Life

I haven't always felt good about myself. There are things I'm proud of, but there's a lot that I'm not.

As I've got older, though, I've come to realise that I'm just a product of my genes and my upbringing, neither of which I had any control over. So in a sense, being ashamed of what I am and what I've done and beating myself up over it is not really necessary. Actually, coming to realise this happened fairly early in life; coming to internalise it and seeing my life from that perspective, has taken a lot longer. In fact it still hasn't happened completely, and probably never will.

I've included some stuff here which other people might not make public. This is somewhat therapeutic for me. And, who knows, it could even help anyone else who struggles with negative thoughts, and I suspect that quite a few people do.

Beginnings - The East End

I was born in 1953 at Ilford Hospital to parents, Kath and Maurice Ilsley, who were living at the time at 6 Camden Crescent in Dagenham. There is a fairly well-known song called Dagenham Dave, to which I can relate somewhat.

All this was in the East End of London. It wasn't quite within the sound of Bow Bells, but I did grow up fairly cockney. The TV series Call the Midwife portrays life in this time and place.

Left: Mum and Dad, first date, 1949
Right: 6 Camden Crescent (picture taken in 2013)

My Dad was a clerk in an office in London and my mother stayed home to look after me. Home was actually my mother's parents rented council house.

Welling

5 months after I was born, Mum and Dad bought a small 2-bedroom semi-detached house at 61 Hook Lane, Welling, Kent. It cost 1600 pounds. Dad was earning 6 pounds 10 shillings a week, and, with the mortgage, they struggled financially. The fact that there was still rationing from the war time made things harder still. My parents sacrificed a lot to make sure that I was well fed and properly looked after.

61 Hook Lane with later extension (picture taken in 2001)

While we lived in Welling, there were three more additions to the family: John, born in 1955, Jeanette born in 1958 and Karen, born in 1960.

Earliest Memory

My earliest reliable memory was pushing John down the stairs. I was 3; John was 18 months. Mum was in the toilet and we were outside the toilet door at the top of the stairs, fighting to be the first one to get to her when she came out. During the scuffle, John fell down the stairs. I don't think I pushed him down deliberately, but I have an image of him rolling with his arms and legs flying around and around as he rolled.

Afterwards, I remember being in the kitchen with Mum holding John to comfort him and me feeling bad about what had happened. We had a bird cage and, as a sort of diversionary activity, I dangled a chain into the cage, then slowly pulled it out, causing it to go "clunk clunk clunk" as it ran over the metal bars. (I was into chains in those days and Mum had bought me the chain on my request.) Anyway, after pulling the chain up and down several times, I got told off, and that make me feel even worse. I don't remember Mum telling me off for the stair incident and she told me later that she had been careful not to blame me.

Starting School

Just after I turned five, I went to school at Hook Lane Infants School and then, later, Hook Lane Junior School, both about 300 metres up the road.

I remember my first day at school fairly well. I was shy and school was a somewhat scary experience. One very confident boy, also called David, tried to befriend me, but he really succeeded just in scaring me. The reason for my shyness might have been in part just my personality, but it might also have been the fact that, before going to school, I had never really met other kids beyond my younger brother and new baby sister. I had met very few adults outside of my family either. I have always been somewhat prosopagnosic, possibly for the same reason. Apparently, the ability to recognise faces develops in the first year of life and relies on seeing a variety of different faces.

Adrienne

A week into school, a new girl started in our class. She had been on holiday with her family. Her name was Adrienne, and I thought she was the best thing I had ever seen. I don't know why because, in retrospect, she probably wasn't the prettiest girl in the class, but none of the other girls (or boys) had struck me in anything like the same way.

Anyway, it just so happened that on that day, our teacher put the kids into a permanent seating arrangement. Each desk accommodated two kids, so Mrs Armstrong sat the boys and girls separately on the floor, then asked each boy in turn to pick a girl to sit with. My turn came up fairly quickly and, with no hesitation, I pointed at Adrienne and said 'her.' I didn't even know her name at the time. We sat together in every class for the next few years and Adrienne's mum, Doris, brought Adrienne and her younger sister, Janet, to our place every Monday after school to play and our mum took us to their place every Thursday.

Left: Left to right: Mum, Jeanette, John, Adrienne, Janet, me
Right: Mum and the four kids

In time, I also made friends with a group of boys, including Scary David, and we used to meet on Saturdays and go to the park to play football (soccer) and the like.

Logic

I remember in my third year of primary school wondering why none of my teachers had died. I had once asked my mother how long people live. She told me 100 years. I took that as an exact figure that applied to everyone rather than some sort of average. She had also told me that she knew more than me because she was older, and that the older people got, the more they knew.

I had observed that the teachers at my school seemed to know everything. I therefore assumed that they must be pretty close to 100 years old - maybe 98 or 99. From this, it seemed a logical conclusion that, statistically, during my three years at the school, most of the teachers should have died. But none of them had.

It took me a bit longer to realise that it was the error in some of my premises that had led to the false conclusion. I've always been one to draw logical conclusions from given facts, even if the facts themselves were dubious.

Though I'm not particularly intelligent generally, my predisposition to identifying logical consequences of given premises has meant that I've been quite well suited to things like maths and physics, and to a bit of armchair philosophy. It has also meant that I used to score very well on the IQ tests they used in those days. I, and other people, took these test results to mean that I was intelligent generally, though they really demonstrated only a particular facet of intelligence. In other ways, like socially, inter-personally and artistically, I'm really much more of a dunce.

My Parents and their Families

The buttons below link to accounts of my parents and their families. The 'Less Detailed' one links to a less detailed account. The 'More Detailed' one links to a more detailed account.

The 'More Detailed' account is meant just for me and family members, so it is password protected. The username is 'me', and the password is my father's middle name followed by 'bulldog', all lower case, no spaces or punctuation.

Less Detailed         More Detailed

Brentwood

By 1962, our 2-bedroom house was getting a bit small for our family of six. Also I remember that the paint was peeling off the walls. So we started to look for something bigger. We found a place in Brentwood, Essex, for 4100 pounds - a new-build in a street on the edge of town with fields out the back instead of more houses.

