Remember the days of the old schoolyard : 1963-1969 : Cordwalles Junior School, Camberley

 “I don’t wanna go,” I was shouting as I struggled to hang on to the car door for dear life. I was being kidnapped and forced into a vehicle outside my home that was wanting to carry me away … to my first day at infant school. My mother was trying her gentlest to push inside the family car her five-year-old son who was usually well behaved and never angry or upset. Passers-by on their way to work in town were gazing. Passengers were pointedly staring out of a passing double-decker bus. What was wrong with that belligerent child? My mother was equally horrified to witness my first tantrum.

I enjoyed being at home. I had plenty of activities to occupy myself there. I never found myself at a loose end. My parents had a remarkably hands-off attitude to my upbringing, letting me put on records, listen to the radio, watch television or play in the back garden whenever I wanted. There was no regime to follow. I was perfectly content organising my own life and did not require a school to instruct me what I should do and when. During the past year, my mother had been sending me to Mrs Potten’s ‘Gay Tree’ nursery school on Grand Avenue in order to mix with other children because I was an only child. I had found most of my peers there to be noisy and bossy, whereas I was quiet and calm. To seek acceptance, I must have adopted their rather posh accents, committed to immortality when my father recorded me on his Uher reel-to-reel tape machine reciting the two ‘Winnie-the-Pooh’ books that I knew by heart.

My mother already harboured an aspiration for me to marry ‘above my station’. Whenever we walked into the town centre, on passing Bath Road, she would suggest I call on ‘Wooty’ who lived at the far end of that cul-de-sac in a large house backing onto the grounds of Sandhurst Royal Military Academy. I had met Alexandra Wooten at nursery school but had not developed a particularly close friendship with her, preferring the company of more down-to-earth Liam who lived only four doors away from our home … until his Irish parents moved away to Blackwater. Despite my mother’s persistence, I may have only visited Alexandra’s house once to ‘play’ because, unsurprisingly, I found we had no common interests.

My reluctance to attend primary school was due to anticipation that a new set of peers would be similar to Mrs Potten’s charges, the only children of my age I had so far encountered. I was mistaken! My fee-paying, town centre nursery school had been dominated by the offspring of Camberley’s middle class, whereas my state primary school was located on the peripheral council estate where I had been born, built to rehouse South Londoners whose homes had been destroyed by bombing during the War and subsequent slum clearance. Patronisingly, the council had named the estate’s streets ‘Kingston Road’, ‘Mitcham Road’, ‘Surbiton Road’, ‘Wimbledon Road’ and ‘Carshalton Road’, as if newcomers would feel more at home by eulogising their former hometowns some twenty miles away. Naturally, none of those roads led to the places after which they had been named.

I quickly discovered how wrong my expectations about school had been. My new classmates seemed perfectly normal. Unlike Mrs Potten, teachers did not require us to dress up in costumes and repeat archaic speeches for Biblical reenactments, or to watch violent ‘Punch & Judy’ puppet shows. Instead, we were given interesting creative activities to do and treated with respect and encouragement. Teachers addressed us by our first names. I loved school. I quickly retired my quasi-posh accent. I had already mastered the reading and writing skills with which some of my peers were struggling and was now teaching myself to type. One day at home, my mother had asked me to put away her electric iron and, without realising it was still plugged in, I picked it up by its plate and screamed, burning my right hand. She had to bandage my thumb and index finger for a while, so I continued to learn to type at home using my middle finger … the way I type to this day. I had wondered if my erased fingerprints would ever return, but they did eventually.

After two years, we all moved to the adjoining primary school where teaching was more structured. I attended my first morning assembly in the main hall but was baffled when the principal instructed us to recite something called the ‘Lord’s Prayer’. Everyone around me bowed their heads and recited a kind of mantra I had never heard. It felt unnervingly as if I had mistakenly been invited into some kind of cult in which all the teachers and children had already been indoctrinated … except me. I had no understanding of what was going on around me, more so because next we were told to sing strange songs from a thick book of incomprehensible ancient lyrics I had never heard played on the radio. It was impossible to sing when you had no idea what the tune should be.

Afterwards, having observed my bafflement, a teacher asked why I had not participated in the religious part of our school assembly. She seemed shocked that I had never heard of ‘hymns’ or ‘prayers’, asking whether my family was ‘Christian’. I had no idea what that word meant, so I returned home and asked my mother, who replied that we were not religious. She wrote a brief note to my teacher explaining that simple fact and, thereafter, I was excused from the section of daily assembly devoted to hymns and the like. Every day for the next four years, I would sit in a nearby small side-room alongside several children including classmate Jacqueline Dixon, a Hindu who initially asked me what was my religion. I had to tell her and the other non-Christians sequestered there that I did not seem to have one. I was an oddity.

