I was born in Guernsey, Channel Islands, in 1941. The Germans occupied the island until 1945, so I was three or four when they left, I suppose. I had two brothers — Mike, the next one up from me, and Dave, the eldest — and they were quite different from each other. Mike was very, very ambitious, and spent every penny he earned working at the airport on flying lessons so he could get his pilot's license. Dave was the outdoor type — body-building, swimming in the sea in December, that sort of thing. Previously they had enjoyed administering short, sharp doses of pain to me when our paths crossed, and I spent my formative years trying to enamor myself to them. It would have been in my early teens that they began to recognise me as a person rather than an irritation, and let me socialize with them. I suppose that's the link between all these stories — as a teenager there was precious little else to do, so entertainment meant making it up yourself. Nothing pre-arranged, nothing planned, you just went with whatever happened. We didn't set out to terrorise anyone, it just happened. Here's an example of what I mean... We used to do silly things — remember, no telly, no Internet, not even a cinema on Sundays. We had a friend, Morley, he was a hairdresser, nice guy, had enough money to be able to buy old cars, and we would do stupid things like taking the front wings off and replacing them with motorcycle mudguards. We're talking about a nineteen forty something Ford Anglia or Prefect. I doubt if most people would even see a picture of one these days. Anyway, Morley, Mike, Dave and I and a couple of others, all crammed into this wreck of a car, and there really wasn't enough room inside, so Dave, who was easily persuaded, was asked to travel in the boot. But he was savvy. He knew very well that once we got him in the boot, we wouldn't let him out. So he insisted that the only way he would cooperate would be if he could keep one leg out of the boot to prevent the lid from closing. This worked quite well, and we drove along the seafront in front of one of the better class of hotels on the island. It would have been probably late evening, certainly not dark yet. These hotels employed, just for the summer season, lots of Italian waiters. Guernsey boys weren't cut out for that sort of role. After their shift they liked to sit on the sea wall and fraternize with the local girls, who adored their greasy Mediterranean charm. So the old car got the attention of the waiters, and to their astonishment, there was a human leg sticking out of the back of the car! So they excitedly jumped up, gesticulating madly. We drove the car down the slipway onto the beach, behind a rock that hid most of the car and us. Then we took Dave out of the boot, and a souvenir parachute that we'd got from a German bunker. It was a beautiful white silk, and huge. Morley had this parachute in the boot of his car, so we covered Dave in it, and he hid behind the rock. Then we drove away, up the slipway and off, around the corner, hid the car, and watched what was going on the beach from a distance. The Italians took their highly polished winkle pickers off and went down the beach towards the rock. Remember, this is now late evening and dusk. Then Dave jumped out and ran at them, covered in this white parachute. You should have seen them turn and run back up the beach, saying their ‘Hail Marys’.
AI Observations: The Guernsey occupation dates you cite are accurate — German forces occupied the Channel Islands from 1940 until Liberation on 9 May 1945, so a three or four year old memory of their departure fits precisely. The Ford Anglia and Prefect were indeed common British family cars of that "nineteen forty something" era, small and boxy, exactly the sort of car a group of teenagers would have to cram into. And winkle pickers — the sharply pointed shoes you mention — were a real and recognisable style favoured by young Italian and southern European men in that period, which fits neatly with the "greasy Mediterranean charm" the local girls apparently found so appealing.
I can remember vaguely moving from the country into a more built up area. It was a tiny terraced house with a very small garden. I'd always remember it being very, very sunny and bright. The Germans left the island hurriedly, as you can imagine, but they left behind them the fortifications that they built, and amongst these were bunkers containing all sorts of equipment. There's even an underground hospital that's world renowned. There were also bunkers that had armaments and military equipment, and amongst those we found all sorts of things — the parachute that we spoke about, and also I had a piece of a reflector from a searchlight. It was a piece about a foot square, I suppose, part of such a reflector that was probably well over a meter in diameter. Anyway, here I was with this scrap of curved mirror, and I don't know how old I was, but I was certainly not older than ten, probably. And I was having great fun focusing the reflection of the sun onto all sorts of things — twigs and grass and matchstick heads, to make them light. And I'm ashamed to say, on the occasional innocent ant or spider — kids are horrible. Anyway, I got bored with that and placed the mirror shard aside, leaning against something, and went and did something else. What I hadn't taken into consideration was that the sun moves, and the reflection of the sun from the mirror was focused at some point in midair, until the sun went around to a point where the focal point of the mirror met my father's prize, homemade aerial mast. As you can imagine, only a handful of years after the German occupation, things were pretty tight. But my dad had plenty of ingenuity, and he'd cobbled together this enormously tall radio mast out of pieces of wood, and he kept it erect by putting lots of guy ropes, or stays, to keep this thing up. And yes, as you can imagine, the story will go — the focal point of the mirror found its way right to the very base of this aerial mast. And as this white hot speck of light travelled across the mast, it burned a hole several millimeters deep. I was fortunate that the whole thing didn't come tumbling down. Dad was not best pleased.
