixth-former and refused to call him ‘sir’. This offence went unpunished, indicating that he was hardly the vicious sadist remembered by Richard.

To support his theory, he calls on the evidence of one of my exact contemporaries, who wrote in an Internet posting: “A nasty piece of work if ever there was one. These days organisations like Child Line would take a great interest in specimens like him.”

As it happens, this gentleman, during the five years that I knew him, could not himself have been described with honesty as other than seriously weird.

Richard is unkind, too, about our headmaster, W.R. Upcott-Gill, “a comedy headmaster from central casting”. Though a sartorial disaster in his chalk-encrusted suits, he seemed to me essentially a well-meaning man, and I write as one who was caned by him on many occasions. (That 11-plus success meant that ever after I was regarded as an under-achiever.) By contrast, one English master whom he admired struck me as vain (dyed hair) and malicious. A minor illustration: though I was widely recognised as my year’s best reciter of poetry, this teacher deliberately excluded me from our inter-house competitions by failing me, so to speak, in the heats, though my recitation of Siegfried Sassoon’s Everyone Sang would, I am sure, have been better than anyone else’s. Fifty years on, it still rankles.

Giving praise where it is due, however, Richard pays tribute to another English master who proved a useful mentor to both of us, in his case guiding his cricketing career as well.

On the whole, this in an enjoyable, well-balanced book depicting what I, too, recognise, viewed from the same perspective, as truly a lost world. Would that we could turn back the clock.