Although my aunt Sheila worked as a ‘dinner lady’ at the school, I always returned home to take lunch. I would stand alone at the bus stop at the top end of Upper College Road, staring across at the modernist St Martin’s church on the opposite side of the roundabout, puzzled as to what might go on inside. I had heard classmates talk about attending something called ‘Sunday School’ there, next door to the home of classmate Annette van Hartaan Veldt. This church must have been where almost everyone else at school had been indoctrinated into their cult. It seemed to take an age until Aldershot & District Traction Company Limited’s number 1, 2 or 3C bus arrived to carry me one mile home for a halfpenny fare. (Once I had grown to be amongst the tallest in my class, the bus conductor insisted I pay the adult one penny fare despite me still being a child.) Arrived home, I would have just enough time to snack something and then catch the bus back for afternoon classes.

After school finished at four, if it was not raining, I could save the bus fare by walking home alone the length of Upper College Ride. This downhill route passed through a 400-yard stretch of Ministry of Defence woodland, a natural barrier intended to isolate the council estate from private housing around the town centre. It was always a lonely journey bereft of fellow pedestrians and scary on dark winter afternoons, me worrying an escapee from Broadmoor might jump out from behind a tree. The money saved I would blow in the sweet shop near my school on ‘Batman’ bubble gum packets, ‘Flying Saucers’, ‘Swizzels Love Hearts’, ‘Lemon Sherberts’ or a ‘Lucky Bag’. I was obsessed with the ‘Batman’ TV show and, as well as requesting my mother fabricate the superhero’s ‘utility belt’ for me to wear, I saved enough sweet wrappers to send for a ‘Batman’ poster that would grace my bedroom wall.

My favourite school activities were summer days when the teacher would take our class outside, thirty of us sat cross-legged in the shade of a huge tree behind the main building, writing essays in exercise books balanced on our laps. Those remain some of the happiest days of my life, before homework and exams impinged on my childhood, and before my parents sent me to a faraway school stuffed with posh boys and requiring a bottle-green uniform.

My least favourite school activity was ‘swimming’ in the newly constructed, unheated rectangular above-ground pool on the playing field. Alongside were two tiny windowless wooden huts in which girls and boys were shepherded separately to change into their costumes, and where I hated my mates spying me naked. I was so rake-thin that the bottom of my rib cage protruded, making me imagine I had some kind of physical deformity not evident in my schoolmates. My acute embarrassment destroyed any enjoyment and inhibited my capacity to learn to swim … which sadly I never overcame.

In my final year at Cordwalles, teacher Mr Hales encouraged us to open savings accounts with Trustee Savings Bank [TSB]. Once a week after class registration, he would ask if we had coins to deposit, record their value in our individual bank books and update our balances. It was a great way to make us understand the value of money, particularly as the monetary system was about to convert to ‘new pence’ from shillings. Would a school today actively encourage ten-year-olds to manage their first bank accounts in class?

I made some really good friends – including Paul Rowell, Michael Heinrich and Martin Bell – who would invite me to their houses on the estate after school. I was surrounded by peers of both sexes, of various religions and diverse races. I feel very lucky to have been educated in such a safe, sympathetic and uncompetitive environment, full of stimulation and encouragement that immensely shaped my attitudes and life thereafter. Unfortunately, it made my subsequent education and career make me feel all the more like a fish out of water, forced to navigate pathways amongst privileged, entitled people who seemed to have had very different childhoods that had fostered their cold, cutthroat, self-centred outlook on life.

I was sad to leave my primary school in 1969, after which I no longer saw the classmates with whom I had spent the previous six years. My parents failed to appreciate that their decision to continue my education at a distant school tore me away from roots I had forged on Old Dean Estate and isolated my social life by forcing me to travel daily to the other end of the county. At Cordwalles, I had felt like a normal boy living a normal life. I was never again made to feel that I fitted in so comfortably.

Postscript. The first time I went to church was in 1967 to accompany my mother to the final service of St George’s, built by the local Middleton family in the 1890’s on St George’s Road at Knoll Road, prior to its demolition to create a car park adjacent to Herman Solomon’s Garage. Despite never having known my mother attend any church, she was annoyed that our nearest one had been sold off as part of Camberley town centre’s modernisation. 

