Table of Contents

i.Title

ii. Epigraph

iii. Dedication

iv. Preface

v. Acknowledgments

1. WHAT WILL HAPPEN TO PLAS YOLYN?

2. FAMILY HISTORY

3. LIVING THE DREAM

Epigraph

There were four days left. On Monday we were travelling to Manila to be with our recently born daughter, Selene.

She was born during our annual trip there four months earlier. We had applied online for her passport but soon realised there would not be one in time for our return to the UK. We left her with my wife’s family in our house in Manila. Once we arrived back in Britain we immediately set about following up our online application to the Passport Office, without any success.

We ended up with a BBC Midlands Today camera crew filming Shane, my wife and myself in our house. I was overcome, and could hardly speak. Tears rolled down my cheeks. This was broadcast to millions of people that evening and had the national media calling us the next day wanting to run the story everywhere. As I put the boys to bed that night, Charlie was impressed.

‘It’s not every day you see your parents stressed out and crying on TV, Dad,’ he said, beaming a satisfied smile.

Dedication

For Shane

The image of the crescent moon on the cover has multiple meanings.

It was the shape of the moon in the Philippines on the night Selene was born.

Selene means the moon in ancient Greek.

Shane's name was originally 'moonshine', later shortened to 'shine' and finally changed into Shane. The night Shane was born, while her mother was in labour, the full moon appeared from behind a cloud, and shone brightly into the room which was not otherwise lit. Just at that moment, Shane was born.

The crescent shape on the cover also has another meaning. In the occult, the crescent shape is not from the moon, but from Saturn. As Saturn declined as Earth's former sun and moved further away from Earth, light from the present day sun started to reach into Saturn's sphere. The present day sun's light first appeared as a revolving crescent shape on Saturn as seen from Earth, and this revolving crescent was recorded by people on rock drawings around the planet.

This story of the emergence of the current solar system after the decline of the former arrangement of the planets in our sky is from The Electric Universe and is described in the film 'Remembering The End of the World' at www.thunderbolts.info

You can only unravel history and myth if you become aware of the true scientific nature of the universe, and the real history of the world. History is indeed mostly myth. Myth, properly understood, comes mostly from history.

The story of my life and of how Shane and I got together is extraordinary, yet no more so than the real story of the world. I hope that readers of this book will enjoy and benefit from the perspectives it brings.

Table of Contents

i.Title
ii. Epigraph
iii. Dedication
iv. Preface
v. Acknowledgments
1. WHAT WILL HAPPEN TO PLAS YOLYN?
2. FAMILY HISTORY
3. LIVING THE DREAM
4. PACKWOOD
5. RADLEY
6. AUSTRALIA
7. MERTON COLLEGE, OXFORD
8. DODGING THE BULLETS
9. BREAKING THE BARRIERS
10. NO ONE'S LAUGHING NOW
11. EXPANDING HORIZONS
12. NEW FACTORY
13. THE SPIRIT OF BUSINESS
14. THE KING OF FUN
15. WHAT'S BEST FOR BRITAIN?
16. THE EURO STOPS HERE
17. DICING WITH DEATH
18. ASIAN ADVENTURES
19. WHEN YOU NEED YOUR FRIENDS
20. TROPICAL GETAWAY
21. THINGS START FALLING INTO PLACE
22. TIME TO SETTLE DOWN
23. THE UNEXPECTED
24. AWAKENING
a. Eplilogue
b. Plas Yolyn Repairs
c. Dar Obituary
d. Links - Family
e. Links - Others
f. Report -Cows to Chains
g. Other Publications
h. Colophon

Preface

All through my life, I have tended to be intensely emotional. Born a Scorpio on October 26 1954, that’s the way I am and the way I see things. If I’m interested in doing something I’m fully interested and will go to lengths most people wouldn’t consider. As a result in the different phases of my life, I have found myself in extreme situations over and over again, in the different countries I have visited, and in the various professions in which I have worked.

By taking things to the limits I have experienced great successes and near disasters. My temperament combined with business instinct and linguistic skill has driven me to do things which have possibly changed the position of Britain in the world or, at least, contributed more than a little to that. I have developed ideas for running businesses that are today used and taught in many places around the globe. These could help transform the future for many more people should they become aware of them.

In this book, I take my life mostly in chronological order. Following the timeline too strictly, however, makes the story hard to tell and at times I follow a particular theme to its conclusion, then go back and pick up other aspects which were taking place concurrently. During my life I frequently jumped ship from different roles, from business to academic writing for example, then from academic writing to politics, from politics to alternative research, and finally from alternative research to reaching some surprising conclusions about what really underlies the events that are driving the world, going into the realm of the spiritual. It is easier to write about these as separate topics although in fact they were more mixed up together and less separated in their living. I describe the events in the mentality I had at the time.