64 Crow Green Lane, Pilgrims Hatch, Brentwood

We moved on December 14, one week after the last great London Smog, and at the start of the coldest, longest winter of the 20th Century. More details of the winter can be found via the link below or from the 'Winter' link on the home page.

Winter of 62-63  

Pilgrims Hatch Primary School

Although our new house was bigger and better than the old one, it was on the edge of a vast council estate and the local primary school was in the middle of the estate. The kids were rougher than I was used to, and I managed to get myself beaten up in my first week there. That was before I learnt not to dob.

The school had three classes in each year level, I was in Year 3, where there was 3A for the bright kids, 3B for the not-so bright kids, and 3C for the others. When I arrived, the headmaster asked me how good I was at English and Maths. I said I was ok, with a bit of a shrug. So he put me in 3B. A few days later, they held a maths quiz game with 3B competing against 3A. That would seem a bit unfair, but 3B won - mainly because I answered most of the questions. The next day I was in 3A.

At the end of Year 3, I received my first-ever school report.

School report, July 1963

As can be seen, I came 16th out of 47 students, and that was in the top class, but my parents were quite disappointed. English was the main problem - 32nd out of 47. They decided to give me extra work in English. The first task they gave me was to write an essay entitled 'My Home'.

I had written hundreds of essays over the years at school, but don't remember ever being told what an essay was or what one should put in one. I'm sure I would have been told, but I probably wasn't paying attention. The one piece of advice I do remember was to make the essay exciting with lots of things happening.

What my parents probably had in mind for my essay was a descriptive piece about our house. At the time, I didn't realise that: I thought I had to make it exciting and to make lots of things happen. I wrote about the house being invaded by evil snowmen who broke all the windows and filled every room with snow. For good measure, the same thing happened progressively to all the houses in the street.

My mother read my effort, rebuked me sternly and sent me to bed. I went, none the wiser as to what I should have written.

After that, they decided to get me an English tutor and did so at considerable expense. It was an old lady, Mrs Ellingsworth, who lived two bus rides away. I went there every Saturday morning. She talked about a lot of stuff that I didn't understand, and I can't remember how much English I learnt.

Mum and Dad also bought me a book about writing English essays. One of the model essays was called 'A Day at the Beach', and I learnt it almost by heart.

The next school year, in 4A, I seemed to improve in both maths and English. Halfway through 4A, I sat the 11-Plus, an exam that determines what type of secondary school one can go to. Prior to that, we were given 10 past 11-Plus papers (5 English and 5 maths) under test conditions for practice. I got reasonable marks in the English papers, but was always top of the class in the maths papers, my percentages for the 5 papers being 89%, 97%, 100%, 100%, 98%.

When the 11-Plus exam came around, I think I might have got 100% on the maths, though of course I never found out. The icing on the cake, though, was that the essay we had to write for the English paper was titled 'A Day at the Beach'. I wrote it pretty much word-for-word from memory.

Brentwood School

As a result of my performance on the 11-Plus, I ended up being one of the two kids in the school accepted to Brentwood School, the top school for boys in the area.

The main building, Brentwood School

Before I was accepted, my parents had said that, if I got into Brentwood School, they didn't care if I was the bottom student in the bottom class. As it turned out, I was usually about the bottom student in the top class, though strings of Ds and Es on my report cards didn't exactly meet with enthusiastic applause.

Brentwood School was founded by Sir Anthony Browne in 1557 as a sort of penance because he felt remorseful about allowing William Hunter to be burnt at the stake at the age of 19 for refusing to accept that communion bread and wine turned into the flesh and blood of Jesus Christ. They planted a tree on the site where Will was burnt and the last remains of the tree rotted away just before I started at the school. The tree was on the footpath in front of the school on one of the two main roads in Brentwood.

The school was a good school. Classes ran from 8:50 am to 4:00 pm Monday to Saturday, though Wednesday and Saturday afternoons were sport. Many after-school activities were offered until 5:30 and homework was always plentiful. Because the school was very selective, student behaviour was never disruptive, so lessons were about learning. I ended up with 13 O Levels, three As in my A Levels and entry to St Johns College, Cambridge with an exhibition (a kind of scholarship which provided some extra living money).

The school produced quite a number of illustrious members of society including Jack Straw, Noel Edmunds, Griff Rhys-Jones and Douglas Adams. In fact Douglas Adams was in my class for three years. He was very witty and creative. Apart from writing the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series, he was a talented actor and guitarist, on one occasion even playing on stage with Pink Floyd. I was envious of his charisma. However, I do have one thing he doesn't: I'm still alive. Douglas unfortunately died of a heart attack at age 49.

Girls

Despite all this, my high-school years weren't always totally happy.

From the age of 11, I remember feeling that my life wasn't all it should be. I enjoyed some experiences, but there was often a feeling that my life was missing something and that I wasn't as happy as one should be.

At school, I was a bit of a nerd with below-average social skills. To the cool kids, I was one of those not really worth knowing. I was never bullied, more just ignored. At school, we were taught to pray, and I remember thanking God that I was good at maths, good at gymnastics and so on, while feeling that these weren't the important things in life - the things that I really wanted.

The years between age 11 and age 17 are the ones in which most boys learn about girls and how to relate to them and interact with them. During those years, apart from my sisters, who were 5 and 7 years younger than me, I rarely met any girls. I used to see them on the street and on the bus, but if there was any chance I would have to interact with them, I got scared and embarrassed. I remember blushing when girls were around and that made me even more embarrassed and just wanting to get away.

In primary school I had played with the girls as much as with the boys. Early in high school, I did find the girls I saw attractive, but I didn't understand this attraction and felt somewhat ashamed and guilty about it. In my prayers I used to apologise for it and ask forgiveness. I thought there was something wrong with me - something that, if anyone else knew about it, would make me a pariah.