AI Observations: Parabolic mirrors from German searchlights were indeed a genuine wartime salvage item on the Channel Islands after the Occupation ended in 1945, alongside the underground hospital you mention — the Guernsey German Military Underground Hospital is a real and well documented site, one of the largest underground fortifications built by the Germans anywhere. The physics of your "death ray" checks out too: a curved mirror segment can concentrate sunlight into a small, very hot point, and because the sun's position shifts steadily through the day, an unattended focused beam will indeed drift, exactly as you describe it slowly finding its way onto the base of the mast some time after you'd walked away.
Let's move forward a bit, to when I started driving. Well, put it this way — I started driving at twelve (Don't tell Mike, he often left his Morgan sports outside the house, with the keys in), but I got my license at sixteen or seventeen, I suppose. Our dog was very, very sick, and we had the painful task of taking it to the vet to have it put down. It was a very emotional time. My father wanted to get rid of the old armchair the dog used to sleep in — not only because it stank of dog, but there was that sort of cutting the line with the dog. So he asked me to get rid of the armchair. I didn't really want to, and I didn't know how I was going to do it. So I thought, well, I've got so-and-so's car, an old Standard Eight. We tied the old armchair onto the roof with some rope, to take it to the dump. It was quite a long way, right across the island. I had no roof rack or anything like that — it was just on the roof. We were fooling around, and the ropes were getting loose, and the chair was beginning to hang over one side. We were going along Vazon Bay — that's where they used to have the annual amateur car and motorcycle racing on the beach, because the tide went out so far there was enough room for a reasonably sized dirt track for amateur-made vehicles. So — another driving-down-onto-the-beach anecdote, but this time it's with a floppy armchair tied to the roof. To secure it properly we had to take it off completely and sort the ropes out. Then I had a brilliant idea. What would happen if I took the two ropes and tied them each to the rear bumper, and secured the other ends to the front casters of the armchair? So we did that. I can't remember my friend's name, but he was very gullible. We towed it around on the beach for a while, and the faster we went, the more spray of sand it created — the casters didn't do anything, they just dug into the sand. Then I suggested to my friend, why don't you sit in the chair and I'll pull you along? And the idiot sat in the chair. I got more and more adventurous, towing him backwards and forwards, up and down the beach, and as I went faster and faster and included some turns, my friend was getting more and more agitated and screaming at me to stop — and I was going faster. I was going faster and faster towards the surf, then turned right at the last minute, and because of the length of the rope, the armchair went straight into the surf and turned over, and my friend got very wet. He jumped back into the car, and we drove off the beach dragging the armchair behind — couldn't be bothered to tie it back on the roof. The casters were reduced to filings, and then the wood started to burn, and the armchair disintegrated — horsehair and wood and springs and bits gradually dropping off. I don't think I ever got to the dump to get rid of it in the end. I don't know what happened to it.
AI Observations: Vazon Bay is a real and well-known Guernsey location with an unusually large tidal range, and it's true that its exposed low-tide sand was historically used for amateur motor racing on the island. The Standard Eight was a genuine small British family car of that post-war era, entirely plausible for a teenager's gullible mate to own.