I write at the end about humanity and our place in the universe. This is not just my story but also your story. I hope that you can learn from my experiences, leading you, for example, to have better and longer lives and maybe to awaken you from the spiritual entrapment that we are all being subjected to. I hide nothing. My less successful notions and actions are covered as surely as my successes. That way you should reach the conclusion that what I write is the truth. I trust in my memory, which is still pretty good if I give it enough time. If there are occasional errors, which concern anyone, please let me know and I will willingly check the facts that are being questioned. Any errors will be corrected in future editions.

To understand the life of an entrepreneur, you need to focus for a moment on the word ‘risk’. You have to go beyond the way the word is used today, where it is used more or less as an alternative for hazard, or a situation with an almost certain negative outcome.

‘That’s risky,’ people will say, meaning leave it well alone.

To an entrepreneur, risk has exactly the opposite meaning.

It is when life starts to get interesting.

Risk is, in fact, not as our government has chosen to define the word, as the certainty or even probability of a negative outcome. Risk concerns a situation where both good and bad outcomes are possible. Risk originally was a Latin verb – risqere - meaning ‘to dare’. Risk describes the moment you decide to pitch yourself into a situation, which could have bad consequences for you and others, and yet could have very good consequences. You have to believe that those good consequences are achievable, commit yourself, probably including all your finances, all your time and energy to ensuring you achieve the outcome you have decided upon, and avoid the negative possibilities.

As you read my life’s events, you will see moments when I took such decisions, where I dared to move to a new way of seeing things, or of doing things, as I saw advantage as the likely result of doing so. These decisions were usually taken instinctively, without much knowledge of what I would be facing once the die was cast, often informed by sudden realization which came to mind from who knows where. But, at no time did I doubt I had done the right thing or wish to go into reverse once I’d moved, though on occasion I came near to disaster, even losing money to boot.

Writing this book is just the latest risk I am taking. There are possible negative effects of course in publicising aspects of your life. For you browsing this introduction to go on to get the benefits of the book, you will first need to take the risk of reading it. I must warn you there will be things inside it that could stretch your mind beyond its comfort zone. Yet you could also find it helps to unravel many of the things that possibly confuse you about the world. You might become more aware of things that are harming us, and be able to act to improve our chances of living longer and healthier lives. You might also find ways to be more successful, in whatever way you prefer to define the word ‘success’, or at least be more satisfied with what you have achieved.

Learning from the failures and successes of others is surely the most sensible thing you can do, rather than working things out from scratch yourself.

My earlier business writings with Professor Bernard Taylor of Henley Management College tell you that I have things that are useful to know. Those writings on entrepreneurship are on MBA courses all over the world. But this book has a much broader remit than how to grow a business. The first part covers my upbringing and education. Then comes the business growth section in the middle. The last section covers my academic political and spiritual experiences.

I, of course, want my children to know who I am, and their children in turn. All that I did will be lost if I don’t write it down. Some of the things that I have learned in life at some cost are important for others to know and I want them to become known to benefit as many people as possible. Humanity can only survive if we know what is happening to us; what our best potential is and what our destination will be. We all need to work together, so far as that is possible.

The concepts I am hoping to hand over are always developing. This work will only last until the next encounter with progress, yet there is already more than enough that needs setting in print.

You can laugh, cry, get angry, or ridicule. All of these are legitimate responses. They are though, not my concern. I merely want to tell my story and give my message. Accept or refuse, the choice is entirely yours.

Henry Curteis
Shrewsbury, England, December 2018
First Edition

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Mike Bird, Tim Bol, Jane Crouch, Alice and Charlie Curteis, Bob Hecks, Tim Hope-Wynne, Ray Kenna, Phil Lister, Jeremy Lyon, Stephen Mount, Rachael Nash and Ned Pamphilon for the advice they gave me as I was writing the book.

As for the people, entities and spirits who contributed to the story, for evil done, I tender forgiveness and offer peace. For goodness, undying gratitude.

ORIGINS

‘What will happen to Plas Yolyn?’

The end of my school days came just a few weeks after my seventeenth birthday. I yearned to be free from it all. I could see more hope in stepping out into the real world than staying in the classroom, but I could get little support from any quarter for doing so. In those days the idea that you educated yourself better out in the real world than was possible through reading textbooks was not heard of. Everything was about getting letters after your name and crawling into lucrative and safe ‘careers’.

Parents earnestly advised their children to stick it out, however tedious the studies, with encouraging words such as ‘it will be worth it in the end.’ Even as young children we were harangued that without good exam results our future lives would be impaired. From aged seven due to choices made by my parents I was forced to comply.