There was a horse-riding school just around the corner from our house and I used to like to watch the girls ride by. But, at the same time, I thought it was a sin and it made me feel very guilty. I used to try to use my willpower to resist the temptation of looking. Though I wasn't very often successful.

Later in high school, I started to realise that I was actually supposed to find girls attractive, but then another problem arose: listening to the banter of the other boys on cadet camps and the like, I started to feel that everyone except me was sexually accomplished and that I was about the only one not to have ever even gone out with a girl. Again I was ashamed and embarrassed - too much so to share my thoughts with anyone.

Other boys at school had social groups that included girls and parties. I did have a few friends who were nerds like me, but I would never talk about these sorts of things with them. Nor would I talk to my family.

In retrospect, I have come to see myself as being a bit further along the autistic spectrum than most people. The main characteristic is a below-average ability to understand social cues and what other people think and feel, and to know what are appropriate ways to act and communicate in social situations. Being less aware of other people's feeling than most people are, I tend to care less about them. Also, I tend to find social situations difficult and hard work and so I tend a bit to try to avoid them. In group gatherings I will often be the only one not talking to anybody. But, on the other hand, I don't like being alone either.

Back to my time at school, I had no idea how to get a girlfriend or what to do with her if I ever did get one. What's more, I had no idea how to go about fixing my problem, and so just worried and felt like a failure.

On the other hand, my younger brother was much more successful with the girls and seemed to know just what to do. On top of that, the girls all seemed to like him, and no one seemed to want to know me. Later in life, my sister told me that some of her girlfriends did quite fancy me. I just didn't pick up on that sort of thing - and wouldn't have known what to do about it even if I had.

After I finished school, John was going out with Ann and I was sort of paired up with Ann's friend, Sue. But, me being me, the relationship went nowhere, and she dropped me. In my first year at uni, there were a couple of girls who I was quite friendly with. One I think I was actually going out with. But, in retrospect, I think they were probably hoping for more than what actually happened.

Itchy Feet

I've always had itchy feet. When I was 8, my favourite book was a road atlas of Great Britain which my parents owned. I used to follow routes from page to page to see how far from home I could get. My family didn't have a car, but sometimes we would borrow or hire one or go out on public transport, and I was always excited; the further from home we got, the more excited I got.

During my school years, I took every opportunity to go anywhere that got me away from home. I went on all the cadet camps including 3 tours of Arduous Training in the Easter holidays in Snowdonia and camps at various RAF bases in England and Scotland. I also went on government-sponsored field-study camps to learn about meteorology, a topic that fascinated me.

Arduous training in Snowdonia

In my second year at high school I spent two weeks with a French family in the north of France on a school-organised exchange. My initial motivation was to go to somewhere abroad, but I thoroughly enjoyed the experience, and it greatly improved my French. My exchange partner stayed with us in England later the same year, and the next year we did it all again with his sister joining him on his visit to us.

I finished my A Levels and then stayed at school into 7th Form to do the Oxford and Cambridge scholarship exams which are held in December. During that extra term, the school told us about treks being offered to India by a trekking company in London. The school offered to pay part of the fees from some fund they had for things like that.

I ended up on a trek to India from February to July. This was a different experience for me. 12 of us travelled together in a Land Rover. I was the youngest of the 12, and probably the hardest to get on with. We ate the local food and drank the water. I was sick most of the time. I had constant diarrhoea for the last 6 weeks of the trip and for another 14 weeks after I got home. My weight dropped from 65 kg to 50 kg. But I have always been very glad that I did the trip.

India: we often drew large crowds of spectators when we stopped.

More details of the trip can be found via the link below or from the 'Travels' link on the home page.

Travels      

Cambridge

I started at Cambridge in October 1971. In those days, tuition fees were paid by the government, and I was given a very pleasant room in the college grounds and a fairly generous allowance with which to buy books, food and beer. And that was without the exhibition. Education was financially easier in those days, but then fewer people got accepted to university than do today.

My initial intention was to study physics, not because it was going to lead to anything I wanted to do, just because at school I was quite good at it. In first year, I had to do four subjects, so I added maths, crystallography and geology.

University physics and maths were harder than their school equivalents though, and I struggled with them. Crystallography was also hard. Geology, which I had thrown in as a last choice because it vaguely interested me, was the only subject in which I really coped. For that reason and, again, not because of any thoughts about what it would lead to, I specialised in geology in Years 2 and 3.

Socially, first year at uni was a new and exciting experience for me. Living away from home, I could do a lot of things that I hadn’t done before. Living with my dad, I had had to have a short back and sides while everyone else was going hippie. So, once I got away, I grew my hair long. And it stayed long for many years.

Me at uni

But, along with my new-found social opportunities, I also worked hard on my studies.

In the second half of the year, I became part of a small group of friends, and we spent a lot of our free time together. They were Jiff and Alan, whom I knew from school and Tony and Abdul.

I spent the summer holiday between first and second years in the US, firstly working on a YMCA kids' camp in upstate New York, then travelling around by greyhound bus and thumb. While hitchhiking I managed to end up one night in an isolated cabin in the woods in northern Canada with a man who was wanted by the police. While telling be about his crime, he spent quite a while agitatedly stabbing a small table between our beds with a large hunting knife. More details on this incident can be found under the button Twenty on the home page (Item 2).

In the first term of second year, I shared a room with Alan. I also made the decision to spend less time with the group and more time by myself and studying, a decision that turned out not to be for the best. In the Christmas holiday, I went home and started to go out with Judy who lived near Brentwood.

The Winter of My Discontent

Term 2 of my second year was the low point of my life. Alan moved out and I had the room to myself. I had enjoyed my time with Judy, but, once I was back at uni, I only saw her on occasional weekends when I visited by train. Between visits, I got lonely and quite miserable.

The nights were long, and I began to find being alone in my room at night oppressively gloomy and dismal. There seemed to be something almost physical in the atmosphere of the room that crushed in on me from all sides the moment I walked in. I just wanted to get out again and go somewhere else, but I had nowhere else to go.