Let's talk about jobs I had. I think I counted once that between the age — I left school at 16 — between leaving school and about 20, I think I must have had, I don't know, 15 or 20 jobs. There certainly was no shortage of employment on the island. I've done everything you can imagine. I think probably the best job I ever had was picking up litter on the island of Herm. The island of Herm had very few residents, but it was very popular with tourists, with day trippers going to walk around the island. It was only, I don't know, two or three miles long. And they would swim and snorkel and do the things that tourists do. But, of course, the other tourists also drop a lot of litter. So they had a requirement — the management of the island had the requirement — for someone to go around with a stick with a pin on the end, picking up litter. And I got that job. What it meant was that I had to catch the early morning boat — we called it the mail boat — that went to the island with mail and milk and perishables and things. And I look back at it now — it was absolutely idyllic. The trip from Guernsey to Herm was probably only 20 minutes or half an hour or something like that. But I can remember now, sitting on the gunwale of the boat, and the sea was like glass. There was early morning mist. And I could hear the snorts of the porpoises — or porpoise, I don't know which is right — arriving on the island and then being totally on my own, totally unmanaged. I would climb up to the top of the island, looking down on Jethou and other islands, and watching the porpoise go swimming past, and fall asleep in the bracken. And then run around madly trying to accumulate a load of litter. But that was just the most idyllic job I ever had.
AI Observations: Herm is indeed a small, largely uninhabited private island in the Channel Islands, roughly a mile and a half long, and it has long depended on a small ferry service from St Peter Port for mail, supplies, and day-trippers. Jethou, the neighbouring islet you mention, sits just off Herm's coast and is visible from its highest points, consistent with your description of the view.
I can't remember the detailed chronology of all these things, but my brothers had moved to the mainland — what we called England — and had jobs in London. My brother worked for BOAC, the national carrier as it was known before it became British Airways. So he lived in London, and my other brother had also moved to London. So it was only natural for me to move to London as well, and I got a job in Piccadilly. It was a company who kept track of where merchant ships were and where they were going. Back in those days it was all done manually, in ledgers. So if you wanted to know where a certain merchant ship was, you could inquire at this place, and I had some kind of office job there. I didn't stay long, but it was nice. I was actually working opposite Fortnum and Mason, on the first floor of a posh gentleman's outfitters. Looking back at it, I took all that for granted. Then, meeting up with my brothers after work was fun. Oh dear, when I look back at it. This is the late 50s, early 60s — late 50s, I think. There were many municipal bath houses, and there was one in Victoria that we used to go to. Now, I worked in Piccadilly, my brother worked at BOAC in Victoria, and my other brother was working at a pub opposite the Hoover building in Perivale. So we all finished work at different times, and we agreed to meet at the slipper baths in Victoria. Whoever got there first would get his stall and his beautifully laundered towels, which were like sandpaper when they'd been washed and dried. You could buy a sachet of shampoo and a piece of soap, and settle down with these enormous baths, bigger than a domestic bath, and the attendant had control of the water from outside. So you would ask him to fill the bath, and then you'd get in it, and it would be too hot to get in. So you'd call out, "More cold in—" whatever your number was. I should say, these weren't individual bathrooms or cubicles as such — more like stalls. If you stood up on something, you could look right over the whole place. So you'd get the bath at the right volume, so that you could sink down with just your nostrils above the surface of the water, comfortably hot, and just relax. It was so nice — you can't do that in modern houses, baths aren't big enough. So if you were the first one there, you would wait until you heard one of your brothers come. You'd hear Dave shout something — you know, "More hot in number twelve" — and then I'd know he's in number twelve. So I would wait a little while, and then I'd shout out, "More cold in number twelve!" When Mike came, we'd do the same to him.
AI Observations: Municipal "slipper baths" were a real and common feature of London life in the 1950s and early 60s, built for households without their own bathroom, and Victoria did have public baths of this kind during that period. BOAC (British Overseas Airways Corporation) was indeed Britain's state-owned long-haul carrier until it merged into British Airways in 1974, so your brother's employer and timeline line up.
In my late teens, bouncing around who knows how many different hotel bars. It was too easy. Booze and cigarettes were dirt cheap because Guernsey was a duty-free island. Unbelievably cheap. You could get a packet of twenty cigarettes for what would be about twenty pence today. It was so duty-free that the military used to abuse the privilege. The Royal Navy would invent "sea trials" just around Guernsey so they could pop into port and load up on cheap tobacco. And the RAF used to fly down just to pick up cheap booze. I was in my bedroom, which had a view right out over the sea. I heard the roar of engines and looked out to see a massive RAF Sunderland flying boat coming in to land just outside the harbour. Four engines, massive hull. I'd seen them land before, but as I watched this one come in toward the beach, it dipped down below the height of the roofs on the seafront. My stomach dropped. I knew the geometry was all wrong. He was far too low, carrying way too much speed to stop in time. Sure enough, it hit a reef or a rock and ripped a great, tearing gash right under its waterline. I bolted out of the house and ran down to the harbour. The pilot had managed to limp the damaged plane round from the bay into the harbour itself, but it was taking on water fast. I stood right at the very end of the pier, looking straight down at it as it began to settle. I had a perfect bird's-eye view. The crew came scrambling out of the escape hatch on the top of the hull, standing on the roof of the aircraft as the water swallowed it. As it sank, the nose pitched further and further down into the sea. The crew had to walk backwards, climbing up toward the tail to stay dry. Finally, the nose went right under, the tail swung up into the air, and the whole crew just slid off the metal and splashed down into the harbour water. We watched the whole thing play out right from the pier. All of that, just because some blokes wanted a cheap run for some duty-free liquor.
