Clarke was born in Minehead, a coastal town in Somerset, England. "The fact that I was born half a mile from the sea--or at least from an arm of the Bristol Channel, which to a child seemed positively oceanic--has certainly affected all my life.
"Much of my youth was spent on the Minehead beach, exploring rock pools and building wave-defying-battlements. Even now I feel completely relaxed only by the edge of the sea--or, better still, hovering weightless in the sea, over the populous and polychromatic landscape of my favorite reef. So in an earlier age I would probably have written stories about the sea. However, I was born at the time when men were first thinking seriously of escaping from their planetary cradle, and so my imagination was deflected into space.
"Yet first I made a curious detour, which is obviously of great importance to me because it involves virtually the only memory I have of my father--a shadowy figure who has left no other mark, even though I was over thirteen when he died. The date would have been around 1925. We were riding together in a small pony cart near the Somerset farm into which he had sunk what was left of his World War I army gratuity, after an earlier and still more disastrous adventure as a gentleman farmer.
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