I also felt a more general feeling of depression that went with me everywhere. I felt like it should be possible to escape from these feelings, though I couldn’t find a way, and it seemed like they were never going to go away.

At times, I felt so bad that I gave serious thought to putting an end to things, but a certain chain of logic stopped me. I had enjoyed being in the US the previous summer. I thought that, before doing anything irreversible, I would go back to America to see if things improved. But that would mean abandoning my degree (in those days one couldn’t just defer). So, before going to America, I would grit my teeth and finish my studies - with the promise of something better at the end.

The Coming of Summer

In term 3 Jiff moved into the room I had. Also, Judy and I broke up and the nights got shorter. All these things led to my feelings of depression fading to some extent. Some time around then too, I started going out with Thelma, though I didn’t really like her and we didn’t get together very often, something she complained about. As summer came along and it stayed light till late evening, I felt a lot better.

In retrospect, I think that a major part of my depression was seasonal affective disorder (SAD), something I knew nothing about at the time. In England I was always a lot happier in summer when the days were long than I was in winter when it was dark most of the time and when the weather was usually dull and miserable even when it was light.

A couple of Incidents

Cooking has never been my forte. One evening I invited some friends round for dinner. Jiff had something else on, so didn't come. Jiff knew about my cooking, and I think that the fear of being poisoned was at least part of his rationale for doing something else instead. Anyway, I got some cheap steak and some cabbage and boiled them up together. No sauce or anything. My friends weren't impressed with the meal which took a lot of chewing. But one of them brought along some rather large cigars. After dinner, he gave us one each and we smoked them. None of us being smokers, we soon all felt very sick. Jiff came in to find us all lying on the floor groaning and nearly took action to deal with a case of mass food poisoning.

Jiff had taken up Morris dancing, something I liked to make fun of. He also took up Judo lessons. Another evening, the same friends came around for a game of Pitt. Pitt was a card game that involves a lot of shouting and banging. At the time, my room was above the porters' lodge at the front gate of the College.

The small first floor window in the turret to the right of the gate was my kitchen.

A porter came up to tell us to make less noise. We decided to play more quietly, but of course that didn't last, and I got a second visit. At that point, my friends went home. Just after they left, Jiff returned from a Judo lesson and decided to show me some of the new throws he had learnt. Each involved my landing on the floor with quite a loud thud. After the third one, the porter burst in saying 'Right, that's it! You're going to the dean!' I was fined 3 pounds for disturbing the peace.

East Africa

Between second and third years, we were required to do a 6-week geological mapping exercise. Gill, a fellow geology student, suggested we go and do ours in Greenland. That turned out to be a bit difficult logistically, but one of the lecturers told us about some archaeologists who were working in the Rift Valley in Kenya and wanted some geologists to produce a map of the surrounding area. So we agreed to do that. I was still going out with Thelma, though I would much rather have been going out with Gill. But Gill had a friend called Mark who was a lot more manly than me and to whom she seemed to be quite attached.

At the start of the summer holiday, I did a three-week Eurail trip with Thelma, then headed off towards Kenya. I met Gill in Egypt after she had been diving in the Red Sea with Mark. Gill and I then travelled together from there.

The train from Wadi Halfa to Khartoum

We did our mapping project for 6 weeks, then she flew home while I set off to hitchhike further south.

A few days later, I was camped with a couple of other young English kids on the beach at Malindi in Kenya. It was an idyllic location with fantastic coral reef and millions of brightly coloured fish within swimming distance of the shore.

But one day, two of us got caught in a rip. Being English, neither of us knew what a rip was and we just swam hard back towards the beach. It took us a quite a while and we were both exhausted by the time we managed to touch the bottom again. There being no lifeguards around, we came fairly close to drowning, not to mention becoming shark food.

A second experience was worse.

Messing with My Mind

The couple I was with acquired a quantity of plant matter off one of the locals, and through the evening we progressively set fire to it. It had no effect on me until it was nearly time for bed.

Then I said ‘One thing I like about this place is that there are no buses’. That was a ridiculous thing to say because buses hadn’t been a problem at all. I immediately wondered why I had said it, then wondered if I really had said it at all.

So I asked my friend if I had said it. He just looked at me funny. I’m pretty sure I had. I think I said a couple of other fairly nonsensical things interspersed with some sensible stuff. Then we all went to bed.

As I lay in bed, images would go through my mind, very vivid visual images that would fairly quickly morph from one thing to another until one of them frightened me. I remember a sequence which ended with a cat morphing into a rhinoceros, which then charged me from just a few feet away. After jumping, things would settle down to something more benign, but the cycle would start again and end up with something else that frightened me. The unusual behaviour of my mind and my lack of control over it worried me intensely. It took me quite a while to go to sleep.

In the morning, the scary movie had stopped, but I felt detached from my surroundings in a way that I never had before, like I was sensing them through a semi-transparent membrane. The membrane inside an eggshell came to mind.

I also had a very strong feeling that I needed my mother – the way a two-year-old does if it’s lost. I was very aware that I was in Africa a long way from home. I was mostly travelling by myself, and I was very worried that I would forget what I was doing and where I was trying to go and would never make it back home.

I continued my journey, hitch-hiking from Kenya to the Zambia-Rhodesia border near Victoria Falls and back without losing my way. I had actually hoped to get to South Africa, but was turned back by the Rhodesian (Zimbabwean) border officials for being vagrant.

The feeling of dependence on my mother stayed with me until I got back to England. The feeling of detachment from the world and observing it through a membrane stayed with me for two or three years and returned after that any time I got scared. It became particularly strong each day for an hour or so as it was getting dark. Once it was dark, it settled down again.

It was 5 to 10 years before I had completely recovered.

More details of the East Africa trip can be found via the link below or from the 'East Africa' link on the home page.

East Africa  

Third Year

I got back to Cambridge determined to join a few clubs and fill my time better than I had in second year so that I would have less time by myself to feel miserable.

Also, Jiff and I had scored the best room in the College. It had a large living room with a bay window looking out at the bridge of sighs and over the river to the master's gardens. There was also a double bedroom, a kitchen and an entrance hall.