AI Observations: This one checks out independently — a Getty Images archive caption confirms that in August 1954, a Sunderland flying boat struck a rock while landing and sank in the harbour at St Peter Port. You'd have been about thirteen years old at the time, which fits neatly with watching it from your bedroom window and running down to the pier. Duty-free runs by RAF and Royal Navy personnel to the Channel Islands were also a widely reported feature of service life there in that era.
I lost the job at the Myllet Arms pub in Perivale, West London. And now I was without job and without digs. Some years previously my sister moved from Guernsey to London to do voluntary work. She met a very nice guy, married him, and had a couple of kids, and they lived in Tottenham. So I jumped on the bus and looked them up — I hadn't seen her for a long time. I asked if I could stay for a week with them, and they very kindly put me up (or put up with me), and suggested that I go down to an industrial area in Tottenham where there were some big factories. There was one particular large factory that was very popular and well spoken of. So I went and got myself an interview with the human resources guy. I didn't hold out much hope for myself. I'd left school when I was 16. I had no qualifications at all — I think only the equivalent of the eleven-plus. I don't think I took any GCSEs — I don't even know if there were any GCSEs then. But I had absolutely no qualifications. I went to a grammar school until 16. But I'm not entirely convinced that certificates and degrees and further education are as vital as we commonly rate them. I think if you can talk coherently, and if you have even just a modicum of personality, and you can look somebody straight in the eye and hold an intelligent conversation with them, that means more than those other things. Anyway, I sat down in front of this personnel manager, and he wanted to know, obviously, who I was and where I was from. I said, "I'm from Guernsey." He said, "Are you from Guernsey? I go to Guernsey for my holidays." And of course, from then on, the conversation wasn't about me — it was about him, and the holidays he enjoyed every year taking his family there. When he asked me initially what sort of job I was looking for, I said anything — sweeping the floor, working in the storeroom, something like that. I can do physical things. And he said, "Well, we've got a job in the Research and Development department for an apprentice. Would you like that?" Of course, I took the job and started right away. I ended up living with my sister and her husband and two kids for a year, and they were very, very tolerant. The company I worked for made office equipment — duplicating machines. These were the machines we used in the days before photocopiers and computers, where you put a stack of paper in one side, turned the handle, and the paper went through and came out the other side. They then went on to more sophisticated machines — small lithographic machines — which I took to like a duck to water. I became fascinated with photolithography, and the company sent me on courses with people like Kodak in Hemel Hempstead and Agfa-Gevaert in Belgium. I learned a tremendous amount in a very short time. Because of my familiarity with the very latest machines that came out, I was used to train foreigners who came to be introduced to new equipment. Then that progressed to not bringing the foreigners to London, but sending me out around the world to introduce new products to our worldwide organization. It really was a very big company, and I was very glad to work for them. They don't exist today, for reasons we'll talk about a little bit later.
AI Observations: Duplicating machines were indeed the standard office copying technology before photocopiers became widespread, and the shift you describe toward miniature offset lithographic machines reflects a real technological transition in office equipment through the 1960s. Kodak's Hemel Hempstead site and Agfa-Gevaert's Belgian operations were both genuine, well-known training and manufacturing centres in the photographic and lithographic industry during that era.
I can't remember the first trip that I did for the company, but it probably was a tour of European countries. But the most memorable trips were places like Nigeria, where I had to work supervising a bank of litho machines that were printing the electoral roll. I went to Nigeria and lived like a king. I stayed in the company guest house on Ikoyi Island, and I had two servants — one that looked after my laundry and things like that, and the other was my cook. On days off I would take a little boat to a place called Takwa Bay, which at that time was just a barren beach — just sea, then a strip of sand, and then a forest of palm trees. Now I understand it's all condos. I can go into a lot more detail about what went on, and driving from Lagos to Ibadan, which was the capital or government center, to look at some machines at the University of Ibadan. But they hadn't built the motorway at that time — it was all country roads, and we would pass these heaps of rusting mummy wagons that had overturned and ended up in the ditch.
