1) Early Childhood In The Forest Of Dean

I was born on September 20, 1960, at home, not in a hospital, at the house known at the time as "Sunnybank Bungalow" in the village of Lydbrook, which is on the northern edge of the western portion of Gloucestershire just on the England side of the border between England and Wales and known as the Forest of Dean. The "border" is, of course, not actually a border because England and Wales are both parts of the United Kingdom and so is more like the borders between U.S. states or Canadian provinces.

I remember it as a typically English village with stone walls and hedges and patchwork fields outside of the trees of the forest. Our house was actually half of a duplex with a porch (known as a "veranda") which offered a nice view of the hill on the other side of the valley along which Lydbrook is laid out. Our house faced west so that the sun shone in during the late afternoon. The words "bungalow", which is a one-story house and "veranda", which is a porch, were not originally English words but were, I believe, borrowed from Hindi.

My mother, Vera, was from Worrall Hill, a satellite village of Lydbrook atop the hill opposite our house. My father, Les, was from Drybrook, another village to the north of Lydbrook. My maternal grandmother, who I knew as "Nanna" lived with us and my father was a bus driver for the Red and White Company.

We had no central heating but there was a fireplace in each room. I had a plastic pail such as the ones that children use to make sandcastles. One day, my mother decided to use the pail to clean the ashes out of a fireplace and to this day, the scent of burning plastic reminds me of this time.

There was no electric refrigerator but in it's place was a small, cool room known as "the larder". Occasionally, I was punished for misbehaviour by being shut in there for a brief period of time. Outside, I had a swing set and there was a pile of coal for use in the fireplaces. The most important industry in the Forest of Dean was originally coal mining.

My prized possession was a blue toy plastic motorcycle. However sometimes I would ride it into the woods nearby, leave it to look at something and then be unable to find it. I also placed high value on a traditional British policeman's hat that I had been given. One Easter, I was given a chocolate egg mounted inside an elaborate cup, which I still have today. In fact, I have the cup here in front of me to help to bring back memories of this time.

The Forest of Dean also once had extensive iron mines. There were slag heaps in various places in the forest and my father would take me to climb one preiodically. They seemed like huge mountains that took me a long time to reach the top.

There were many squirrels all around and I tried in vain to catch one. One day, there was a hedgehog outside our house. At another time, there was a fox going around the area stealing chickens.

Sometimes, I would be taken for a walk and we would go past a window in which there was always a radio on the windowsill from which music would be playing. But I do not recall having any contact with music myself at this time.

One day, while in Hubert Evans' Barber Shop, I asked where Heaven was because I had heard of it but did not know where it was. I was told that it was straight upward and for years, I thought that for someone to get to Heaven, they had to go to Lydbrook first because Heaven was directly overhead there.

I had heard of Jesus. I knew that he was an important character, although I did not understand what he did. I thought that Jesus was a local, from around the Forest of Dean. One day, I noticed a large group of men in a room having some kind of meeting and I thought that Jesus must be among them.

At night, I could see the vertical bar of light moving across the wall opposite my bedroom window from the headlights of cars on the road below shining through the gap between the curtains. But one night, there was a loud rumbling such as I had never heard before. It sounded like the footsteps of some kind of giant.

However the following morning, none of the adults seemed to have the slightest concern about any giant. Maybe it was a friendly giant that came out of the forest occasionally to visit our village. The ground was wet and I eventually realized that what I had been hearing was thunder.

One of the first things that I remember learning is that numbers can be expressed either by their symbol, such as "6", or written out, such as "six". Another prominent name is that of Dr. McMinn, the village doctor who delivered both me and my brother, Paul, when we were born.

We would go, in our Volkswagen Beetle, to the shops in Cinderford, a larger town near Drybrook. There was a Woolworths there along with numerous smaller shops.

The nearest city to the Forest of Dean was Gloucester. It was very different from our village. There were many more people and I could see that most of the people in Gloucester did not know each other because they would rush past each other without saying hello. In Lydbrook, it seemed as if everyone who met stopped and greeted one another.

There was a store in Gloucester, the Bon Marche, which was much bigger than Woolworths. I do not know where the name originated but "bon marche" means "inexpensive" in French. (The Bon Marche was later known as Debenhams).

A magnificent building was Gloucester Cathedral. I learned that a cathedral was more important than an ordinary church. I have vivid memories of the light through the stained glass windows and the echos off the walls in the cathedral. Maybe this was where God actually lived, there probably was not enough room for him in the church in Lydbrook.

One day in Gloucester, Westgate Street near the cathedral was being paved and a passing horse knocked over some flammable liquid. There was a massive fire on the street but it did not appear that any buildings were damaged. My father wrapped his coat around my younger brother as we passed by on the other side of the street to protect him from flying sparks.

I was taken to visit Lydbrook Primary School, the village school, because I was to soon start school there. But it was not to be, there were other plans in the works. We were soon to move to a place far away. The Canadian Government had been loaning money to would-be immigrants to pay their way to settle in Canada and we were going to live in a place called Saskatchewan.

We had sold our car to Eric Webb, the village mechanic, and he was to drive us to the dock at Liverpool, where we were to board a ship. We dropped off my grandmother at my mother's sister's house and then began the long drive ahead. We drove further than I remembered having gone before. The landscape became flatter and with fewer trees than there was in our forest.

It was announced that we were soon to enter the Mersey Tunnel at Liverpool, which ran under the Mersey River. Finally, we were at the dock and a massive ship with several chimneys stood in the water in front of us, the Empress of England.

Eric Webb left in our car so, whatever we were doing, there was no turning back now. Even if we changed our minds, we would have no way to get back home.

We boarded the ship and after what seemed to be a long time, things began to move. The ship was so big that it appeared that it was standing still and that all of England was floating away. The ship had a large dining room for meals.

For the first time, I saw people that were completely different from us and speaking in ways that were incomprehensible. At the time, I thought that a person was born as either a child or an adult and would be that way all of their lives. I did not yet know that children grew into adults. I walked all around the ship's decks with my father and there was a ceremomy in which balloons were released when we were halfway across the ocean.