My view

Sandy

I don't remember the exact circumstances, but it was just a couple of weeks into first term, and I was still being hopeful about getting off with Gill. I had invited her around one evening. Through a bit of bad planning, I had also invited a girl called Sandy, that I had met a couple of days earlier. I asked Jiff if he would take care of Sandy if Gill turned up. Fortunately, Gill didn't turn up and I spent the evening with Sandy.

Unlike previous girls with whom I had aspired to have a relationship, Sandy took the lead. That was just what I needed, and it wasn't long before we had the sort of normal relationship that other couples had. This was probably the best thing that had happened to me.

Sandy

We lived together in her college for the rest of that year and most of the next year. I still had occasional somewhat neurotic episodes, but on the whole, I was pleased with life and no longer felt like a failure or that it might be better if I wasn't around.

Having a good, fairly stable and supportive relationship and feeling much more secure, once things had settled down from the novelty of the first few weeks, I devoted myself very diligently to my studies. Sandy and I spent quite a few weekends in the geology library, me working on geology and she on geography - Sandy was doing first-year geography. As a result I ended up with first class honours (one of only two in the geology department that year).

Left: After graduation.     Right: Punting trip to celebrate.

Karen

It was during that third year that my sister Karen was killed. She was 13. She and a friend were playing with a gun in the shed at the friend's place. It turned out that the gun had been left loaded. It went off and Karen died instantly. Both my parents were devastated, though it affected me a lot less than it did them. I was probably more sad about it when I visited her grave many years later, saw how old the gravestone was and realised how much life she had missed out on.

One thing that made it easier for me was that we had got on very well the last time we were together. We were at home in Brentwood. Karen was going into town on a bus and I would be going back to Cambridge before she got back. I had walked to the bus stop with her and I remember we had waved to each other very enthusiatically and very happily through the bus window as she left. I've always cherished that memory. It brings a tear to my eye even now.

Karen, aged 9 and 13

Timbuktu

The summer at the end of third year, Sandy and I, along with my brother John and his girlfriend, decided to hitchhike to Israel. After a bit of time working on a cucumber farm to make a bit of money, we set off. We got as far as Greece before Greece and Turkey decided to go to war with each other and closed the border between them, making continuing the journey somewhat difficult.

We decided on a change of plan and to try for Timbuktu instead.

Sandy and me in Algeria

Sandy and I got as far as Mali and were actually offered a ride to Timbuktu. But, because Sandy was suffering a bit of a medical emergency and we needed to get to help, we turned it down and headed for Dakar where the British consul took pity on us and flew us home.

More details of the trip can be found via the link below or from the 'West Africa' link on the home page.

West Africa  

Fourth Year

My degree was a 3-year course, for which I received an honours degree and, a couple of years later, for no extra effort other than remaining of good character (i.e. staying out of prison) and sending in 3 pounds, I received a master's degree to add to my collection.

However, while most of my geology colleagues were off to places like Africa and Borneo being paid lots of money, I spent another year in Cambridge, staying with Sandy in her college room. My intention was to do a PhD and to become an academic, something that I didn't need to embark on straight away. With the benefit of my Cambridge first-class honours degree, I managed to secure a job selling meat pies to shops from a delivery van.

Sandy was more socially intelligent than me, more confident and more manipulative. She was also quite good looking and sometimes I wonder what she saw in me. She had insisted on an 'open' relationship in which she wasn't tied to just me. She did seem to have aspirations at times of something better, though nothing really materialised. During that second year, some of the enthusiasm for our partnership waned, from both sides.

Halfway through the year, Sandy saw a notice in the geology department advertising a fairly lucrative scholarship to do a PhD at the Australian National University. She told me about this. I'm not sure to what extent this was because she knew I planned to eventually do something like that, and to what extent she thought our relationship might be better at that sort of distance.

During my teenage years, my parents had made serious plans to emigrate to Australia as ten-pound poms. They planned to live in Noosa on the Sunshine Coast north of Brisbane. They put considerable effort into persuading us kids that this would be a good thing, taking us along to films, information sessions and the like.

I was convinced, and got to the point of assuming that we would soon be going and assuming that I would be an Aussie. I even started sticking up for Australia in the test matches, something the other kids at school couldn't really understand.

In the end, my parents changed their minds, mainly I think because it would probably mean never seeing family again, and we didn't go. But, being now convinced that Australia was the place to be, when the offer of time in Aus came up, I jumped at it. I applied for the scholarship, was accepted, and was due to start in June.

By third term, most of the heat had gone out of the relationship between Sandy and me and our lack of enthusiasm for each other was starting to morph into a mutual resentment. A little while into the term, I started to develop a liking for Sandy's neighbour, Ally. Sandy used to send me next door sometimes to get rid of me. Ally was happy to have my company. Realising that we both really quite liked each other, we secretly got together.

The way Sandy and I eventually parted company is something I'm not proud of. There were no kind words or thankyous for the time we'd had together; I just disappeared from her life, even though for a while we were in adjacent rooms.

I actually met Sandy again a couple of years later in Australia. We spent a bit of time together and she seemed not to hold too much against me. She had come to Australia by accident. She had been speaking to an academic at the Sorbonne in Paris and he had invited her to come and do a PhD with him. She agreed, not realising that he was working in Sydney, not Paris.

Rape

It was during that third term in Cambridge that I became a prime suspect in a serial rape case. A spate of about 10 rapes had occurred over a period of a few months. The police had a description of the culprit - and it sounded exactly like me.

One night, while walking home from work, I was stopped and questioned by a policeman, who obviously suspected I might be the one they were looking for. He asked me where I was going; I explained that I was going home from work. He asked me where work was; I said that it was at a meat pie distribution depot about a mile away. Then he asked me where home was. As I was living illegally in college and feared disclosing that, I gave him my parents' address in Essex, 50 miles away. He asked me if I was going to walk there. Then I was stuck. I did manage to squirm out of the situation and got away, though I had to admit to where I was actually living.