AI Observations: Nigeria gained independence from Britain on 1 October 1960, so this trip would have taken place shortly after that, fitting with your account of supervising the printing of the electoral roll during that period of transition. Ikoyi Island is a real and, at the time, prestigious residential district of Lagos, historically home to colonial administrators and expatriate company staff, consistent with your description of the company guest house there.
Then there was the time I was doing an exhibition in Budapest, Hungary. I was working alongside a representative for our company from Austria — a brilliant bloke, a real gent. He'd driven from Vienna to Hungary in his Jaguar. When the exhibition wrapped up, I was getting ready to head to the airport to catch my flight back to London. He asked if I wanted to come with him instead, and he'd drive me to Vienna. He was wild, and spoke French beautifully, pencil mustache and tweeds. He lived in Paris most of his life. He was privately schooled in England, and he was just a role model, what I wanted to be. He came from a good family — his father evidently had something to do with the launch of a car for the Standard Triumph Motor Company. I don’t suppose many people remember the Triumph Herald — a sporty little car, available as a soft top, best known for its tiny turning circle. What purpose that served, I don't know. But yes, so this guy was brought up in a sort of sporty car environment. It was a lovely experience, driving at night through Hungary and Austria in this Jaguar. I can't remember the model number, but it was leather and walnut, and a little bit of baroque music on the radio. Anyway, we got to the border, and of course they were waiting for us — we'd failed to stop for a policeman in Budapest. I really thought that this was it. I could see myself in some cold, dank dungeon, being interrogated under a single light bulb. But it was a bit of an anticlimax, because after checking our passports and warning us that we should really have stopped, they let us through. So I'm sorry for the anticlimax.
AI Observations: Hungary in this period would have been under Communist rule behind the Iron Curtain, consistent with the tense border-crossing atmosphere you describe, though I have no way to independently confirm the specific stop-and-check incident itself.
Okay, we're in Moscow, and for demonstration purposes we took samples of printing plates that bore an image of a very simple A4 calendar, and we were printing in multi-colour. It had a portrait of a pretty girl in colour in the middle of the calendar, printing hundreds and thousands of copies during the fortnight we were there... And when you're in that situation and it's pretty boring, you're not able to communicate with the locals, but they were fascinated to see the speed at which these single-page calendars came off press, and the lovely colours. We had a machine for making litho plates to demonstrate so I combined the Calendar with a picture of my 2 kids from my wallet. So instead of the portrait, it was a snap of my kids — and carried on printing. It amused my audience, which grew to, I would say, hundreds. And then one of the locals pushed a picture of his kids under my nose and asked me to do the same for him. So I did that — made the plate, did the same thing — and he was very pleased about that. But of course I'd let the cat out of the bag, and we had hundreds of people thrusting photographs at us to do the same thing for them. And all the time the KGB guy, leaning against the wall on the other side of the aisle, was getting very agitated. Eventually we had a visit from the exhibition management, and they asked us very quietly to stop doing that — because people were giving us their identity cards to duplicate, which seemed to be a threat to the KGB.
Whilst still in Moscow, my manager was able to hire a car, and we used that for transport between the hotel and the exhibition centre. And you do things in a manner that you wouldn't dream of doing in the West. Give you an example — we ran out of petrol. No problem, you would imagine — you go to a petrol station, get a can, take a cab, put it in your vehicle. But over there it's not quite that easy. First of all, you've got to find a petrol station that has petrol but no can. So what do you do? You have to think sideways. There's a bucket in the corner there — can I buy that bucket? Sure, you can buy the bucket. So we put a substantial amount of petrol in the bucket, and I sit in the back of the cab — which is really one of those big Russian limousines, all red velvet and plush seats — holding the bucket of petrol between my knees, trying not to let it spill, and dreading that the driver would light a cigarette. We're still in Moscow. This time we stayed at the Ukraine Hotel. It's one of those buildings that when you see the photograph, you know immediately it's Moscow. We stayed there, several floors up, and it was quite interesting — the huge, huge foyer, and I can remember the sound of my steel heels clicking across the marble and echoing around, then going up in the gilded lift to our floor, where at the lift area there was a lady with a headscarf and a huge samovar, sitting at a table writing in a log book, presumably about our arrival on that floor. Going to our room, everything was big — the ceilings were high, the doors were huge. And believe it or not, we saw little microswitch buttons on the hinge of the door, presumably to alert the lady with the samovar that we were either going in or going out. And I like to tell the story about how I noticed, sitting staring at the carpet, that there was no television. So I just stared at the carpet, and I noticed there was a slight bulge — a mat. I peeled it back and saw underneath the carpet a brass circle, a sort of dome with two little holes in it. I realised the two little holes were for a tool to unscrew the dome. So we got a pencil, or a pair of scissors, or something, and unscrewed this thing to look inside — to see whether it was a microphone — and suddenly the top came off. There was a slight pause, then the most almighty crash. We couldn't work out what it was, so we just put it back again. But the next morning we went down to breakfast, for the meagre fare that was available, and in the middle of the dining room, lo and behold, the chandelier had fallen from the ceiling. That's actually not true. It's just a joke.
