Unlike most Englishmen, I am lucky enough to have lived in Scotland. Better still, I did so as a small and impressionable child who has ever afterwards been comforted and reassured by Scottish voices and moved by Scottish landscapes.

I enjoy the seriousness of the place. You can keep your Golden Gate and your Sydney Harbour Bridge – no prospect gives a more powerful demonstration of man’s heroic triumph over gravity than the original Forth Bridge, and the setting – stern and wild – is matchless. Though, like many such imperial prospects, it would look even better with a few huge grey warships nearby.

I wept when I left – for an England I didn’t know – on a steam-hauled southbound sleeper, and still remember looking longingly from the train through the flashing diagonals of the great bridge, wishing I wasn’t going.

Scroll down for video

Alex Salmond takes a moment to take in the Forth Bridge as he flew over it on his way to Edinburgh

To this day I’m thrilled whenever I return. I love the exhilarating difference between us and them, and have enjoyed most of the growing assertion of Scottishness in recent years, though I can manage without Gaelic signs on railway stations, which I suspect are as baffling to most Scots as they are to me.

So I could never really join in what I saw as a shallow English resentment at the Scottish aspiration for independence. The Scots are a people, Scotland is a country, and the demand for self-rule is reasonable.

We wasted many years, and made enemies out of friends, by refusing Home Rule to Ireland. Why make the same mistake again? I couldn’t be romantic about it because I understand – as most in Britain do not – that there is no true independence for any territory ruled by the EU. But I could see why Scots got cross when they were told separation from England would make them poorer.

So what? The power to rule yourself is priceless. Isn’t our history full of people who put liberty above money? So I set out for my old home in Rosyth, and the lovely ancient capital in Dunfermline, in two minds.

I didn’t fit neatly into anyone’s preconceptions, and nor did the Scots I spoke to. It was easy to fall into conversation with people, easier than it would have been in England.

There was the quietly humorous shopkeeper who gave me a quick run-down on Dunfermline’s modern political geography – still very much a matter of Catholic and Protestant, whatever anyone may tell you. It wasn’t all that different from what you might have heard in Armagh City in Northern Ireland.

He was keener on the Union than I was, one of the lost legion who once made the Tory Party the biggest political force in Scotland, most of them now well over 50. They are not making them like that any more, and when they are gone the ‘yes’ vote will be far more powerful.

His Scotland was the country I remembered, the smell of coal smoke on the sharp winds, the mines and heavy industry, and the thin-faced, serious people educated in stern and rigorous schools. That’s all gone.

Scots living in England were unable to vote in the referendum, but people of foreign nationality living in Scotland were

The schools these days are as soppy and comprehensive as ours, and outside one of them – being used as a polling station – I encountered another feature of the new Scotland.

I was chatting to a teller from the ‘No’ campaign when we were approached by a man who could barely speak English and who looked to me as if he might well be Burmese. Touchingly, he had no idea how to vote, and wanted to have it explained to him.

We sent him inside for official advice, but I had two sharp opposite thoughts. The first was a sort of joy at a fellow-creature having his first taste of democracy; the other was to wonder why such a person should have more power than I did to change the face of my country.

The next person I met was a cheerful citizen who had decided that morning to vote ‘Yes’. It was a pure gamble, a gesture of revolt against a life that hadn’t offered him much – he hated, above all, the absence of any work except on miserable wages.

Independence (as I think he knew) wouldn’t change that one bit. He just wanted to show he was alive, and relished the power to hurt those who had done nothing for him.

Then I took a train to Cowdenbeath, once a coal-mining town, deep in Gordon Brown territory, its wonderfully bleak name best known from the weekly recitation of the football results.

Now it’s a town of people who used to work, their occupations gone – though it has somehow managed to acquire a sizeable Polish population and a small Turkish community.

A magnificent, upright old lady with an umbrella, walking stoutly to the polls through the drizzle, filled me with guilt by denouncing, in beautiful, grammatical and clearly enunciated English, the silly delusions of the ‘Yes’ campaign, who were promising to spend money they hadn’t got on things they couldn’t afford.

She wouldn’t say how she was voting – like a lot of ‘No’ voters – partly because she had been brought up to believe in the secret ballot. But it wasn’t hard to guess. Yet the young woman with the two children, one in a pushchair, made an equally moving case for ‘Yes’.

Deserted by her husband, stricken early in life with cancer, anxious to work but compelled to travel miles to do so, she truly believed that an independent Scotland would treat her better than the decayed and patchy welfare state she now relied on.

Back in Dunfermline, a woman from England – who moved to Scotland because she liked it so much – told me a worrying story about a neighbour who had tried to put a ‘Yes’ poster on their shared lawn. When she had asked him politely not to, he unleashed a torrent of filthy insults, so menacing that she called the police (who, to their credit, came quickly and put him in his place).

Yet a few miles down the road a young mother complained to me about a ‘Yes’ canvasser who had ludicrously told her a ‘No’ vote would leave Scotland undefended from the terrorists of the Islamic State, who could then come and cut her head off. It wasn’t clear what would bring the Islamists to Fife at all.

By this time I was back in my old home town of Rosyth, where there are still 1940s Naval married quarters (including the one where I lived, instantly recognisable after nearly 60 years) amid the modern housing.

The Rosyth dockyard, built to calm an Edwardian panic about the German naval threat, is a solid symbol of the Union, overshadowed by the enormous crane used to build the new ‘Queen Elizabeth’ aircraft carriers.

I found plenty of obvious ‘No’ voters at Rosyth’s polling stations, some of them clearly English and linked with the dockyard. But the surprising thing was the number of ‘Yes’ supporters in a place so heavily dependent on the Ministry of Defence.

The following day, this being reserved Fife rather than rebellious Glasgow, there was little desire to go over the battle again. I got the impression from the disappointed ‘Yes’ voters that they do not think the issue is closed, and believe that – perhaps ten years hence – their day will come.

English politicians, toying with fudging the promises they made in the last days of the campaign, should beware. From all my conversations, I am fairly sure that Gordon Brown’s intervention swung many thousands of Labour votes from ‘Yes’ to ‘No’. Mr Brown and those voters will punish us terribly if they think we have bilked them.

It is believed that Gordon Brown's intervention swayed many Scots to vote against independence

One disappointed supporter of independence was plainly sick of being characterised as some sort of mindless anti-English bigot. He took me aside and said very seriously, ‘Please tell your readers this. I am not voting ‘Yes’ because I am anti-English. You would be utterly wrong to think that this is what motivates me or most of us.’

He was not the only one to say that it seemed to him that most English people know very little about Scotland and its people. I think this battle will be fought again (most Scottish battles are). But need we be so sad and bitter if it is, and if it goes the other way (as I suspect it will)?

One young couple, he a determined ‘Yes’, she a severe ‘No’, gave a little hope to all of us. They disagreed utterly on the best future for Scotland, but with laughter rather than venom, and went off happily holding hands into the windy dusk.

Why ever not? Nobody was suggesting that we went to war with each other. I never saw why we in England should make such a fierce business of this, saying that a ‘Yes’ would be forever.

Ours is a willing Union, not a forced marriage like those that imprison Flanders in Belgium, and Catalonia in Spain. The door is not locked against those who would leave. Why then should it be locked against them returning?

Alex Salmond asked, powerfully, ‘If not now, when?’, and I think the answer may well be ‘Ten years hence, when the older generation is gone’.