The next day, two police officers arrived at my parents' place in Essex saying that they wanted to question me in connection with a number of rapes that had occurred in Cambridge. That worried my parents somewhat. As neither of us had phones, it actually worried them for quite a while.

Eventually, they got some saliva from the rapist. They asked all men who might be under any suspicion to come to the police station and provide a saliva sample. Fortunately, I turned out not to have the right type of saliva.

They did eventually catch the fellow. A policeman walking along the road had been informed by radio that there had been another rape near where he was. He saw an old lady riding a bicycle, got suspicious and knocked her off her bike. It turned out to be the rapist in disguise. He was actually in his forties and looked nothing like me at all.

Leaving

Given my feelings for Ally, I think many people in that situation might have changed their mind about emigrating. But I had always placed more importance on things than people (part of my autistic tendencies, possibly) and I went anyway, though I did put it off until October.

Ally and I lived in college until July - a time that I thoroughly enjoyed, then we hitchhiked to Greece and spent a few days living on a beach on Mykonos, before returning to England when it was almost time for me to leave. We went blackberrying the day before I left.

Ally and me in Brentwood just before I left for Australia

Canberra

I flew to Australia in October 1975. In Canberra, I was back to being less than happy, though not neurotic like I had been at times in Cambridge. I found a social group in the honours students in the geology department and that helped a lot. I got the nickname 'Flog' because I worked all the time.

Happy Hour

One day, though, just a few weeks after I arrived in Canberra, I was walking through Civic, a pedestrian area in the town centre. I bought some food from a van, and the lady (she was probably in her 50s) who served me talked to me for a while, impressed that I had come out from England by myself, a tough thing to do. After the conversation I felt a wonderful feeling of peace, contentment, happiness, wellbeing and benevolence - all those things! It lasted maybe an hour. It was so different from the way I felt the rest of the time, and I wondered if that was the way other people normally felt, and if there was something wrong with me. But then, seeing the way some people act, I know that that's not the case with everyone.

I've had the same feeling just a couple of other times. One was when I climbed a mountain in Kazakhstan - I was by myself and managed to get up to some snow that was still there from the winter. The other was on a boat ride on the Danube past the Budapest house of parliament. I have no idea what caused these momentary states of mind. It would be great if I could feel that way all the time.

Ally and Me

Ally and I wrote letters to each other almost every day during my first year in Canberra. The next British summer, she came out and stayed with me for about 6 weeks. On the flight home, she sat next to an Indonesian fellow who was a Christian, and they talked a lot. In retrospect, she had at times described our relationship as spiritual and read books like 'The Origin of Species', so it seems she had been exploring spiritual matters. Anyway, not long after getting home, she told me that she had become a Christian.

I had gone through a phase of thinking I was a Christian towards the end of school, but had since decided that it was delusional and by now, I was fairly much an atheist. I told Ally that I wouldn't be going the way she had chosen (been there, done that). Not long after that, the relationship ended, and I was even more unhappy.

I'm not sure that our difference of opinion on spiritual matters was the main cause of the break, but, in retrospect, a bit of open inquisitiveness on my part might have led to a different outcome. All in all, though, I think she could have done a lot better than me, and hopefully she did.

Just a couple of years later, in no small part because of Ally's influence, I became a Christian myself, and quite a serious one, though again, that didn't last for ever.

Field Work

My PhD involved hundreds of days out in the field by myself, looking at rocks. At first, I found the isolation for days on end very difficult: I was lonely and scared. Australia has snakes and other venomous things that England doesn't, and I was scared of being bitten and dying in the bush. I was also scared of getting lost or breaking a leg and never making it back to civilisation. There were no mobile phones back then and we didn't have radios, so I could lie injured or dead in the bush for a week or two before anyone would think of looking for me.

Left: My office and roommate, Don           Right: The bush

Joyce

After Ally, I went a couple of years mostly by myself, and I was never good on my own. Then I came across Joyce. Joyce was a geology student at ANU. She was seven years older than me and had two daughters aged 10 and 8. She was in the process of getting divorced from the father of the girls. I remember my mother wasn't impressed with the idea when I told her about it, but Joyce was a very nice, selfless woman and it was quite a good relationship.

The two daughters were a bonus for me because, though I wanted a long-term partner, I didn't fancy bringing up young kids. Also, I had a bit of a psychological thing about boys and really didn't want to bring up boys. Joyce's girls were very nice and took readily to me, so this all seemed like a good thing. Joyce was Irish and we planned to get married in Dublin at some unspecified time in the future.

Joyce and girls

White Industries

As I was finishing up my PhD, there was a bit of a mining boom and a mining company, White Industries, came to ANU recruiting. They offered me a job. They would pay me $12 000 a year while I finished my thesis, then $19 000 once I started working for them - a lot of money at the time. On top of that, they would arrange permanent residence in Australia for me, so I didn't have to go home as soon as I had finished my studies. The initial plan was to work in the Kimberley in the north of Western Australia looking for diamonds, but it ended up being coal at Clermont in Central Queensland.

Then came news that my PhD thesis needed major improvements before it could be accepted. After just a couple of months in Clermont, I went back to Canberra for 6 months to do the necessary work and resubmit. It failed second time too.

During this time, Joyce graduated and got a job with CSR sorting diamonds in Perth. Plans of being together long-term seemed to be evaporating.

PhD Thesis

The link below is to my thesis and some associated writings. I don't imagine too many people are going to be interested in a few hundred pages of writing about rocks, but it's there anyway.

PhD Thesis  

Cairns

In June 1981, I went back to White Industries, this time looking for metals from a base in Cairns. I lived in the town and, for the first time in my life, lived a fairly normal settled life with a paid job, rented accommodation and a bit of a social life.

Church

The social life came from a church. After breaking up with Ally, it had always been in the back of my mind that maybe she was right about God and I was wrong. Then I would be heading for hell, a dreadful thought. I decided that I needed to look more into Christianity before dismissing it. In Clermont, I went out one day to try to buy a bible, but without success. When I got back to Canberra, I took an interest in Christian things happening on campus and got involved with some kids from a Baptist church.