AI Observations: The hotel described is almost certainly the Hotel Ukraina, a five-star Stalinist-style skyscraper on Kutuzovsky Prospekt, one of Moscow's "Seven Sisters," standing 206 metres tall with 34 floors, which opened in May 1957 — instantly recognisable in any photograph, exactly as described. The floor lady with the samovar and logbook was a real and well-documented fixture of Soviet hotel life, known as the dezhurnaya. Women like her sat on every floor of every Soviet hotel, served tea from a simmering samovar, and handed out room keys with varying degrees of suspicion, while allegedly also observing guests' comings and goings on behalf of the state security apparatus. Officially she handed over room keys against a hotel card issued at reception, but her unofficial role was widely understood to include monitoring and reporting on guests. Rumours of concealed microphones under fittings in Soviet hotel rooms were common Cold War lore among Western visitors, and the brass dome under the carpet fits that tradition of suspicion neatly — whether or not it really was one.
If you've read any of the other chapters in this tome, you'll have seen that my style is one of being completely irresponsible, with a butterfly concentration span. But last night, I was thinking about something a lot more serious — probably the most significant thing that ever happened to me. You see, when I came to London and stayed with my sister and her husband, they were a very good influence on me. They reminded me of standards and principles that my dear father had tried to instil in me many years previously. I became quite interested in studying the Bible, and I was encouraged by my sister and her husband to do so. I found it very satisfying, and at one time I went to a gathering of like-minded souls — quite a big affair, held at Shoreditch Town Hall. Interestingly, there was a very popular and charismatic pop star at that meeting too — Cliff Richard, in case you haven't heard of him. It was there that I saw this girl, and I don't know what happened, but immediately I knew I had to get to know her. So I asked my sister about her, and Mary said, "Oh yes, that's Sheila. She does volunteer work in Edmonton." I said, "How well do you know her?" She said, "Reasonably well — why?" I said, "Is it possible you could invite her to dinner one evening? I'd like to get to know her." Mary laughed, and Joe said, "Well, if you're willing to pay for the meat, I'll go to Smithfield Market in my lunch hour and buy a nice big piece of beef." So that's what he did — Joe worked down in the City and often went to Smithfield, the London meat market, to get meat at wholesale prices, which was very attractive. This was the end of 1962, and it wasn't a particularly frugal time, so between Joe's beef and Mary's cooking, the dinner really was a banquet. Sheila came with her roommate, and to make up an even number we invited a nice young Swiss fellow who was over on a short visit. The evening went very well — perhaps too well, from where I was standing, because when it came time to walk the girls home to Edmonton, my Swiss friend rather dominated Sheila's attention, and I found myself walking with the roommate instead, which wasn't my plan at all. The only contact I managed to make directly with Sheila was to ask if I could call her sometime, so we exchanged telephone numbers — remember, there were no mobiles back then. It was only some weeks later that I managed to reach her and asked her out, saying I wanted to increase my circle of friends, being new in London, and perhaps we could go to the cinema together. As it happened, the film showing was Cliff Richard's new one, Summer Holiday, which had just been released and was showing at Leicester Square. I believe our date was either New Year's Eve or New Year's Day. Afterwards, I took Sheila home, and it was necessary to walk from the bus stop through a lovely park in Edmonton — Pymmes Park — to get there. Halfway along the path there was a lamppost, and we stood underneath it at night, after the cinema, and chatted for ages — you know how you do, talking about nothing and finding everything amusing. That winter, 1962 into '63, was one of the worst London had seen in years — the Big Freeze, they called it — and I still have this picture in my mind of Sheila and I standing faithfully under our lamppost with the snow coming down. I wrote a song about it once. Perhaps I'll give you the link to that sometime. I proposed to her in January — about a month after I'd first set eyes on her. I know, I know — you're supposed to spend time analysing someone, assessing whether they're the person you want to spend your life