A Potted Personal History (1972-1980ish)

As these posts will be semi-autobiographical in format, perhaps a little background information on the author will help to give a more rounded appreciation of the subsequent posts. On the other hand, feel free to skip this bit and move on to more things ‘Who’, I’ll quite understand.

I was born at around 6pm on Tuesday 20th June 1972 (three days after episode 5 of The Time Monster had been first broadcast) at Queen Mary’s Hospital in Roehampton, a small suburb in south-west London. For the first ten or eleven years of my life, I lived nearby in Southfields with my parents and my sister, who is three and a half years older than I am. Southfields is about half a mile away from the All England Lawn Tennis Club at Wimbledon, and some of my most vivid childhood memories are from the nightmare two-week period around my birthday every year when the Wimbledon Championships took place, and a stiflingly hot Southfields was swamped with thousands of tourists, some of whom used to knock on our front door asking for accommodation! We lived in a three-bedroom maisonette which was partly provided for by the Metropolitan Police as my father was a constable within their ranks. My sister and I both attended a local primary school, where I started in September 1976. Incidentally, the photo below shows me on the balcony at our flat in Southfields holding one of the fab clock birthday cakes that my mum used to make me. She would always make the time on the clock face match whichever age I was celebrating, and as you can see its showing 5 o’clock so I assume this was taken on 20th June 1977 – my fifth birthday. However, there is an imprinted date on the back of the photo stating that it was developed in June 1978 which would mean it was in fact my sixth birthday. So, either the photo developer’s machine was on the blink or my mum made a horrendous cock-up that particular year! I also look forward to many a comment about my National Health glasses and eye patch…..

 My parents divorced in 1978 when I was six years old, and my mum subsequently had to juggle 3 jobs at the same time to provide for myself and my sister. She eventually trained and qualified as a nurse, a job which she still carries out to this day. My parents’ divorce meant that we had to move out of the police flat and live temporarily with my maternal grandparents, who lived about 10 minutes walk away. During this period, my sister and our grandparents looked after me out of school hours whilst our mum was at work, and we also had various Spanish au pairs along the way as extra help. I was very shy and introverted as a child; I’m not sure why this was, but the fact that my parents had divorced and my only sibling was a sister who was fairly confident and outgoing

probably had something to do with it. I had a couple of good friends during my time at primary school, but no other friends outside. I spent a lot of time with two of our cousins who are both boys, but I wasn’t really interested in their usual boyish pursuits of football or cricket, as my father – for the brief period that he was directly involved in my upbringing - had never encouraged me in that direction. From childhood to my early teens I spent most of my free time playing with Lego, apart from summer holidays which were spent either camping with my Italian grandparents in France or Italy, or with my other grandmother in the Cotswolds. Lego was a staple pastime of my childhood, and over the years I became quite talented at building a multitude of objects with it, everything from simple houses to mansions, ocean liners (including a beautifully detailed model of the Titanic), model towns and villages, model cars with working engines, working windmills – the list goes on and on. My only failure was building a submarine which wouldn’t go under water because of the air inside it acting as ballast. I therefore decided to put something heavy inside to make it sink, but unfortunately I decided to use my battery-driven Lego motor for the job. For some reason the motor never worked after that. I even joined the Lego club when I was about 8 years old, and I remember my grandfather taking me to a Lego exhibition at the then fairly new Milton Keynes shopping centre. It’s ironic that this particular location was chosen for such an exhibition, as it could easily be said that the whole of Milton Keynes was built out of funny little plastic bricks……

 Next episode: A Potted Personal History (1980-1985ish)