More than two decades later, having recalled that I had once opened a savings account at school, I walked into the TSB Camberley branch in London Road and asked if I could withdraw the balance. It took several weeks for the staff to locate my details and obligingly add years of interest to my balance before I could withdraw a small sum that I had almost forgotten I had.

Virtual Tour of Cordwalles Classrooms

[Originally published at https://peoplelikeyoudontworkinradio.blogspot.com/2023/12/remember-days-of-old-schoolyard-1963.html]

If you can’t stand accounts, get out of the kitchen : 1966 : Whites of Camberley payroll & the pink fridge

 “Grant, why haven’t you written anything? What did you do yesterday evening?”

Our teacher had walked along the row of desks in the classroom and noticed that I had yet to start writing. I had been staring at a blank page in my exercise book, trying to imagine a way to pen two sentences and crayon an accompanying picture. I had to draw a deep breath to explain:

“Yesterday I helped my mum in our kitchen, calculating the Income Tax and National Insurance on an adding machine for the fifty people where she works, updating their record cards for Inland Revenue and then writing those amounts on their pay packets.”

The teacher looked thoughtful for a while. What on earth was this eight-year-old boy talking about? He had a wild imagination! After some reflection, she said:

“Just write that you went out to play with your friends and draw a picture of them.”

I did not relish the idea of lying but, if even my teacher could not find a way to summarise what I had really been doing the previous evening, I would follow her suggestion. This was the first (and last) occasion I tried to explain to anyone the work I did once a week with my mother in our home kitchen. Classmates remained oblivious to the range of administrative duties I performed regularly for my mother’s employer and my father’s business. While they were playing with their Sindy or Action Man dolls, I was busy reconciling accounting entries in a financial ledger.

The kitchen was a rear extension to our suburban, two-up two-down, semi-detached house. Downstairs had been transformed into one massive room since my father had removed the dividing wall. From the front of the house, you could now look through the window and see straight through to the rear garden. Visitors would gasp and enquire why the ceiling had not fallen down as ‘knock-throughs’ were unheard of in the early 1960’s. I remember the dust clouds when builders installed an iron girder in the ceiling to replace the wall they had just demolished.

The kitchen had once been of adequate size but now was somewhat cramped following the arrival of our latest ‘mod con’ – a fridge. Before then, milk bottles had been stored precariously on the rear window’s outdoor sill. Two years earlier, my father had been intrigued by a private ‘for sale’ advertisement in his favourite journal ‘Exchange & Mart’ (think ‘eBay’ on paper) and had arranged a viewing. We drove miles to locate the U.S. Air Force base and suddenly entered a parallel, colourful 3D world only previously viewed in 405-line, black and white location shots of ‘I Dream of Jeannie’ and ‘Bewitched’. It was a miniature slice of modern-day America incongruously tucked into a hidden, rural corner of bleak, post-war Britain.

My father had to switch to the right side of the road to drive our pink and white ‘Rambler Classic 770’ station wagon along the base’s wide roads lined with identical, single-story chalets built on spacious plots around which was a complete absence of fences. This was the North America to which my parents had long dreamed of emigrating and why they had embraced all things American since the 1950’s, including their children’s names, the oversized American Motors cars they drove, the pop music they loved and their ‘Life’ magazine subscription. Three decades later, when I glimpsed the neighbourhood in ‘Edward Scissorhands’, I was transported back to my first childhood impression of American suburbia on that day.

We located the house of the lovely American couple selling the fridge who explained they were about to be posted ‘back home’ at the conclusion of their tour of duty and were selling their household contents. The fridge was a huge American ‘Kelvinator’ and, to our amazement, was bright ‘Bermuda Pink’. It had a huge horizontal chrome door handle, a foot pedal to open the door if your hands were full and a freezer compartment which I was already scheming to fill with ‘Zoom’, ‘Fab’ and ‘Funny Faces’ ice lollies or blocks of ‘Neapolitan’ ice cream, on sale in the corner shop yards from our home. Smitten, my parents needed no convincing to purchase the fridge with cash they had brought.

The Americans asked if my parents wanted a foot-high stack of DC Comics which they were happy to throw in for free. Although the fridge would not fit in our car, we could take the comics home with us. Before we left the base, we popped into its ‘grocery store’ which was filled with American brands of cookie, breakfast cereal and sweets that, until then, we had only seen in American magazine advertisements. Having spent ages selecting a variety of items, we were disappointed at the checkout to be told that the shop only accepted American dollars or credit cards, neither of which my parents possessed. We would just have to wait a little longer to sample such delights once our emigration had been realised.

