In the summer of 1945 the world was beginning to come to terms with the imminent end of World War II. The Japanese had still to surrender but this was only days away and my father had asked my mother if she would marry him. She agreed, whereupon he then felt it a suitable time for my mother to meet her future in-laws.

 

Both my parents were successful scientists who had graduated in 1942 with good degrees in Physics, my father with a first from Cambridge, my mother with a 2.1 from Royal Holloway College, then part of the University of London.

 

On graduation young people with good maths degrees were effectively drafted to help solve the problem of deciphering the German codes at Bletchley Park. Similarly, young people with good physics degrees were drafted to work at the Royal Radar establishment, R.R.E. in Malvern, Worcs. Their work there was to develop ways of using physics to defeat Hitler. This was where both my parents were sent upon graduating and as my mother was one of only a few women working there, she was courted by a number of her male colleagues, including a New Zealander and an American from Minnesota. It was a pretty international crowd working there, but despite these somewhat exotic temptations, she agreed to marry my father, and consequently travel up to Yorkshire with him to meet his parents who ran a shoe shop in a small town in the county.

 

They drove up on a Sunday and upon arrival all four of them sat down in my grandparents’ lounge and my grandparents began to get to know the lady who was about to become their daughter-in-law. As the afternoon progressed my father and his parents would one by one leave the room and then come back some quarter of an hour or so later. By mid afternoon my mother, who had not eaten since leaving Malvern early that morning, turned to my father and asked him when they were going to eat.

 

My father was rather surprised by this question, because as he and his parents had left the room, they had gone to the kitchen, made themselves something to eat, eaten it and then returned to the lounge, so he candidly replied “We’ve all eaten.”  Such was my mothers’ introduction to the family she was about to become part of. Nevertheless by the end of the year they were married. 

 

Despite this inauspicious start to my parents’ relationship they had quite a lot in common. In particular, both of them regarded one of their parents with little more than contempt. In the case of my father it was his mother, who could hardly cook and who let the house become very untidy. Almost invariably one had to do the washing up before one could contemplate eating and one regular job my grandfather, Stanley, had to do before shutting up shop every day, was to go around all the shoes stored on the shelves in the shop and make sure they were back in their correct location, since Jane, his wife, who helped out in the shop, could be relied on to never put any unsold shoes back in their correct location.

 

In the case of my mother it was her father, Arthur, for whom she had little time. He was one of those men who enjoyed wars, or to be precise, he was able in both world wars to find himself a useful role in life. In the First World War, he was a despatch rider, taking messages back and forth between the junior officers at the front and their superiors based in chateaus some distance behind the front line. My mother came from Leicester and during the Second World War, her father was an air raid warden there, going around his patch of the city making sure people put their lights out. Come peacetime however, he could not hold a decent job and what little money he had was spent down at the pub and whenever he came back from the pub, he would verbally, though not physically abuse both his wife and my mother. When he first met my father he told my mother he did not think much of her choice of future partner. My mother told him in no uncertain terms what he could do with his opinion.

 

I, however remember him fondly and he apparently had a way with young children. Whenever he visited Malvern, he would take me around to the local pub, “The Prince of Wales” in Newtown Rd., get himself a pint and me a fizzy drink and regale me with his stories of  “being up to his knees in blood and mud” during the First World War.

 

I was born in 1948 and was apparently soon making my mark on my parents. Initially they lived in a flat in Graham Road in Malvern and I had a room to myself with my cot placed in the middle of the room, well away from all four walls. One morning my mother came in to find several items that had been on the mantelpiece knocked on to the floor. I was the only person in the room, but how could I have done it? My parents put the items back on the mantelpiece and the following evening after putting me back in my cot, left the door just ajar, so they could stay up and watch me. To their surprise I stood up in my cot, having got hold of some long object and waved it around, seemingly with the intention of knocking the items to the floor. They came in and removed this object and my first exercise in surprising my parents was over.  

