I was born in January1951 at the Kentish Hospital where my father’s sister worked as a nursing sister. Dad was permitted to see me, through a glass door, newly born just before he caught the train to Portsmouth and a ship to the Korean War.
I was 2½ when he returned and, since the picture on Mum’s dressing table was of a smart sailor, I was indignant that “That’s not my Daddy, MY Daddy wears a hat!” But he kissed my Mum so I guess everything was OK.
Until I was five we lived at Littlestone on the Kent Coast in the top floor flat of an old former hotel building literally across the road from the sea, shoes were never worn except when we visited my Grandma in south London who, very far from posh, would have been appalled at the thought of her grandson bare footed, but on the dunes it was heavenly.
In readiness for my schooling my Dad got an Admiralty hiring, a three bedroomed house in Rainham from which he could cycle to the dockyard each day. I went to the brand new infants school, built as part of a vast council estate created specifically for ex servicemen and their families. I was very happy there and made good friends who a couple of years later moved with me to the next door, thirties Junior School, which was quite strange but gave a good honest rounded education. Like many others here I took the eleven plus and was sent to the Technical High School, now a Grammar, but at the time very much the Chatham dockyard apprentices route into a career. I rejected that, following my Dad into the RN.
We only stayed in the hiring a year when a bit of financial luck allowed my parents to buy a between the wars three bedroomed bungalow with a good long garden where I played after school, since my only sibling, a brother born shortly after I went to school, was born with a club foot, necessitating my mother taking him, on the bus, the five miles to the hospital three afternoons a week. I was never actually a latch key kid, if it was wet I played in the shed and the girl next door walked me to and from school for a few months until I felt confident to go on my own. Half terms alternated between Grandma in Sydenham, Gran in Ashford and Canterbury, my mother’s dream city, whilst summer days out were on the Railway along the north Kent coast: Broadstairs, Margate, Herne Bay, Ramsgate.
From the age of 8 I was a wolf cub and later a sea scout which filled many weekends under canvas or later as a teenager we slept on HMS Discovery, now in Dundee, but then moored at the Temple in London where I learned self confidence and navigation, both for at sea and getting around the capital.
I had a wonderful childhood, with caring but not stifling parents, bearable but occasionally sadistic teachers, (the cane was regularly employed and the slipper in daily use, especially by a few of the unmarried female teachers). As planned I finally left school at just 16 with almost no qualifications and went to sea where I spent virtually thirty very happy years.