A fortnight later, a truck delivered the fridge to our home. However, because everything in America was genuinely ‘bigger and better’, it was found to be too wide to fit through the house’s backdoor. My parents’ unbridled enthusiasm had overshadowed the practicality of measuring their purchase, as the fridge had appeared perfectly scaled inside the American-style kitchen we had visited on the base. Now it had to remain outside unused (houses had no outdoor power points) for more weeks until a solution was executed. The old sash window at the back of our living room had to be replaced with a modern double-glazed version and, during this building work, the wall below it would be unbricked to carry in the oversized fridge and then replaced (floor-length ‘French windows’ were unknown then).

This operation successfully moved the fridge into the living room but, once again, my parents had failed to measure the internal doorway to the kitchen extension. It was too narrow. The door was removed from its hinges. It still did not fit. The door frame had to be removed. Only then, accompanied by my father’s considerable vocabulary of swear words, did the fridge just fit with tenths of an inch to spare. Finally, the object was inside the kitchen. Our home now had not only an enlarged living room but also a door-free walk-in kitchen, both of which were unusual. It may have contravened building safety regulations but it had accidentally created a large, unified downstairs space which we loved. There still remained one problem. The fridge operated on America’s 110-volt system so a large transformer box had to be found and bought before it would function.

We now had a huge fridge but a considerably smaller kitchen space. This is where, once a week, my mother would bring her adding machine home from work and all the paperwork necessary to calculate and record the wages to be paid to the staff of Whites (Camberley) Limited where she worked as bookkeeper. Founded by Percy White in 1908 and now managed by his son Peter, the family business had diversified from bicycles into car sales and repairs, a service station and coach hire from its plum town centre location at the corner of London Road and Knoll Road.

At the beginning of each tax year and after a government budget announcement, telephone-directory-like books were mailed to every employer in the country, filled with tables to calculate how much Income Tax and National Insurance contributions were to be deducted from pay, according to the worker’s tax code and whether they were paid weekly or monthly. The skill I perfected was in looking up the appropriate amounts for each member of staff every week, entering these figures on the employee’s blue card and then writing these amounts on small brown ‘wage packet’ envelopes. My mother took these to work the following day and counted out cash from the company safe to insert in each. I always wondered if Whites’ staff ever wondered why their pay details appeared in an eight-year old’s handwriting.

I learnt to be nimble on the adding machine, keying in amounts that my mother would read out, producing totals that could be torn off from a roll of paper. At the end of each ‘tax year’ in April were additional tasks of totalling up each employee’s contribution card, reconciling these amounts with the ledger entries and sending all the cards to Inland Revenue. We also had to handwrite P60 end-of-year certificates for each employee and, if a worker left their job during the year, we had to write out a P45 form in triplicate. Only a small table would now fit in the kitchen so we had to cram the ledger, adding machine and documents there, plus lay paperwork out on the worktop area and even on top of the fridge. As no homework was set by my school, these evenings proved no distraction from my education. Instead, I became an expert in double-entry bookkeeping and the intricacies of the British taxation system at an early age.

I adored the DC comics that had accompanied our pink fridge and handled them with the utmost care, keeping them in pristine condition under my bed. They were as yet not on sale in Britain, so I was looking forward to buying more once we emigrated. However, for reasons never understood, my parents decided to give up their long-held plan to move to Canada and instead they bought a plot of land locally to build their own house. Although their obsession with Americana remained unabated, it was tinged with the sadness of a shared dream that had failed to materialise. Within a few years, their marriage disintegrated and our family broke up for good. My mother cancelled her decade-long subscription to ‘Life’ magazine. After the 1973 oil crisis, American cars became too expensive to run, particularly when she was now a single parent.

When we moved out of our house in 1968, we sadly left the pink fridge behind. I always wondered what transpired as the new owners would have had to knock a hole in an external wall to remove it from the house if they no longer wanted it. That huge pink fridge was as indestructible as Captain Scarlet!

Two decades later, I returned home to retrieve my treasured DC comic collection, only to discover that my younger brother had crayoned all over them and torn out pages while I had been away. Our 1960’s dreams had all turned to dust.

