The Way I Was: Glory days of chariots for hire: Colin Welland tells Nicholas Roe of the day he turned down a drink with a girl in her Butlin's chalet because he wasn't thirsty

I WAS 15 going on 16 and three of us went to Butlin's in Skegness for what was my first holiday independent of my parents. It was 1950 and still on the edge of austerity. I think rationing was still around in those days, and these Butlin's holiday camps were a Valhalla for working-class kids. They were just like big schools, really. You had your houses, your discipline, your dining hall, your social activities, competitions - I remember getting to the final of the crown green bowling competition because my grandad was a crown green bowler and I knew all about it and surprised everyone, being 15 and in the final.

Why should I feel superior now? It's no use looking back at things you did in the past with present sophistication because that would be unfair to those times. In those days it was perfect for my aspirations and for my stage of social development. Though I suppose you can look at the naivety and think how simple life was. For instance, three girls asked us back to their chalet for a drink and we said 'No, thank you, we're not thirsty.'

I know how I felt at that age. I was completely secure. We lived in a small town called Newton-le-Willows in Lancashire. I had a wonderful mother and father. I wasn't too successful academically, though I was in certain areas - I was good in the arts subjects, absolutely hopeless in science and mathematics. I played rugby and cricket for the school and I was the big cheese in all the amateur dramatic productions.

So I felt I had a certain usefulness and a presence in the school and in the community, and to that extent I was content. I lived in a council house, and looking back I think we were not gun-fodder but pen-fodder in a way. We went to the local grammar school, which provided the run-of-the-mill educatedE class for the insurance companies, the teaching profession and THER write errormaybe the lower reaches of the legal profession.

But I always wanted to go on stage and I was discouraged from doing so, simply because our fathers and our teachers were the children of the Great Depression and they believed in the value of a qualification. Friends who went to public schools would tell me that they would meet the careers master and he would say, 'Right, what do you want to do?' The sky was the limit. We didn't have a careers master, and when we set about trying to realise our ambitions there were severe boundaries put on them.

But I believed what they told me and in a way they were right because I did get qualifications, I did become a teacher and I did go out into the world as a wage-earner. And certainly, as a writer, those years in the trenches have stood me in marvellous stead: the immense richness of the time, the affections and enmities, learning how society ticks, how people make room for each other and elbow each other out of the way . . .

Oh, the holiday must have done something for me: we'd been free, we'd been independent. We'd made many of our own decisions and we must have come back feeling cock-a-hoop that we'd survived it all.

I can remember the tune of the moment, 'Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered', and whenever I hear it now I can still feel the excitement of descending the steps into the ballroom, you know, the scent of females . . . I can remember the final dance and the feeling of sadness when we sang 'Goodnight Campers' for the last time and said goodbye to the friends we'd made there: we made friends, yes, but not lasting friends, though strangely enough the three of us who went there are still together: one of them lives 10 minutes from me in London.

I have a house in the Lakes and I drive up the M6. From the motorway I can see where I used to live and I often think: I used to sit on the wall looking out over those fields and that kid would never have dreamt that one day he would go up and collect an Oscar. It's a shame that limits are set on the ambitions of working-class kids. But looking at this photograph, within the limits of life in those days and what was available to him, this boy was having a bloody good time.

(Photograph omitted)