SCHOOL was tough for Mark Wilkinson. He was clearly intelligent but was also severely dyslexic. This was the 1950s and nobody could understand what was wrong with him. So he spent most of his time staring out of the window.

Nor did he find much support for his difficulties when he got back to his council-house home in Buckinghamshire.

“My parents were fearsomely clever people, but they were also frustrated intellectually,” he said. “They would have loved to have gone to university. I was obviously smart, so when I didn’t come home with good results they used to get cross with me. They were disappointed that I was not some form of achiever because they wanted that for themselves.”

He was encouraged to sing by a music teacher at school, and at the age of 13 was good enough to be offered a place at the London School of Music. But his family advised him to turn it down because they didn’t think he would be able to cope.

Wilkinson’s time at school was not entirely wasted, however. While staring out of the window he gradually taught himself the art of looking at objects in a completely different way.

He said: “I spent a lot of time changing the geography around me and visually playing with the environment, moving tractors and hedges and trees round. It wasn’t until I was in my mid-thirties that I realised that it wasn’t something that everybody could do.”

Happily, he was taken under the wing of the crafts master who persuaded his teachers to let him work alone at the back of his class making stained-glass windows and carving things from wood while other lessons went on around him.

Wilkinson also began to spend his evenings and weekends helping to make furniture with his father and grandfather, who were both carpenters. He continued to help them when he left school at the age of 14 without any qualifications and realised it was something that suited him.

He said: “I learnt that if I wanted to be accepted and not be called thick and stupid, as I was at school, then the way lay in making things beautiful. Since then making things beautiful has almost been a neurotic compulsion, something that gives me great solace.”

By the age of 19 Wilkinson was good enough to be offered a place at college in High Wycombe to study furniture-making. Once again, however, he turned it down — this time because he didn’t think he was good enough and was frightened of failure.

Instead, when his parents moved to Somerset, he went with them and, on impulse, bought a derelict nine-bedroom monastery. Because he had no money of his own, he did a deal with the woman who owned it to pay her the money in instalments.

Wilkinson renovated the monastery with the help of friends and then rented out rooms to them.

He said: “I was the richest hippy around. We used to race around the countryside advertising for Baby Belling cookers. It was great fun.”