[Originally published at https://peoplelikeyoudontworkinradio.blogspot.com/2023/10/if-you-cant-stand-accounts-get-out-of.html]

Blinded by the light : 1967 : Architectural Drawing Services, 27b High Street, Camberley

 It was a mystery. Questions were asked. Answers were not forthcoming. Nobody could understand what had happened. Evidently something must have occurred. But what? And how? The professionals were stumped. I could not help. I had no answers either. Had I been in an accident? No. Had I hit my head? No. Had my face been hurt? No. I remained as baffled as were they. I had no answers. The whole thing was to remain a complete mystery … for decades.

Once a year, we were told to stand in line in the corridor in our underwear. Boys in the morning, girls in the afternoon. I hated standing around near-naked in public. One by one we were ushered into an office where a nurse rushed through an eye test, a hearing test and pinged our underpants’ elastic for a gender check. It was the result of my eye test that held up the ‘production line’ for processing my classmates. The record card had logged my vision as 20/20 one year ago. How come, now, I was so short-sighted that I could read no further than the second line on the eye chart? It was a complete mystery.

Children tend to join a ‘family business’ once they have finished their education. I was put to work by my father before I started school. Once I could walk, I accompanied him on appointments to measure houses, shops, offices and factories where I held the end of a long tape measure marked in feet-and-inches, wound out from a brown holder the size and shape of a discus. Once I could read, I ensured copies of design periodicals including ‘Architects Journal’ were returned to his office shelves in strict chronological order. Once I could write, I used Letraset sheets to transfer stylised, appropriately scaled men or women pushing pushchairs onto his ‘artist’s impression’ building elevation plans. Such was the volume of graphics and lettering I used that the well-thumbed, thick, ring-bound Letraset catalogue became the closest we had to a Bible in our house.

My father’s office was a Portacabin behind the garage in our back garden. As our house was only 300 yards from the town centre, clients could visit him easily. However, my parents were about to move to a house they had been building two miles on the opposite side of town that was reached by an unmade road. It would prove useless for a business. The solution was the rental of a town centre office at 27b High Street on a busy pedestrian alleyway connecting to the Knoll Road public car parks. It had three rooms: a small lobby, a main room large enough for two drawing boards and a desk with an electric typewriter, plus a smaller back room. My father registered a company named ‘Architectural Drawing Services’ and ordered letterheads, invoices, statements and business cards with an olive-green border from Southwell Press in Park Street.

The office windows faced the wall of the Midland Bank building on the other side of the alley. My mother had applied to work there in the early 1950’s, desiring a job closer to home than the administrative role at Elizabeth Shaw’s chocolate factory she had taken after leaving the grammar school on Frimley Road. Thrilled to learn that her application had been successful, she was disappointed to be told she could not work there because no women’s toilet existed in the building where only men were employed. Instead, she was offered the same job at the Midland branch in Farnborough where she could use the female public toilet in the newly built Queensmead shopping plaza … which she accepted and had to commute.

In my father’s new office, I was given three additional tasks. At the end of each month, I typed the invoices, statements and their envelopes. If clients’ payments were overdue, I had a box of green, yellow and red warning stickers I would lick and attach to their statements, printed with progressively strident threats. I handwrote details of each invoice into a large accounting ledger, the opposite page of which my mother updated with bill payments she had made.

Secondly, once school finished at four o’clock, I would pay a halfpenny to catch the number 1 or 2 or 3C bus to the town centre and wait in my father’s office until he was ready to drive us home for ‘tea’ at our new house. He would regularly ‘pop out’ and leave me alone in order to (I learned much later from my mother) spend an hour or so with his current mistress. Clients and potential clients visiting the office late afternoon might find it manned only by a polite nine-year old boy, banging out documents on an IBM Selectric typewriter he had mastered years earlier. It must have seemed bizarre.

Things could have been worse. If I had been born a hundred years earlier, I might have been sent up chimneys as I was appropriately thin and tall (only Pamela Munroe and Marina Hirons were taller in my class of thirty). As it was, I was made familiar with most aspects of running a small business by the time I finished primary school. These were skills that schools (and even university) failed to consider worthwhile imparting, and why girls like my mother had to be sent subsequently to ‘secretarial school’ to learn the practical aspects of commerce about which their male bosses would never need to worry their unpretty big heads.

