Growing Up

Growing Up

Non-Fiction

Pages: 122 Ratings:

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Our hero was born on 24th March 1940, which in that year was Easter Sunday, in the Bird in Hand pub in the village of Stoulton, 5 miles south of Worcester. There was a lot going on in 1940 of which he was totally unaware: the Dunkirk evacuation, the Battle of Britain and the Blitz, for starters. On a lesser level perhaps was the suicide of Virginia Woolf. Meanwhile, over in New York, Duke Ellington was composing and recording masterpieces like Take the A Train, Chelsea Bridge and Sepia Panorama.

What follows is our hero’s misadventures in the countryside around the hamlet of Sneachill in rural Worcestershire recounted in this saga.

Michael Bowles was born in 1940 at the Bird in Hand pub at Stoulton near Worcester, and spent the next few months totally unaware of the Dunkirk evacuation, the Battle of Britain, the blitz, and the suicide of Virginia Woolf.

He received primary education at Bredicot village school, including unscheduled, unauthorised sex education which was not well received. This was followed by secondary education at Pershore Secondary Modern School. During both he was boringly serious and well-behaved.

Then came the misadventures of a student engineering apprenticeship at the Royal Radar Establishment and College of Electronics at Malvern where he was less well behaved. Next came a short period as a design draughtsman before obtaining a graduate engineer post at the Royal Aircraft Establishment at Farnborough leading to a career as a chartered engineer with MoD Procurement Executive and the Defence Evaluation and Research Agency.

He now lives in retirement in Blandford Forum engaged in his hobbies of writing and art. He still does not know if he is any good at either.