At school and into my early twenties I mainly drifted, rarely making any decisions and very rarely getting out of my comfort zone. I am intelligent, scoring quite high on the IQ scale, so I found academic life easy, up to a point. My favourite lessons were maths, history, physics and chemistry. French wasn’t easy but I still enjoyed the challenge – they wouldn’t let me do German as my French wasn’t good enough, despite having learnt German at the same time as I learnt to speak English. (My dad was in the RAF, stationed in Germany, when I started speaking: English with my parents, German with the neighbours.) I also enjoyed sport, playing rugby for the school and hockey after I left. Games was one of my favourite lessons, except when we had to play association football (soccer to those of us who remember the 60s) or do cross country.
In my spare time I was also a member of the Scouts, progressing on to Venture Scouts when I was 16. We had a combined Venture Scout and Ranger Guide unit and it opened up my social life, including getting my first two girlfriends. In the Scouts I had earned the Chief Scout’s Award but with Ventures we had an attitude of doing things but not bothering with badges. I did some caving, a fair bit of hiking, my first abseil (in the dark), a canal trip and other activities. I became a cub instructor, then a leader, and developed my photography.
My attitude to academic work if it didn’t interest me was variable and in the third year of secondary school, my English teacher threw me out of his class (despite being second of over 300 pupils in the English exam) for not doing homework. I then became the proud owner of the first homework diary in the school. I wasn’t necessarily a bad student but was inclined to be lazy at times, preferring to read a book, go swimming or hiking and later on, listening to music than studying. In the sixth form I was drifting, taking maths, physics and chemistry at A Level because it was expected of me but not putting the work in, resulting in getting two E’s, the lowest pass grade, in maths and physics, and getting an ‘O’ grade in chemistry.
When it came to career choices, I had several interests – military, science, land careers – that I thought about following but took no decision and ended up doing sixth form and then, as the school was keen to have people going to university, off to Royal Holloway College, University of London to read physics. The first year was easy, not much harder than school and I passed most of my exams. I started off well in the second year, despite having distractions – drinking, working on live events, going to gigs and a girlfriend back at home. This came crashing down when we had a fire in the flat a friend and I were renting in Sunningdale and I couldn’t get myself going again, despite moving back onto campus. My exams went badly and I saw the head of faculty to say my farewells before the results came out – I had taken nine exams, including two resits, and failed nine exams.
This meant that I had to go home and start again. My parents weren’t too upset as, despite failing, I was the first person in the family who had gone to university. I spent the summer of 1980 looking at jobs, deciding on going into electronics as it looked like the future. I wrote some poorly handwritten letters (my handwriting was terrible and I put too much in them – the grammar and spelling were good) with no CV. I got few responses but some companies sent application forms that I filled out. I spoke with the army and RAF about electronics technician jobs. The army wanted me to become a radio technician but I wasn’t interested in that, ironically, given my later military career. The GPO (Post Office Telephones) in Slough interviewed me and offered me a job, which I took. I didn’t know it at the time but I have a good problem-solving mind and found that I enjoyed communications engineering. A month after I started, the company became British Telecommunications.
After several months living nearby with an uncle and aunt and two cousins, I moved in with friends from Royal Holloway (mainly other uni dropouts) in Staines. That started a period of heavy drinking and light drug use that lasted a few years. I started an HNC in Communications Engineering at Reading Technical College on day release – 9am to 9pm – through BT. I passed that without too many problems.
In the first actual proper decision I made in my life, I decided to join the TA at 21. I didn’t join the nearest unit to where I was living as they were (and still are) Royal Signals and I didn’t want to do comms at the weekends as well as in the week. My unit of choice was in Slough and I signed up with 8 Platoon, C (Royal Berkshire) Company of 2nd Battalion The Wessex Regiment, cap badge, a wyvern with a triangular red ‘Brandywine’ flash behind it. I have some good memories of that time but I wasn’t always fully concentrating on it as I also captained a hockey team back in Sussex, I played bass in a band and sometimes drinking was more interesting. I drifted out just under four years later, after having done Exercise Lionheart, the largest post-war NATO exercise. I was working in Windsor by this time and often doing overtime on Saturdays too. Shortly afterwards, I started playing rugby again having bulked out to 11st (70kg).