My third task was to work in the rear office that was off-limit to clients, kept darkened by a venetian blind across its window and contained two printing machines. One was an absolutely massive dyeline printer that used ammonia solution and photosensitive paper to reproduce paper copies of 36- by 48-inch architectural plans drawn onto tracing paper. There was no ventilation from the room as the door to the main office had to be kept shut to keep out the light, as did the one window to prevent a breeze blowing the blind. The second machine was a Rank Xerox monochrome photocopier that used ultraviolet light to print onto photosensitive A4 paper.

During term time, I would regularly do small copying jobs for my father after school on both machines. I hated the smell of the ammonia, the heat generated by the machines and the bright light emitted by the photocopier. During this era, such machines were uncommon outside cities and my father soon realised he could subsidise their cost by offering copying services to non-clients. He was approached by the Associated Examining Board [AEB], the only GCE examination board not linked to a university, which had moved from London to nearby Aldershot in 1966 and was seeking a business to contract for photocopying services. It would mean taking on a lot of seasonal work but the returns would prove significant. The deal was done.

Schools in the UK and former colonies took GCE exams every June, sent them directly to the persons appointed to mark them, who then sent them to AEB. A percentage of papers for each subject were then forwarded by AEB to a different academic whose job was to check that the initial marking was appropriate and consistent. They were sent a photocopy of the student’s marked work to ensure the original would not be lost. Turnaround time for these tasks was critical as exam boards notified students of their results in August before the new school year started the following month.

My mother was occupied at home caring for my younger preschool brother so it fell upon me to fulfil this contract. Most of my school summer holiday had to be spent in the darkened back room of my father’s office, photocopying thousands of examination scripts for days on end. It was hot work and the ultraviolet light flashed around the edges of the document plateau thousands of times. AEB were pleased with the results and renewed the contract to execute the same work for their less busy December exam retakes. Bang went my Christmas holidays too!

The outcome, which everyone had apparently failed to anticipate, was my mother taking me to Leightons opticians at the top of the High Street to purchase my first pair of NHS glasses with thick lenses in tortoiseshell frames. I refused to wear them at school, not because I feared being bullied (something never witnessed at Cordwalles Junior School) but because it was so rare then for children of my age to wear glasses. My stubbornness perplexed teacher Mr Hales who struggled to comprehend why I could no longer copy down things he wrote on the blackboard. Had one of 4H’s brightest students suddenly become illiterate?

Subsequent eye tests proved just as baffling to opticians who could not understand why my eyesight had deteriorated so suddenly during one year, but then remained static for years afterwards. It confounded me too for a long time until I finally understood the havoc wreaked on eyesight by lengthy unfiltered exposure to UV light. The only positive side effect was that, in every workplace I have since worked, I have been the one person in the office who can be relied upon to fix a malfunctioning photocopier!

Once I progressed to secondary school in 1969, I became too busy completing mountains of homework to continue the monthly office tasks. Besides, my father was about to upgrade my ‘help’ to evaluating the potential profitability of local property deals for a considerably more lucrative sideline he had discovered. I also suspect he preferred I spend less time at his office because, the older I was, the more difficult it became for him to disguise his dalliances with women.

In 1972, my father left our family forever to run off with recent teenage bride Suzie Anthony who lived a few doors away. The courts ordered him to pay the mortgage on our house and maintenance to my mother and her three children. He avoided payment, claiming he was unemployed despite living in salubrious, gated St Georges Hill, Weybridge. He broke into our house while we were out and stole almost everything he had ever provided for us, including some of my treasured vinyl records purchased with pocket money. My mother had to take both a day job and an evening cleaning job to try and make ends meet.

On my sixteenth birthday in 1974, my father applied to Farnham court to reduce my maintenance payment to £1 per year, arguing that I was now old enough to take a job. The court agreed, despite him already owing thousands in arrears and me about to take eight O-level exams and hoping to continue my education with A-levels and university. I received a letter from the court informing me of its decision at a hearing of which neither I nor my mother had prior knowledge. When the amount owing mounted even further, he fled abroad. Farnham court said it was our responsibility to trace his whereabouts.

In 1976, entirely coincidentally, my first paying job was processing examination papers at AEB in Aldershot. Almost a decade had passed since I had similarly handled thousands of students’ handwritten GCE scripts from all over the world in my father’s office. It was difficult not to believe in some kind of ‘fate’.

My father died in 2013 though I was not invited to his funeral. A handwritten will bequeathed the majority of his assets to my younger brother whose contribution to my father’s business in Camberley had been … zero.

[Originally published at https://peoplelikeyoudontworkinradio.blogspot.com/2023/07/blinded-by-light-1967-architectural.html]