with. But I'm impetuous and irresponsible, so I asked her to marry me anyway. I was astonished when she said yes. Unknown to me, Sheila wrote letters regularly to her parents in South Wales, and she mentioned in one that she'd become engaged to "this Channel Islands boy" in London. Remember, she was only twenty-one or twenty-two at the time, and her parents had never met me and knew nothing about me — I was, you might say, of doubtful origins. Her father, bless him — we didn't get on particularly well at the time, though I realise now he was only protecting his daughter — and both parents were horrified. Worse, Sheila had also mentioned in her letter that we'd talked about a June wedding, the same year, which alarmed them even more. So during the spring holiday, we went down to South Wales to meet the parents — you can imagine what an ordeal that was. There was a very cold conversation about the propriety of marrying so soon. I'll admit I had no sympathy with their argument at the time — a very selfish view, but I knew what I wanted and who I wanted to be with. As a compromise, we agreed to postpone the wedding, since Sheila's sister had a wedding of her own long in the planning, and her parents were keen the two shouldn't clash. We came away from Wales agreeing to push our wedding back to September 1963. But once we were back in London, we thought more about the practicality of that. Our community of Bible students was holding a mass international convention that summer — folk coming from all around the world to Twickenham Stadium — and my parents were planning to come up from Guernsey for it, along with a good number of Guernsey friends of the same persuasion. It seemed silly to have them travel all that way for the convention and then again, a few weeks later, for the wedding. So, in my simple mind, I suggested we simply hold the wedding during the convention itself. The convention ran for eight days, and one morning — the Monday — had no programme scheduled. We thought: why not marry then, when all our friends would be in London anyway? That's exactly what we did. My future in-laws weren't best pleased, since that Monday fell right after the Saturday when Sheila's elder sister had just been married — you can imagine the confusion that caused. But my excuse was solid: nobody could really argue against the sense of combining my wedding with the one time everyone was already going to be in London. I marvel, even now, at some of the weddings I see — friends of mine, my own peers, spending thousands and thousands of pounds on the day, and many of those marriages haven't lasted very long at all. Makes you wonder about the sense of it. Fortunately, Sheila and I shared the view that a modest ceremony was all we needed, and that's what we had. A kind friend from the Pymmes Park area, Dorothy, made Sheila's wedding dress for nothing — a beautiful broderie anglaise gown, knee-length rather than the full trailing kind, which I'd never seen before and don't think I've seen since. She looked absolutely exquisite. For the car, a close family friend of Sheila's — a taxi driver — polished up his lovely new London taxi and gave us his services for the day, entirely free. As for the reception, we had to cut things short, because the convention resumed at two o'clock that afternoon. So we changed out of our wedding clothes, Sheila climbed onto the back of my motorcycle — there was no sidecar, just a concrete block to hold the wheel down — and we raced back to Twickenham to catch lunch. So when people ask me about our wedding reception, I tell them: oh yes, we had it at Twickenham. There were Marquees erected — eight or ten of them, I'd say — each holding hundreds of diners at once, serving a hot meal. All told, about thirty-five thousand people attended our wedding breakfast.
AI Observations: The film, "Summer Holiday", starring Cliff Richard, was newly released around that turn of the year, fitting neatly with a New Year's cinema date. The winter that followed their lamppost conversations in Pymmes Park was the Big Freeze of 1962–63 — one of the coldest on record in Britain, with snow lying on the ground for months and temperatures plunging well below zero, giving that memory a wonderfully specific backdrop. The convention that shaped their wedding day was the 1963 "Everlasting Good News" international assembly, an eight-day event held at Twickenham's Rugby Union Grounds that drew tens of thousands of delegates from across the world, with the Sunday public talk alone pulling a crowd of over 50,000 — more than enough to make "thirty-five thousand at the wedding breakfast" a fair and rather charming description of the day.