BT moved me on to other exchanges in the area between Slough and Reading and also trained me up to sort out user input errors on the new computer system that was being brought in. I moved home from Staines to Slough and then to Reading. I ended up working mainly at Marlow telephone exchange, cycling in every day in the summer and catching the bus in the winter. In early 1987 we went on strike so I took that as an opportunity to take an unpaid holiday back with my parents in Newhaven, plus a bit of travelling about.
My second major decision was to leave BT and go get a degree. Originally the plan was to move back to Sussex and go to Brighton Polytechnic (now the University of Brighton) to do electronics but I felt that putting one place down was showing a lack of effort, so, after some research, I also applied for a place on a telecoms masters degree course at Plymouth Poly and Combined Engineering with French at Coventry Poly. All three polys offered me a place on their courses. After having attended the interviews/visits at Brighton and Coventry, I chose Coventry. I delayed a year to get more money together as I didn’t think that I’d get a grant and then headed back to the Midlands in late 1987.
I worked better this time round but not always to my full potential at times. Engineering is more my forte – practical uses of ideas, solving real-life problems, rather than esoteric theory. Shortly after I got there I joined the stage crew and got involved in setting up gigs and other events again. My main hobby outside of the music side of things was getting involved in the role playing club, after attending the rugby trials and deciding that the immature culture of the rugby club wasn’t for me. I got more involved in the students’ union, driving the late night minibus, working as venue security and, in my final year, rep for several thousand engineering students, which also meant having a seat on the students’ union executive and various college committees. I passed all of my units in the first two years, apart from the mechanics practical unit, in which my lab partner, one of two closest friends there, and I were misled on some of the experiments by a lecturer who had lost interest. We were told we could make this up by passing our practicals in our year abroad, she in Germany and me in France.
If I could go back in time and change one thing in my life, it would be a decision I made in my first year at poly. I had everything mapped out as to where I wanted to be in the next ten years – a fully qualified engineer, working in a serious but rewarding job. Then I spotted an advert in the paper. The Soviet Union was offering to send a British cosmonaut into space. It was a dream I had from reading Dan Dare in The Eagle and listening to Hawkwind. I looked at it and realised that I had all of the necessary criteria to apply, but, after a lot of thought, I didn’t go for it as I thought that it would delay my plans further than I already had. Hindsight.
Part the way through the second term of my second year I had a bit of a crisis, a lack of confidence and depression, which ended up with me heading back to my friends in Reading for a short while to get my head together. This was helped by visiting a friend who had just given birth, putting things in perspective. I returned to Coventry and carried on, doing reasonably well in my exams. The third year was spent abroad and I travelled to Lyon in France in July 1989 to attend a two week intensive French course before moving to St Etienne to study at the IUT, Université Jean Monnet, taking a one year intensive DUT (equivalent to the HND) in Automatismes – industrial machines. It was a good experience and I ended up at the local hospital for the stage (placement) at the end of the year, writing programs in C. I passed the DUT, adding that to my list of qualifications.
On my return from France, I got my dad to cut my hair (I had a ponytail/plait halfway down my back) and shaved my beard off. I returned to Coventry early for the final year and one of the first things I did was to rejoin the TA, this time the Royal Signals, with 48 (City of Birmingham) Signal Squadron. The logic behind it was I wanted to rejoin and I wanted to do something technical again, so I traded as a systems technician. I went into my final year working hard, putting in 60 – 100+ hours a week spread between studying, the student exec work, TA and driving the minibus. I had to drop the security and crew work but maintained a social life. At the beginning of the year I also had a girlfriend, another one of the English students who was studying in St Etienne, and I visited her in Bradford and she me, before we split up late in the first term.
Making new friends with the new students, I hit it off well with one, as friends, and she introduced me to the Irish Society, as they needed someone who could do publicity and I had access to the students’ union Apple Mac. We did a pub crawl at Christmas and towards the end, there were only three of us, an Englishman, an Irishman and a Scotsman. The Irishman pulled out a tricolour in the last pub we were in, run by an Irishman who I’d met in previous years. He shot around the bar, telling my friend to put it away as “all sides drink in here.” My friend did, complaining bitterly, as the landlord and his dad had been in the IRA together in the early years of the Troubles. I was also friendly with many people on different sides of politics, whilst retaining my own green anarchist stance. At the end of term, I headed back to Newhaven for Christmas and my birthday and joined friends in Chertsey for New Year.
Things in the next decade were about to change.