When the Army and I realised we were incompatible it was 1973, and I was honourably discharged from officer training at Sandhurst after just four months.
It had been intended that I should go into my father's regiment, the Queen's Dragoon Guards, and my parents were left bitterly disappointed.
My father told me that I would be a failure all my life, but in the event I was only a failure until I was about 40.
After leaving the service I went home and worked as a landscape gardener for a few months; it was this occupation that got me through university, and to which I always resorted whenever I was unemployed.
Eventually, the bad atmosphere at home became intolerable, and I got a job teaching on a ranch in rural Colombia, a country of which I had never previously heard. My boss was a white rancher, who gave jobs on the ranch to my pupils when they grew up.
I went to Colombia at exactly the right time in my life. It meant that I never followed the path laid out for me (public school, cavalry, Oxford, well-paid cushy job), but miraculously ended up doing what I had always known I would do since the age of 12 — writing.
Eventually, the bad atmosphere at home became intolerable, and I got a job teaching on a ranch in rural Colombia, a country of which I had never previously heard, writes author Louis de Bernieres (pictured)
Colombia is a mixed-race country par excellence. The coastal people are mainly descended from freed African slaves. The mountains are home to the indigenous groups, who are of eastern-Asiatic appearance.
The white people are not conspicuously white. It was quite common to see light-skinned black people with freckles and ginger hair. I was quite an exotic creature in such a country, and people would hail me with a very friendly 'Ay Gringoncho!' (Hey, big fat Yank), as I rode by on my horse.
After a year I came home, went to Manchester University, and realised that I would never feel truly British again.
I had been living among a rural people of godlike physique who had almost nothing to eat but what grew everywhere on trees or that they had managed to kill for themselves.
People whose children were brought up by entire villages, who seemed to swap partners every three years, and went crazy with violence when drunk on Friday nights. People whose men dressed like peacocks and whose women smoked cigars and curled their hair with cardboard lavatory roll tubes.
After that, Manchester in the 1970s was the very quintessence of drabness and I felt utterly demoralised. I had never lived in a city before, and felt completely lost and confused.
I fell in love with a chain-smoking French blonde, who treated me appallingly, left me for a gay bus conductor, and eventually realised she was lesbian.
I dealt with all this by remaining in Colombia in spirit, reading nothing but Latin American literature for about 15 years.
Colombia changed me in another way, permanent and profound. My father was a High Anglican, and my mother somewhat more Protestant.
At my prep school we had Chapel twice a day because the headmaster liked to dress up as a priest and parade his piety, in between bursts of his fondling and thrashing.
At my public school we had Chapel every day, and House prayers, but there was something curiously tokenistic about it all, as if one were simply reverencing the quaint customs of the past.
Even so, Jesus Christ seemed like somebody I knew as intimately as I knew my friends. Roman Catholics and Orthodox Christians feel this way about Mary, mother of Jesus, and Muslims feel the same about the Prophet Muhammad.
This personal intimacy is what makes faith seem so easy and natural. However, I did Divinity for A-level, and that's where the rot set in. There's nothing like studying the Bible in a critical and scholarly manner for sowing the seeds of doubt.
Every time the train jolted, you were flung up into the air. It was fantastically good fun, and all the passengers loved it. You would exclaim 'Whooba!' as you flew (file image)
Halfway through my time in Colombia, I was allowed a holiday and decided I was going to neighbouring Ecuador to blow my wages. These were the equivalent of about two pounds a week, so I would first travel to Colombian capital Bogota on the train before taking a plane.
The train was always several hours late, and often never arrived at all, so passengers would have a kind of impromptu party on the platform while they waited.
The tracks were very badly laid and maintained, and rather than re-lay them a much cheaper option was adopted; the seats were prodigiously well sprung.
Every time the train jolted, you were flung up into the air. It was fantastically good fun, and all the passengers loved it. You would exclaim 'Whooba!' as you flew.
Bogota was cold and rainy, compared to the tropical lowlands where I had been living.
I made my way to the airport, only to find that I could not leave without a document called a Paz y Salvo, which was a certificate to show that I had paid my taxes.
The Minister of the Interior was passing through, but was in too much of a hurry to help me, so I decided to spend my time in Bogota instead of Ecuadorean capital Quito.
My strongest memory is of going to the Gold Museum to see the looted pre-Colombian gold, and finding the steps of the museum covered with lepers. It was truly shocking.
Those livid rotting stumps, the rags, the