 

The first event in my life of which I have memories was on a trip up to Yorkshire, getting lost in my father’s home town, when I went out with my mother into the town centre. I wandered off and was eventually taken to the local police station by a concerned couple that had found me. For some time after that I made sure I was not far from my mother at any time.

 

When I was four and a half, my sister arrived on the scene and although we got on reasonably well, there were the usual disputes between us, something unfortunately neither my father nor mother could comprehend, since both had no sisters or brothers. Meanwhile soon after this event I started school and while I have little recollection of my first school, North Malvern infants school, I have rather more of my time at North Malvern primary school. By now I had a best friend, who like me, had been moved up a year because she was much more intelligent than most of her classmates. Nicola was the only child of the local Congregationalist minister, a colourful half-Swiss character who later moved to California, left his wife, and married a young lady, who was much the same age as his daughter. In his latter years, he even visited South Korea to attend conferences, organised by that eccentric religious group, the Moonies. Now if only more preachers would behave like that.

 

At North Malvern Primary School, all the teachers were women. There was the butch games teacher Miss Wrist, the sympathetic teachers, Miss Gwilliam and Mrs Smith, the no nonsense headmistress Miss Worthington and the formidable and quite frightening Mrs Hailer, who one crossed at one’s peril. I adopted a strategy that served me well throughout my primary and later secondary education, which was to keep myself to myself. I suppose I realised this was the best policy after teaming up with several boys in my class and breaking into some rooms at the rear of a local shop. There was nothing there worth taking, all we did in the way of harm was to break a window. Somehow the local police realised who had done it and while the shopkeeper was quite sanguine about the whole affair, we were left to experience the fury of Miss Worthington, who left us in no doubt as to the error of our ways.

 

On a lighter note Miss Worthington was similarly not amused when I was playing Joseph in the Nativity Play at the school, when at one point, my father in the audience winked at me, I screwed up my face and winked back at him much to the amusement of many of the parents there, but not to Miss Worthington who let me know so in no uncertain terms soon afterwards. The other notable thing about North Malvern Primary School was that with no male teachers, there was little in the way of sport, just a bit of physical recreation in the school play area and country dancing in a church hall down the road from the school, my main memory of which, is primarily that of being dragged around the dance floor by a very large young girl with the bizarre name of Sandra Maybe.

 

I had one other experience of note during my time at school in Malvern. From the moment I arrived at school, my parents were keen for me to do well academically and I was entered in an entrance exam for the prep school that was associated with King’s School, Worcester. I was taken over to Worcester by my parents and I effectively did an exam akin to the Eleven Plus, even though I was only eight at the time. I got through it pretty quickly and then somewhat bizarrely got into a conversation with the invigilator. I was very keen on the TV series “Fabian of the Yard”, about the exploits of a noted Scotland Yard detective called Robert Fabian and if I had any ambitions at that time for what I might do in my adult life, it was then, like him, to become a detective. This was what I found myself talking to him about, whilst the other lads continued to wrestle with the questions in the exam. I did well enough to be offered a place, but not a scholarship, so it would have meant my parents paying for me to go there, and my father, a parsimonious Yorkshireman, was not interested in doing that. Having told my parents what had happened during the exam, it was also made clear to me that I should not have got into conversation with the invigilator, an opportunity which unsurprisingly never presented itself to me again, but that I should have gone over my answers again repeatedly to make sure I got as good a result as possible.

 

My time in Malvern was however soon about to come to an end. My father had spent several weeks away from our home to do a civil service course at the National Defence College in Latimer in Buckinghamshire. This had obviously gone successfully and he then found himself offered a promotion within the scientific civil service so long as he moved to another government research establishment, in this case, Fort Halstead, near Sevenoaks in Kent. So suddenly, it was “Goodbye” to Nicola and North Malvern primary school and the family now moved to Sevenoaks.

