I played football for the school and took up tennis instead of cricket, although I continued to play the latter in the park on summer evenings. And I found myself shooting up from about five foot three to six feet tall. Suddenly I was gangly, and very self-conscious of it. Luckily, my mother told me to stop stooping and be proud of my height.
My first form master at the grammar school was Michael Wylie, known as ‘Bubble’ for his rounded features and frame, under whose care and guidance I soon began to excel in class, especially at English, Maths and Latin, and I was marked out as having university potential. I took part in a couple of ‘house’ plays but was never ambitious enough to go the whole hog and try for a part in the school’s annual Shakespearian production.
Meanwhile, my mother, who was a good dancer, persuaded me to enrol for ballroom dancing lessons at the Court School of Dancing. ‘You don’t want to be an eejit all your life, with two left feet,’ she said, and so, rather sulkily, off I went, to be clutched to the bosom of some old lady of about twenty-eight years of age as she tried to instil in me the basic moves of the quick step, the foxtrot and the waltz. I was much more interested in her bosom and found myself sexually aroused as she held me tightly. I think she was having some fun at my expense as she nodded and winked to her fellow instructress whenever I took to the floor with her. On Saturday nights there would be a free dance night when all the pupils and guests would turn up to show off their limited skills. It was full of pretty girls outnumbering the men and boys by about three to one. I had a whale of a time.
Back at school, my academic ambitions waned, and although I managed a good crop of exam results I could not envisage putting my parents through three extra years of struggle to keep me studying, and so I left without going on to university. My father, who might have been a doctor had he had the chance to further his schooling, had thoughts that I might be able to move in that direction; but having absolutely no ability whatsoever in science subjects, that hope went out of the window. I wanted to be a journalist, or, as I saw it, a newspaper man. We read the Daily Mirror at home and I was a big fan of their chief sportswriter, Peter Wilson, whom I got to know many years later. His by-line described him as ‘The Man They Can’t Gag’. I also avidly read William Connor, the columnist who wrote under the pseudonym of ‘Cassandra’, the prophetess of doom, and who extraordinarily lost a libel case to the American showman Liberace after describing him as effeminate. Try as I might, though, and I must have written scores of letters to various publications, I had no luck in that direction, and so I joined a bank. My headmaster, who was highly critical of my leaving school without going on to college, having been unable to persuade me to stay on, wrote a letter of introduction to a contact of his who was the general manager of the Bank of London and South America. I went off to Threadneedle Street in the City of London for an interview and was offered a job. It would entail six months’ training and I would then be posted to Buenos Aires. ‘We’ll never see you,’ said my mother on hearing about it. So I joined a bank a little closer to home, in Brighton. I hated every waking minute of it.
I had had a couple of dates with girls at this time. The thrill of simply holding hands in the cinema was almost overwhelming. I had got into a little trouble on one trip to Ireland when I had taken a beautiful local girl from Ennis to the pictures. Her name was Maura Gorman, and I had given her a kiss in the back row. I had been spotted and was marched off to see my Uncle Frank, who took me to one side: ‘We don’t do that sort of thing in public,’ he said. I was mortified, feeling that I’d let the family down. Mind you, Maura had enjoyed it as much as I had.
Then, back in Brighton, I had bumped into Susan, who with her blonde hair and good looks was making the social side of life very bearable indeed. Sue was still at the girls’ grammar school and looked good even in her navy blazer. Her parents were nice people but a bit suspicious of this boy from the council estate. Over the next ten years, they would get to know me pretty well.
After a couple of years in banking, and with Part 1 of the Institute of Bankers’ exams passed in double-quick time, I decided I couldn’t stand the job any longer and left. For a couple of months I worked as a trainee salesman, which involved me moving away from Brighton and staying in digs.
My landlady, some ten years my senior, took a liking to me and was quite keen to introduce me to the comforts of her bedroom. Had her husband, who was a man mountain, returned home from his job (which involved unsocial hours), I would not now be alive to write about it; but I managed to stay pure despite her constant provocation, which did occasionally lead to a bit of slap and tickle, but nothing more.
Both the landlady and the job were very temporary experiences and I soon returned to Brighton to seek further employment and begin doing a little freelance writing. This clearly would not pay many bills and so I took another temporary job driving a fish delivery van. That lasted a few weeks in the summer. It involved getting up at 5 a.m. to pick up the ‘locally caught’ produce (which had come down from Hull or Grimsby) at the railway station, take it to the shop for filleting, and then off to deliver it to the local hotels and other outlets. The head chef of one hotel would take the baskets of fish, returning them empty to me, save for the fillet steak and a mountain of groceries that I would then deliver to his girlfriend’s flat. There would be a steak in it for me as payment. This was plainly dishonest, but at the time I convinced myself that the chef was doing the stealing. I was merely the ‘mule’.
Soon I had to get a proper job again and found myself in the world of insurance, and started to climb the career ladder. It wasn’t very stimulating but it would give me some sort of future if that was the way my life was going to pan out.
Then I got married to Sue and off we went in her mother’s coffee-coloured Triumph Herald convertible to the Isle of Wight on honeymoon. We were young, I was 23, Sue not yet 22, but we had already known each other for five or six years.
Having enjoyed good health since my early brush with illness as a small boy, I was now to experience another nasty shock.
I had suffered a pretty severe headache one day while at the Farnborough Air Show and, like a fool, had taken a couple of aspirin washed down with a pint of lager. I felt decidedly unwell on the journey home and that night woke and was sick. Frighteningly, I was vomiting blood. Sue called the doctor, who inspected the residue of my insides and decided it was hospital for me.
On arriving at the Royal Sussex County Hospital, I was wheeled into the reception area, where I was asked for my date of birth, next of kin, etc. Then, the woman instructed the ambulance men: ‘He’s for death list.’ So that was it. Twenty-three years of age and it was all over. I hadn’t had a life. I had achieved nothing. I gripped Sue’s hand and a tear slid down my face. All I could think of to say to her was ‘sorry’.
And so I was taken to Defflis Ward, named after a former mayor of the town. Thankfully they eventually changed it; apparently I was not the only one who, over the years, thought they were on the way out instead of up to the third floor.
I was diagnosed with a slight scarring of the duodenum, an indication that I had had an ulcer at some time. But I soon recovered and was back on my feet, but banned from ever taking aspirin again.
It was the middle of the Sixties. I was in my early twenties with a wife, a mortgage and a career in insurance. I had passed the examinations of the professional body, which made up some way for my not going to university. I had reached the heady heights of inspector, the company had supplied me with