I was born in Attercliffe, a once teeming mini-city within the great industrial city of Sheffield. I was born at home, in a house alongside the River Don. My mother tells me that it was a difficult delivery, but she nevertheless endured childbirth on four more occasions. I am one of a minute proportion (reputedly less than one percent) of adults able to recall events from before the age of two. At the time of my birth we lived in a single room next to Newhall Bridge in Attercliffe, but when a second child, a brother, arrived we moved around the corner into two rooms in a small house in Swallow Street. I was just eighteen months old when the move happened, but I can recall living there, and I remember standing at the front door with my mother and another woman, when I was frightened out of my wits by a massive steamroller rolling the road outside. I can also recall grazing my knees when falling off an old wheeled tin horse that I had been given. I screamed at the sight of the horse after that, and I retain an exceptionally vivid memory of my uncle, in an attempt to pacify me, throwing the horse into the River Don just along the road from where we lived.’
When I was barely two years old I contracted TB, and we were forced to move from Attercliffe, in the industrial east-end of Sheffield, to live in an almost derelict cottage named ‘Woodview Cottage’ on the northern slopes of Wincobank Hill in Shiregreen. When the cottage was later condemned as unfit for habitation we were re-housed in a three bedroom house near Handsworth in the south of the city, where I spent the rest of a reasonably happy childhood with my brother and two sisters (a second brother arrived when I was twenty years old).
I attended Stradbroke Infant & Junior School, and despite being the youngest in a class of high achievers I passed the eleven-plus examination, and should have progressed to a grammar school. But Sheffield had just introduced the comprehensive system, and my designated school was integrated into the huge, twelve hundred pupil Hinde House Comprehensive School, where I spent a very happy two years. I was a good student, particularly at Art, History and Geography, but my real love was for English, and I excelled in the subject.
However, I already possessed the strongly developed characteristic of never being satisfied with my lot. I decided that I had been short-changed in being denied a place at grammar school and so made what turned out to be the disastrous decision to move to Sheffield’s Central Technical School. Despite CTS having an excellent academic reputation, I hated the place. I left at the age of fifteen before taking any examinations. Despite being inclined towards the arts, and having virtually no ability in maths or the sciences I became an apprentice mechanical services engineer. I always sensed that I didn’t really fit the mould of an engineer, but I stuck at it and was fortunate to meet and receive valuable guidance from many of the older engineers, some of whom had a significant long-term influence upon me. I also made some exceptionally good friends.
Characteristically, wanderlust took hold on my twentieth birthday when my apprenticeship came to an end and I was free to work elsewhere. Several friends had decided to do the same and we all went to live on the island of Jersey in the Channel Islands. We all worked as farm labourers, intending to earn enough money to travel to Australia, which several of my friends succeeded in doing. But I liked Jersey, and stayed there for three years, meeting my first wife there. After leaving the island I worked for several years at the British Steel Corporation in Sheffield, before going to work overseas; spending seven years in Saudi Arabia, followed by spells in California, Malaysia, and Bangladesh. My time in the desert provided much spare time with little to do, where I began to do an enormous amount of reading and also began to write.
I eventually returned to England, working for several companies, until in 2010 I decided I had been an engineer for long enough and made the decision to return to continue my abandoned education. I studied initially with the Open University, gaining several credits, which qualified me for entry to study English Literature with Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia where I graduated with a BA in 2014.
I subsequently gained an MA, and then qualified as a teacher and became a Lecturer in English at a college in North-West London. I also began work on a Creative PhD during which I began to lose confidence in my writing. I had by then written several short stories, and was putting the finishing touches to novel. But after my work failed to generate any interest from literary agents I stopped writing and abandoned my PhD. I now live just outside London in Bushey, Hertfordshire with my second wife and until recently, our two sons having departed to university.