 

By some amazing coincidence, the gentleman who bought our house in Malvern had moved to Malvern from Sevenoaks and as it turned out, had previously lived in a house in the same road where we eventually bought our new house! This was quite a coincidence when you consider he worked for one of the big banks with no connection to Government scientific research. However for some time, at least initially we lived in rented houses in the St. John’s area of Sevenoaks and I and my sister both went to St. John’s Primary School.

 

Unlike North Malvern, this school had a headmaster and even some male teachers! Here sport was part of the curriculum, as was a weekly lesson involving  the discussion of matters in the news, basically current affairs and I remember we even discussed the grisly coup that led to the military taking over in Iraq, which after a few more military coups led to the assumption of power there by one Saddam Hussein. This was quite a change from country dancing in the church hall. I took my Eleven Plus and with just two other boys from my class gained an assisted place at the town’s public school, Sevenoaks School. I had been friendly with three lads at St. John’s, none of whom made it to Sevenoaks School. In particular I remember playing with one just before the end of that school year and afterwards, I never saw him again. Another boy I had been very friendly with, several years later managed to make it from the Wildernesse School, the local secondary modern into Sevenoaks School, but by then he had forgotten me.  

 

Meanwhile I adjusted to my new surroundings, but I never really felt I fitted in or even found much purpose to my education. In the first ranking of us as to how we had done in the first few weeks of that first year at Sevenoaks, I came 23rd= out of 28 boys. This in the view of my parents was not good enough. In the second and third order rankings in that term, I came first. As the year wore on, I slowly dropped down the rankings, but still stayed in the top ten overall, doing reasonably well in most subjects other than English, and at the end of the year I found myself winning that year’s Maths prize. Looking back I wonder why my parents got so worked up about my academic success, since my father had apparently been just as erratic in his youth, but I got the feeling that I was their pet project and the following year I drifted further down the rankings, coming near the bottom in all subjects apart from Maths where I was top and French and Latin, where I was in the top ten. This now led me to being on report and having to get an approval from the teachers that I had behaved reasonably during each class, even, ironically during the Maths lessons, but I now picked myself up and tried a bit harder and by the end of the year I was back in the top ten in the class and won the Maths prize for that year outright.

 

In the summer holidays of 1960 after two years of Sevenoaks, my mother arranged for me to do an exchange with a French family. The Petits lived in the small town of Grandvilliers roughly halfway between Beauvais and Amiens to the north of Paris. Initially their eldest of four daughters, Nicole came and stayed with us for a couple of weeks and then I went back to France with her and stayed with her parents and three younger sisters for two weeks. It was good for my French and Monsieur Petit, their father, was quite a character, running a small manufacturing business with a handful of employees in a small business unit in the town. I felt he regarded me almost as the son that he wished he had had and one day I found myself venturing over to a local farm with him and taking part in shooting partridges, my job being to act as the dog, retrieving the birds. We also went off in their car down to the seaside somewhere near Bordeaux and he took me out the first evening and we enjoyed some oysters, which I remember finding delicious. Unfortunately however they did not agree with me and I was taken quite ill with some allergic reaction to them and I have avoided oysters ever since. Madame Petit however did a grand job of taking care of me and the exchange was such a success, we did it again the following year, on which occasion I exchanged with their second daughter Dominique, though the one I found most attractive was their third daughter Francoise, who was a real beauty. This was the first girl I had ever met who I genuinely thought was beautiful.   

 

After two years at Sevenoaks, I was able to wave goodbye to history, geography and biology and both chemistry and physics became a lot more mathematical, which I found much easier to deal with. Although I continued to be bottom of the class in English, I was doing well enough overall and thus I continued into my O-level year, where I passed all my O-levels other than English Literature, where I simply could not appreciate the point of Shakespeare’s “Romeo & Juliet”, First world war poetry or Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness”, so much so my English teacher was fearful I might get the paper I took, returned, which happens when you clearly do not take the subject seriously. But instead I just got the worst grade possible, a 9, (1 to 6 being passes), which at least meant I brought no shame on the school.