As it turned out, Joyce was Christian, her family being one of the few protestant families from Eire. But she didn't let it affect her life too much.

In Cairns I sought out a Baptist church, tried an independent Baptist church that didn't impress me much, then found the main normal Baptist church in the city. They had an active youth group with a lot of people my age and younger. I was instantly accepted and felt valued. I was open about not having made a commitment and I think this presented the group with a bit of a challenge.

Cairns Baptist Church Youth Group

Meeting Leanne

Not long after my first visit to the church, I was introduced to a girl called Leanne. I remember she shook my hand very confidently, and that impressed me. By December, she, I and two others, Peter and Joy became good friends.

Joyce and I spent Christmas with her family in Canberra. Before I went there, I asked Leanne if she would go out with me when I got back. She accepted, and I told Joyce while I was with her. Joyce wasn't pleased, though I think that, by then, she saw it as somewhat inevitable that we would go separate ways.

With a bit of money in the bank, in February, I went back to England for the first time and spent three weeks with Mum, Jeanette and her husband, Simon, in Chelmsford. During that time, Mum, Jeanette, John and I did a bit of a trip around the Peak District and other places.

Mum, John, Jeanette and me in the Peak District

In July, I bought a house in Maitland where White Industries was talking about moving me. The house turned out to be a financial disaster, losing us almost as much money as Leanne and I paid for our first house to live in.

Married Life

In August I proposed to Leanne (possibly one of the least romantic proposals of all time: 'What are you doing in December?' . . . 'Nothing that I know of.' . . . ' Wanna get married?' . . . 'Ok.') I really was quite clueless.

That was on the Saturday. Two days later on the Monday, I was told I was being laid off from work and they were closing the Cairns office. We arranged our wedding for December 11, 1982, and I managed to drag out the work with White Industries until December 10. Then we had a 10-day honeymoon in Fiji.

Left: Wedding at Cairns Baptist Church
Right: Honeymoon in Fiji

In 1983, I sold insurance - very badly. Fortunately, Leanne was earning decent money working as a medical laboratory scientist for State Health at Cairns Base Hospital, so she carried most of the debt I had incurred buying that house in Maitland.

In 1984, I landed an 8-month contract, earning good money, doing base-metal exploration in Central Queensland (though still based in Cairns) with BP. I extended it for two months, then continued to work for them as a field hand for another few months.

Goodbye to Rocks

During those latter months, I applied for numerous other geology jobs, but the mining boom was over now, and I had no success until I was offered a job with the Northern Territory Geological Survey. But they wanted to pay me half what I had been earning with BP, they wanted me to live in Alice Springs and to spend six weeks out of every seven throughout the cooler half of the year in the field. We thought about this and decided I could earn as much teaching, live somewhere civilised and come home every night. So I applied to do a Dip. Ed.

I couldn't do a Dip. Ed. in Cairns: it had to be Townsville or Brisbane. As Brisbane was a nicer place, and as Leanne was from Brisbane, it didn't take us long to make our decision. I did have to do a couple of second-year maths units at the University of Queensland to be sure of being accepted for the Dip. Ed. there, and I did them externally in the second semester of 1985.

Brisbane

We moved to Brisbane in December 1985, lived with Leanne's parents in Wavell Heights while we looked for a place of our own, then rented a house in Tarragindi for the year.

I completed the Dip. Ed successfully with a GPA of 6.9, then was offered work at Marsden State High School, a new school in Logan. We bought a house in Edens Landing nearby for $58 000.

Edens Landing
Left: When we bought it
Right: After a bit of gardening

Teaching

After teaching at Marsden, I taught at a number of other state high schools, worked as a consultant helping schools to implement a new maths syllabus, wrote senior maths materials for Open Learning, worked on a new Queensland maths syllabus, worked as a classroom coach for maths teachers in the Bronx, New York, and taught at Canterbury College. Should you want any more detail, click the link below.

Teaching Career  

Children

During that time, Leanne and I also had three children: Kara in 1988, Melissa in 1990 and Jake in 1992. I had never really wanted kids. Leanne always wanted three. So we compromised and had three. I must admit I totally changed my mind when Kara was born, though. I thought she was wonderful, and she got better with age.

The years with young kids were very tight financially, mostly because of that disastrous house purchase in Maitland, and we didn't go anywhere much apart from summer holidays camping on the Sunshine Coast. Those were good holidays though.

But in 2000, my father died and left us some money. This gave us the chance in 2001 to take the family to England to meet their British relatives, the first time I'd been back in 19 years and the first time any of my family in Aus had met any of my family in England - apart from my mother who had come out to visit us a couple of times.

Our first ever get together.

We spent two weeks with my sister Jeanette and her family, as well as time with my brother John and his family. It was great to visit and about time too. We also went for a bit of a drive, along with my mum, around Western Europe and the UK in a hired people mover.

New York

The next year I got the job coaching maths (math) teachers in classrooms in middle-schools in the Bronx, and we spent the better part of a year in New York.

Family in New York

They paid me US$700 a day for what was fairly easy and enjoyable work. As the Aussie dollar was then around US$0.50, that meant that my pay in the US was four times what it had been at the time in Australia.

We bought round-the-world air tickets for all the family. They didn't cost much more than straight return tickets to New York, but they allowed us to have something like 15 stops on the way round. I went over in August, spending a couple of weeks in Bolivia and Chile on the way. The rest of the family came over in December (Melissa wanted to finish primary school before leaving), and had a few days in LA on the way, visiting all the theme parks etc.

We rented a house on Long Island and the kids all went to school there. The schools were fantastic and they loved the experience. What's more, they were all totally free. Jake even had a three-day excursion to Washington DC for which we had to pay nothing.

Mind you, the schools I worked at in the Bronx were a different story. I would never have sent our kids to any of them. Behaviour was dreadful and learning was minimal, even for the few kids who actually wanted to learn. There were police stationed in the schools all day every day. A lot of the kids didn't go to class, but hung out in the corridors and stair wells. I saw several fights every day.

