I want to tell you something about my life but without restricting myself to a timeline, I think a more topical approach is more appropriate.t

I was born in York on 29 December 1948, which makes me a Boomer, like most of my comrades on social media! I don’t object to the term “Boomer”, I object to the assumption that people of our generation are inherently conservative. We are not! Rationing was still in place although I was better off than most, if I had bread and dripping and a glass of water it was from choice not necessity!

I’m the firstborn of my generation on both sides of my family and, although I have numerous cousins on my mother’s sides, on my father’s side there’s only myself and myself and two sisters. Dad’s youngest sister is the last of his generation but she never married.

When Dad was a lad his family moved from Hartlepool to Selby where his father and elder brother were employed as shipwrights. Dad and I both worked there briefly in the office and it closed down shortly after Ken retired. He volunteered to join the Royal Navy in WWII but was told he was needed to build the ships rather than sail them.

Dad lied about his age to join the RAF but I don’t think the recruiting officers cared very much as he had been an air cadet at school. He spent some of his time in Canada on an officers training course and was commissioned after the war had ended and shortly after I was born. I know this because my original birth certificate has his rank as Flt.Sgt. but my earliest memories of him were as a Pilot Officer and he had risen to the rank of Flt.Lt. when he died on active service when I was aged 9 (possibly as a result of sabotage of the aircraft he was flying).

Dad was my hero and I still recall sitting around in my grandparent’s house on Christmas Day when an RAF cap flew over my head. You should have seen how I shot out of my chair to give him a hug. It took me several years to accept he wasn’t coming back to rescue me from an intolerable situation when my mother hooked up with another man who was already married. Dad’s plane crashed in North Africa and he’s buried there, so I couldn’t achieve closure by visiting his grave.

I joined the Royal Observer Corps while I was still at school but found myself learning how to monitor fallout from a nuclear attack rather than identifying enemy aircraft.

I knew when I left school that I wouldn’t qualify as aircrew because of shortsightedness. If couldn’t be a pilot I wanted to be a photographer but was disqualified for the same reason.

I enjoy cooking and heard that the best place to train as a chef was the Royal Navy, so I applied. After two visits to Newcastle on Tyne for a medical examination I was rejected because I was continuing treatment for a congenital condition (although I wasn’t actually ill). I was subsequently rejected by the RAF and Army for the same reason. An application for a civilian job with the Army was denied because I had been fired from a previous civil service job.

The Merchant Navy was only recruiting 16-17 old youths at that time and I was 6 months to old, Selby was still an inland port at that time and my mother knew a skipper who would take me on as a deckhand for one voyage across the North Sea which would qualify me as a seaman.

There was however another way of entry into the merchant marine, that’s by two years experience in the hospitality industry, and that was the route I chose by serving two seasons as kitchen porter in Cornwall.

This was seasonal work and, after my second season I returned to a job in the sugar factory where I had previously worked for two years. This was also seasonal and they wouldn’t keep me on at the end of the season as the factory was closing down after one more season so there was less maintenance to be done. Faced with 3 months unemployment before the holiday season started, with no assurance I would have a job at the end of it, I applied for a job as a tram conductor in Melbourne, Australia.

I was 22 when I started my last job before emigrating, I was night porter at the Raven Hall Hotel at Ravenscar near Robin Hoods Bay. The season ended just a week before the scheduled date of my departure to a new world, just enough to get my affairs in order and bid goodbye to family and friends that I wouldn’t see for another 20 years.

After a week of training on the trams I started work on 7th November 1972. The next day was Melbourne Cup Day, a public holiday in Victoria, and I spent the day hanging around the depot on 3x pay as a spare conductor in case anyone didn’t turn up. Can you imagine that happening now? I remember a train crew having to be brought from Hull to York by taxi because the train wasn’t going to Hull without them. A taxi driver who was contracted to provide a replacement service to get me to my destination explained that the it was cheaper than paying fines and paying compensation. I’ve blogged about this previously. Public Transport https://thephilosophicalmuse.blog/2023/03/16/public-transport/

After drifting from one job to another I applied to join the RAAF because I wanted to a job, I didn’t follow through with my application as I found one elsewhere. My youthful enthusiasm for warfare had dissipated as I was confronted with the reality of the war in Vietnam. It wasn’t something I knew about in the UK, but if I had emigrated a few years earlier I would have been liable for conscription when I turned 21.

Dad was flying a V-bomber when he died, our nuclear deterrent at that time. Would he have dropped the bomb if he’ld been ordered to do so? I don’t know, perhaps in some future life I might get to ask him.