 

Meanwhile besides studying, the only other activities one could get up to at school were sports, none of which really appealed to me and which I partook of to the minimum extent I could. I also realised now that I was very much a loner, not really being part of any particular clique within my class. I got on reasonably well with everyone, but kept myself to myself, and this was perhaps best exemplified by my attitude to cross country running around Knole Park, which abutted onto the school. Like many of my peers, I had no interest in it whatsoever, but the behaviour of the many others who disliked cross country running varied markedly. There were those who simply plodded around the entire course slowly, doing a lot of walking, there were those who took shortcuts and who met up in a discreet corner of the park, where they were able to enjoy a surreptitious fag and there was myself, who took shortcuts, but kept myself to myself, discovering bizarrely en route a place in the park where there was a derelict car, which I was able to enter, sit down in and pass a suitable amount of time in before eventually joining the other “also ran” runners for the last few yards.

 

Academically I proceeded on without great distinction, but capably in most subjects other than English. However one subject that now bored me was Latin, in which one still needed an O Level to get into Oxbridge and I and several other lads with whom I got on well were in the class of Mr. Bate, a teacher who was near retirement and who for some bizarre reason gave us some Latin words and their translation into English to learn in advance of the mock Latin O Level we were taking in the spring of our O level year. I thought about this and realised that quite probably we would be given a previous year’s O Level exam as our mock and my neighbour, also at Sevenoaks School and in the year above me had taken Latin the previous year. So I asked him if he could lend me his last year’s exams. He unfortunately had taken papers number 1 & 2, while we for some reason were taking papers 1 & 3. But sure enough half the words Bate had given us to learn were there in paper 1. I worked furiously at it the night before the exam with the aid of a dictionary and the following day, allowed a number of my friends to quickly copy out what I had done. I looked across the schoolroom with glee to see my friend David Moss, who had just been given the exam paper before me giving me the thumbs up sign behind the teacher’s back. The copying job had been done in such a hurry that we all got similar, but not exactly the same mark and then we got very varied much lower marks in the second paper, Bate being totally oblivious to what we had managed to do. I look back on that as one of my greatest successes at my time at Sevenoaks.

 

I had however developed other interests notably I started collecting stamps, following in the path of my father and grandfather, and here I found an unusual way of adding to my stamp collection, which somewhat alarmed my parents. One boy I got on well with at my school was an eccentric individual by the name of Ian Hector Nicol. As a mutual friend described him to me so succinctly many years later, “He looked like a civil servant even when he was a schoolboy.” Unsurprisingly he went on to enter that profession after graduating from Oxford with a degree in Politics, Philosophy and Economics. While at school he had a short wave radio and wrote to various overseas radio stations, from which he then received letters and magazines. One he got a reply from was Radio Sabah in North Borneo, who sent him a magazine pertaining to North Borneo, but he also got far more replies from the radio stations of Eastern Europe and these would also send him postage stamps from those countries. Even though I did not have a short wave radio, I followed suit and got sent plenty of stamps and first day covers from these countries as well as books teaching me both Polish and Romanian! This was at the height of the cold war and my parents were somewhat discomfited by this, but finding that I could obtain whatever stamps I wanted for free from certain countries, in particular that I could order specific sets from Bulgaria, I continued, causing my parents even more concern later.

 

Meanwhile, I had also developed a fascination with pop music, where I developed a taste not so much for the records that made the charts in Britain, but what made the charts in the United States, of which I became an ardent collector. My tastes ran to everything from Phil Spector’s early hits with groups like the Crystals to early Motown, the late great Buddy Holly and Eddie Cochrane, as well as Roy Orbison, the Everly Brothers, Del Shannon, Sam Cooke and the music coming out of the Brill Building from the likes of Goffin and King, Lieber and Stoller and Neil Sedaka. I was just twelve when I had discovered what would eventually become the dominant concern of my life for the next thirty years.

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Chapter One – Early Years

11/10/2016