大象传媒

My father was an officer in the Royal Air Force in Cairo, Egypt and my mother worked there in intelligence. They were married in Cairo in 1940 and I was born a year later in a hospital on Gaziera island in the river Nile. We were evacuated to Kenya in 1942 as Rommel's forces approached across the desert from the West; it was an uncomfortable journey by train that lasted several days.

We stayed in Kenya for about a year and then started the long six month journey by troopship back to the UK. We embarked in Mombassa and first sailed to South Africa, then on to Freetown in Sierra Leone before crossing the Atlantic to Montevideo in Uraguay. The ship crossed over the Plate River to Buenos Aires to load meat, but as Argentina was somewhat anti-British at that time, all the families disembarked and remained in Montevideo until the ship returned 2 weeks later.

We joined a convoy that was assembling in the Plate River to make the journey across the Atlantic with a Naval escort to protect us from German U-boats. When the convoy set off, our ship went aground on a sandbank, so we were left behind to fend for ourselves. After a day's delay to inspect the ship's hull when no damage was detected, we set off on our own to cross the Atlantic unescorted; first to Gibralter and then on to Liverpool. We later learnt that our convoy had been completely sunk by German U-boats, so our delay on the Plate River had saved us.

It was late 1942 when we arrived in the UK and we went to live in Torquay until the end of the war.

Both sides of my family had military backgrounds, my maternal grandfather was in the British Army in the Punjab where my mother was born in 1909; he died from his wounds in the first world war in Northern France. My mother's brother was in the London Scottish Regiment and was killed in action at Montecasino in Italy during the second world war, whilst my father's youngest brother was a pilot in the Fleet Air Arm and was killed testing an aircraft over the wash in 1943.

My whole life has seen me living in many parts of the world, starting with my father's posting to Singapore for 3 years in 1949.
I have lived and worked in the Netherlands, France, Belgium, Algerian Sahara, Nigeria and Patagonia in Argentina, but that's another story....

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