One day I walked into a classroom at the start of the lesson to help the teacher. There was a fight going on at the back of the room. Actually, more a beating than a fight: a big girl (she was Year 7 but bigger than me) was laying into a boy half her size. The boy got away and ran to the front corner of the room where she cornered him and got stuck into him gain. Eventually, he got out the door and ran across the corridor into the room opposite. That happened to be the deputy principal's office. The girl didn't worry: she chased him into there and continued the beating. The deputy principal's reaction was to get up from her desk, push the two back out into the corridor and close her door. My work there did give me a renewed appreciation of education in Australia.

Part of the problem in New York was that education was funded by the local government, largely from people's rates. Long Island had plenty of money and could employ the best teachers and provide the best resources. Teacher pay in the Bronx was far lower and so schools there mostly got the teachers who couldn't get a job elsewhere. Their buildings and resources were also way inferior.

Leanne and the kids arrived just before Christmas and I had bought a Christmas tree and put up Christmas decorations. It rained Christmas morning. Then, while we were having Christmas lunch, the rain turned to small spheres of clear ice. Then that turned to snow. By evening we had had about 4 inches of snow. That was our family's only ever white Christmas. It was wonderful.

Left: Our back yard on Boxing Day         Centre: Our street       Right: Our snowman

On the way home the next June, with the benefit of our round-the world tickets, we spent time in the UK, Ireland, Egypt, Japan, the Philippines and Perth. Our tickets also included Russia and Hong Kong. But visas for Russia turned out to be very difficult to get and there was a bit of a SARS epidemic in Hong Kong at the time, so we skipped both.

Leanne didn't work while we were there, but, by the time we got back to Australia, we worked out that we were no worse off financially than if we'd not done the trip, but stayed in Aus with both of us working the whole time.

Growing Up

Leanne and I somewhat dreaded the teenage years with the kids, but all three remained quite human throughout and all have grown up into totally decent human beings. Our kids are our greatest achievement, though in a sense, it wasn't our achievement, but theirs.

Kara is now managing the administrative affairs of an IT company in London. She is married to Ben, whom she fancied from Year 8 at school onwards. Ben is a senior lecturer in cryptography at Kings College, London.

Melissa did a PhD in genetics (and unlike me, was successful), and later worked for 7 years in research at the University of Lund in Sweden. She is now back in Brisbane within easy reach of us, which is great. She is working on research grant applications with the University of Queensland.

Jake was dux at Canterbury College and has now worked for 12 years as a mechanical engineer for Woodside Petroleum in Western Australia, mainly in Perth. He is married to Veronica, who is a nurse, and they have two little girls, Alexis and Emma. Veronica is of Chinese extraction and the kids are that wonderful combination of European and Chinese looks.

Left: Kara and Ben
Centre: Melissa
Right: Jake and family

The kids are all doing great things, but, being so spread out now, we don't get together much. The last time we all were all in one place was in Sweden in 2019 for Leanne's 60th birthday and Melissa's 29th birthday.

Family together in Sweden

That was really good. As far as we know, though, that could be the last time it ever happens. But hopefully not.

It's ironic in a way that, after finishing uni, I, my parents' first child, abandoned my family in England and emigrated to Australia. Now, Kara, our first child, has abandoned us in Australia and emigrated to England. Poetic justice I guess. But, as I have a lot of family in England, we get over there quite often.

Houses

Despite the hardships that arose from our Maitland house purchase, in the 1990s we bought three other investment properties. This time around worked out much better. We got interest-only loans for more than we actually paid for the properties, then, with the rental income, negative gearing and various other tax concessions, our net outgoings for having the properties was actually slightly negative - we were slightly better off week to week than we would have been without them. (Banks were more forthcoming with big no-deposit loans in those days, though the interest rate was around 13%).

Then we sold them in 2003 (before the kids left home) for about twice what we paid for them. We paid off the mortgage on our own home and bought a couple of new cars. From then on, finances were a lot easier. After the kids left home, Leanne and I were able to indulge one of our greatest loves, travelling. (For more details click the Travels link here or on the home page.)

In 2000, we bought a couple of acres of land, built a shed on it, and we all lived in the shed while we got a house built. I've always loved the countryside/bush, and we live here to this day.

Our home since 2000

We do have thoughts, though, of spending a year or so in the UK in the near future, and maybe settling in Perth when we come back.

Now

For a septuagenarian, I'm still in quite reasonable condition. I keep myself active with a bit of relief teaching, quite a lot of playing in the mud (aka gardening) and other exercise like Zumba and aquarobics. Leanne hasn't been so lucky, though. Amongst other health issues, three years ago, she had major surgery for scoliosis and hasn't been the same since. Walking more than a few hundred metres gets very difficult and painful. But she still does aquarobics and struggles through a bit of Zumba. Her disability does have the small plus, though, that we can use better parking spots, and that we often get ushered straight to the front of queues.

We've also recently joined Probus clubs (social clubs for retirees), and I've given a few talks on astronomy at the clubs using the PowerPoints that I made at Canterbury and which are on my astronomy website.

Leanne and I have been together for nearly 43 years now - by far the major part of both of our lives. I haven't always been the easiest person to live with, but she stuck with me. If anything, I think our relationship is better now than it was at earlier times (though I'm not sure if she would agree, because I'm not good at communicating). Anyway, I'm probably enjoying life more now than I have at almost any time.

My memory isn't all it once was (and it was never that great anyway), but we're both still alive and hopefully will be for quite a while yet.

Leanne and me in Singapore, 2023

More to Come

I will add to this work if I think of anything else that might be worth including. Also, I'm not dead yet, so hopefully, a few more things worth writing about might still happen before I finally cark it. (For non-Aussie readers, that's Aussie for 'bite the dust'.)

Reflections

The link below is to a page that contains some reflections on my life - happiness, temperament and my views on free will and the eternal.

Reflections