The family atmosphere was literary, but without literary pretensions. John Fuller recalls that they "would go to the Music Hall rather than the ballet."
During much of World War II the family lived in Lancashire, but moved to London in time to witness the V-2 bombardment. At eleven John Fuller entered St. Paul's School in London, where he started writing poetry seriously in 1953. At first he wrote pastiche T. S. Eliot, then a very large number of sonnets. Some of these appeared in the school literary magazine, which had been founded more than sixty years earlier by G. K. Chesterton and which later expired under the joint editorship of Fuller and another pupil. His first publicly published poem, "Circe," appeared in the Listener (10 September 1953); he later described it as "very Eliotesque, with a bit of Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard thrown in."
Fuller recalls that he began writing poetry "with a carefully cultivated independence" from his father's poetry, although, like his father, he read Auden early and adopted some of his mannerisms. At school he first began writing under the influence of a friend who also persuaded him to learn Esperanto.
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