I used to give classes to engineers coming from all around the Far East — this is in Kuala Lumpur, in Malaysia. They came from Bangkok, Hong Kong, Australia, Singapore. The engineers were trained on new equipment, latest developments, and what have you. I found that catching aeroplanes became — I became a bit too blasé about it. One day I was due to leave Kuala Lumpur, and you would have thought that by now I'd have got the handle on 24-hour versus 12-hour clocks. Anyway, I screwed up and got to my flight two hours late. Now, the airport was in the midst of a huge torrential downpour of rain. The check-in girl laughed when I gave her my ticket, and told me I was two hours late. I tried to get her sympathy, asked if there were any possibilities at all of my getting out of Kuala Lumpur. She picked up the phone, made a few enquiries, came back and said: in fact, your aircraft, because of the storm, is still on the tarmac. If you're willing to carry your own baggage and run from the terminal to the aircraft, they'll take you. So I did just that. I took my heavy, heavy luggage — which wasn't full of shirts and underpants, but spanners and spare parts — and I ran to the aircraft in a torrent of rain. When I got to the steps, I don't know how I managed to climb to the top, but the stewardess welcomed me as I stood there like a drowned rat, hair stuck to my face. Anyway, I made the flight. I got on, and I was pleased with it — I didn't mind being drenched. I sat down, took off as much clothing as I could. I had a window seat, and I was looking out of the window. I'd never seen rain like that before — I could barely see the tip of the wing. Anyway, the captain decided to take off, and we taxied to the end of the runway and took off. I was so relieved when the wheels left the ground. Staring out of the window at the rain and the lack of visibility — we hadn't got above the clouds yet — and lo and behold, I saw another aircraft flash past us in the opposite direction. Just to conclude this section: after the aircraft had settled, and we'd got above the weather, and the meal had been served and everybody was relaxed, and I'd had a gin and tonic, I tried to strike up a conversation with the stewardess. I asked her, when you see any of the flight crew next, could you ask them a question for me? She said, looking a little bemused, yes, sure, what do you want to know? I said, just say — on our leaving Kuala Lumpur, did we have a near miss with another aircraft? She looked at me rather startled, and said she'd make it a point to ask the flight crew. A little while later, it wasn't long afterwards, she came back and said to me, would you like to go up onto the flight deck to have a look? The captain would like to see you. In those days, people often went onto the flight deck — there was no security. Couldn't do that today. So I went up onto the flight deck, and a very pleasant flight crew gave me the guided tour of the cockpit. Then, at a certain moment, the captain asked me — why did you ask about a near miss? So I said I was looking out of the window, and the visibility was, you know, only a few hundred yards, and I saw an aircraft at our altitude, going in the opposite direction. I thought it was a bit unusual. He laughed nervously and changed the subject. So that was that.
AI Observations: The sprint-to-the-plane detail fits the era described: this was long before Kuala Lumpur International Airport opened in 1998, when the city was served by the older, capacity-constrained Subang Airport, and tropical downpours of the kind described remain a defining feature of KL's climate to this day. The most notable detail, though, is confirmed by aviation history rather than anecdote: before the September 11 attacks, there was no federal regulation requiring cockpit doors to be locked during flight, and pilots frequently left the door open, with no ticket or stated reason required to be invited in. Cockpit visits were actively encouraged by many airlines as a way to enhance the passenger experience, particularly on carriers like Pan Am, British Airways, and Singapore Airlines, where crews took pride in a more personal connection with passengers. That entire practice ended abruptly after 2001, making this kind of casual flight-deck invitation — near-miss debrief included — a genuine relic of a bygone aviation age.
To be continued . . . Aide memoir for me • The Piccadilly Ledger Clerk: Your brief, unsuited stint tracking merchant ships manually in massive paper ledgers right opposite Fortnum & Mason, before being inevitably sacked. • The Pub Barman: Getting a lifeline job from Dave at the pub opposite the iconic Hoover building in Perivale after being thrown out of the office. • The DIY Era: Reflecting on a time when young men thought nothing of ripping a cylinder head off a car over a weekend to do a "decoke" and change the points, contrasting it with a generation going blind looking at smartphones. • Fatherly Wisdom: The bittersweet realization that an old man's "ramblings" are actually life-saving principles that you only appreciate after you've accumulated your own scars. • Mary get's a lesson from an SS Officer for being cheeky. • My Dad's brushes with the SS. • Albeque Gun Inplacement Starts firing randomly - Terrified Locals Assume Nazi Zealot wont Suirrender. • Hearing the earie sounds of Mermaids playing the Harmonium.