About the Author and Book
Most people have lives of some, or great, interest, though it is often not realized that that is the case until a large portion of has passed by and ‘thoughts recollected in tranquility’ foster the realization that one’s life is only a brief moment of time that all too easily slips into the abyss of forgotten history. Such was the case with my recollection of my parents’ history, for they grew up during one of the most cataclysmic of times, both being born in 1913 and being in the “prime of their lives” during the World War ll, near the end of which I was born (and about which I have often wondered when they knew, or whether it occurred to them, that the Allies were definitely to prevail and that the time had come to pass on their genes).
 
During that War the family home was in the general area of Woolwich and Foots Cray, prime areas for bombing during the prolonged Blitz: they were boroughs adjacent to the London Royal Docks, munitions factories, and the River Thames, by whose reflection bombers could see their way to the prime targets of Westminster, St Paul’s Cathedral and Buckingham Palace. My father’s sight was poor, and for that reason he was enlisted as a fireman, and my mother became an ambulance driver. Twice their home was destroyed by bombs, once our collective lives being saved by a Morrison Shelter, a steel construction that served both as a shelter in case of the collapse of one’s house and as a dining table.
 
These things I know because the incident of my being bundled under the table and the side ‘cages’ being lowered just in time as my father heard the V1 coming and knew that it was for us. This was the stuff of frequently-recited family legend … but very little else was. When she died in 2005, my mother was starting to write some recollections of a life that started ten years after the Wright Brothers first flew and ended two years after the Concorde was to fly for the last time. Nothing else was saved from two long lives: a few photographs survived, occasional memories periodically surface, and no letters remain, despite what I venture to say are thousands written.
 
With time and great good fortune having provided to us five vigorous grand-children, I was bought to task one day when my daughter-in-law found my personal tale sorely lacking in specificity, what I had done when and where being almost entirely unrecorded. Fortunately, this was not quite the case, I having gone away to sea when eighteen years old and at that time been given a five-year diary by a kindly family friend. I was far from diligent in keeping this up, there being gaps, sometimes months long. But in retracing these times with that template, a great deal of detail came back to me that I had thought forgotten but could now recollect with sometimes remarkable, though perhaps not always entirely accurate, clarity.
 
Maturity is not only what I hope that I attained, but some of what the nautical, political and intellectual worlds gained during this so-brief moment in history. In this respect, what follows is not my story but part of a huge fabric but one corner of which I was privileged to witness.