User:Timpo/Bio

This will be autobiography. Its relevance to Wikipedia is that I intend, post mortem to donate my body to science or medicine provided that the researchers agree to upload any media they produce to Wikimedia Commons.

As this is a work in progress, please add any comments to the Talk Page

I consider my life to have been the epitome of human experience, not least because I was born in Camberley during the Winter of 1946–1947 in the United Kingdom shortly after the Nuremberg Trials and before the first United Nations General Assembly in New York.

In the Post WWII Europe, Mains electricity and plumbing were well developed, broadcast radio receivers and telephones were expensive and attached by wires, while road traffic was bearable. Television, Air conditioning, fast cars with power assistance, motorways, package holidays, mobile phones and all the impedimenta of modern life still a distant nightmare.

My parents, a nursery nurse and an engineer, had been financially obliged to run a newsagent's shop. The war liberated them: My father retrained for 'secret war work' at the Royal Aircraft Establishment and my mother became a housewife with a young child to care for, and, since there was then food rationing chickens to feed, eggs to be distributed, vegetables to grow. Somehow she also found time to perform a Punch and Judy puppet show, serve lunches at a local school, act as treasurer for the Women's Institute branch, and participate in church life – not infrequently as an unpaid taxi driver!

Polio would not be eradicated until the end of the century, and I was fortunate in that I was only mildly affected by the then called “infantile paralysis” outbreak. Perhaps thanks to the unconventional therapy devised by the “unaccredited sister” Elizabeth Kenny apart from a minor left face stiffness, I recovered completely. How lucky is that, when several of my classmates had permanent palsy of the arm, and/or leg-irons?

By age 8 I was considered educationally retarded, but fortunately an aunt decided I should be privately educated in an “all boys” school. I recall I was initially placed with much younger children and there I learned the alphabet and to recite multiplication tables to the sound of music.Dyslexia, in those days was considered at best an excuse, and possibly a fraud. However, after writing my name backwards, a young student teacher helped my “reading age” to rocket from illiterate to slightly above average within weeks of my arrival. Did I say lucky?

In a short time, I had accumulated a new circle of friends: one, the son of a family friend, I already knew, The son of our local pharmacist had all but lost the use of his left limbs to polio, and occasionally he would see me waiting at a bus-stop, and be taken to school in his parents elderly Austin 7. I tussled with him only once – and, asymmetric though he was, he was far stronger, and it was I who cried ”Pax!” - my first lesson in equality ? Another near neighbour and occasional passenger was the doctor's son, who was to become a “best friend” and later my “best man”.

During vacations, we played mostly in the woodlands surrounding the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst which had endless swings, ropes and climbing frames intended for training young officers. Before the days of the IRA, we were allowed almost free access to these wonderful outdoor facilities! We were also occasionally allowed to play with my mother's nursery-school classroom equipment, in the doctor's games room we often had free use of his billiard table and his medical library and his collection of air guns, and, since his father was a builder, once in a while, and under supervision, we enjoyed privileged access to certain building sites. My father, an engineer, sometimes let us into his workshop, where we learned to repair our bicycles and the proper, safe use of basic hand-tools. Did any boy ever have a richer childhood?

By age twelve, everything changed – I was having so much fun that I failed both the Eleven plus exam and the Common Entrance Examination, and found myself in [[Kings International College
 * France Hill]] Secondary modern school, mixing with the Working classs and missing my erstwhile classmates. This school employed corporal punishment and was run by a Headmaster did not Spare the Rod. I suffered several Canings from which I learned to hate brutal authority - particularly to oppose capital punishment and campaign against military conscription. Curiously, within a few years I myself would follow my best friend and become a Senior aircraftman technician.

Socially, I mixed mostly with working class boys, although I retained my few friends from the Middle class. Opportunities for female friendship were scant, even in a supposedly mixed sex secondary school. Although I and my school-mates bragged endlessly about our "conquests"  and were sometimes  less than innocent, we knew that, in those days pregnancy meant either forced marriage or child support orders. Contracting a sexually transmitted disease, which was then associated with tramps and beggars, meant almost certain and implacable social rejection imposed by adolescents on anyone unfortunate to contract a dose of clap. Later, we formed a Skiffle group with improvised instruments which performed in local cafés, and as more money became available, this blossomed briefly into a regular band. Being the tone-deaf 'manager' I bough a secondhand Mini Van which amazingly could just cope with with four adults, a four-piece drum-kit, some guitars and amplifiers, although I doubt it was entirely safe and legal when so loaded.

When my best friend recounted his adventures in the Royal Air Force the delights of repairing radios and televisions paled, and I too enlisted. My first 'posting' was to a radar station, high in the Troodos Mountains of Cyprus. During my service there I witnessed the aftermath of the six-day war, the raid on Beirut and the Turkish military overflights of the island (they used our two large Radomes as a turning point). Later I became involved in the various testing progrrames for Concorde at RAF Brize Norton, RAF Fairford and RAF Brawdy, although that aircraft never entered military service.

With the closure of many RAF bases I found work with companies such as MarconiSpace and Defence Systems and its sister company EASAMS, British Aerospace and Thorn EMI, European Space Operations Centre  Panavia, Borland, Digital Equipment Corporation. Thus my career spanned from simply repairing Vacuum tubes and the first transistor radios to writing specifications for military software and advanced control systems