His father was, he recalled, fairly supportive of his resolve to become a novelist, though his mother hoped he might train as a teacher to have “something to fall back on”. Instead, after graduating, Banks hitch-hiked around Europe, and then took a series of jobs, working for almost a decade (some of it in the south of England) as a dustman, a hospital porter and a clerk, with stints at IBM and British Steel, while steadily devoting himself to his writing. Until his first book appeared, he plastered the walls of his room with rejection slips. His parents became more relaxed about the security of his career, he observed, only after he had bought them a house next door to his own.