I had been told at the age of four that I was ‘going to be sent away’. I was sitting by the range in the kitchen at Plas Yolyn with Elsie Meacock, the cook, and my sister, Alice, when they gave me this shocking news. It seemed particularly unfair that I was going to be sent away, and that Alice a year older than me was not. Our life as children on the small farm was idyllic with two maids, two resident cooks, a farm worker, a cleaner, a gardener, a nurse, a former cowman and his son in a cottage nearby. There were also four generations of ‘us’ - our great-grandmother in her 90s, our grandparents, Admiral and Lady Curteis, our parents, Roger and Liz, and us. Bar a bit of mechanisation here and there, we lived the kind of simple rural life that had gone on for hundreds of years with little change.

Adults living with multiple generations in one house sometimes had their problems. The Admiral, for example, would not eat his meals in the same room as Mrs Morrall, his mother-in-law. Our mother too would often complain of her step-mother-in-law interfering in her plans. But, for us children, the tensions were invisible as we just had a big house to roam around and lots of adults to chat to. Outside we could walk around the small dairy farm, watch the animals being fed, pick fruits and berries, build dens, catch tadpoles in the pond, make dams in the stream or play ball games on the lawns. Having so much space to play in and such a happy community to be a part of seemed like heaven.

This idyll, however, was shortly to end. The social changes of the 1960s, inflation and new taxes made the old way of life no longer possible. We were in the same boat as many families who lived in big country houses with staff, in our case as we had for tens of generations. The future for everyone who lived in this way was suddenly under threat, bar the super-rich, which we certainly were not.

My mother’s mother Helen Lyon had some money, which enabled us to carry on as we were a few years longer, living as an extended family and community. My father who had been an engineer before becoming a farmer was able to stop the buildings and the house from falling down through his repairing efforts, which were carried out on very tight budgets. But everyone knew the situation could not go on forever.

Family 1960 Plas Yolyn
Dad, Hugh, Rachel, Alice, Me, Mum

A constant refrain throughout our childhood was ‘But what will happen to Plas Yolyn?’ and ‘What will happen to the furniture?’ The concern was not about what might happen to us, please note. As the next generation, we were somehow expected to provide the solution to the long-running conundrum of how to maintain a building that cost more to keep than anyone could earn. All previous generations had struggled. The building dated from 1776 and the time was coming when major repairs would be needed.

I was told by my mother that as the eldest son of the family, it would be up to me to perform to a high enough level with my career, to give the family a future befitting its past.

“We expect a lot of our eldest son,’ she used to say to me.

This made me feel immensely proud and important, although how I was to turn into someone as big and important as an Admiral was something unimaginable. My first reaction to seeing his photo-portrait sitting on the grand piano was somewhat different. As senior naval officer West Atlantic based in Bermuda in 1944, he wore his Admiral’s peaked hat, with Vice Admiral scrambled egg up his sleeves.

‘When was grandfather a postman?’ I enquired.

Although Alban’s career and status were impressive, I’m not sure the family’s past, taken as a whole, was really all that illustrious, to be honest.

What was beyond dispute was the incredible length of time our forebears had lived at Plas Yolyn. The place had been acquired by our ancestor around 900 AD. That ancestor happened to be Hwyl Dda the King of Wales. He settled three sons in the village of Dudleston, Morgan being given Pentre Morgan, the farm next door to Plas Yolyn. Heylin got Pentre Heylin on the other side, and Iddon got Kilhendre in the middle, on which Plas Yolyn was later built, (the name Yolyn possibly coming from our family’s farm manager who lived there with his family around 1100 AD). We are descended from Iddon, the middle son, and over one thousand years later still occupy the land acquired for him by Hwyl.

From this information alone you can see that we had been, if nothing else, certainly good at sitting around and not going anywhere. At times in history the occupants of the place had played key roles, but more recent stories were of things being sold off and of efforts to stop walls from falling down and roofs from leaking or collapsing. Our future occupancy was going to depend on a bit more than merely being good at not going anywhere. In fact, someone needed to make some serious money if the building was to be repaired and not sold. And that was for us to do, not for our children. If we didn’t solve the problem, our children would not need to be bothered with it, as it would be too late.

No one mentioned our long historical record, to my recollection, during my childhood. I learned of it much later on, from records Dad kept in his desk, but we knew anyway that our ancestry went back centuries from plaques displayed in Dudleston church. My first thoughts on seeing the documents were that it was ‘paid for’, not real history. A local historian would call by occasionally to talk with Dad, and he assured me that all the stuff about Hwyl Dda and 900 AD was true.

The upshot of it all was that we have been at Plas Yolyn since before England was created. In fact, Hwyl Dda, (grandson of Rhodri The Great who defeated the Vikings at Anglesey and unified Wales), gave Welsh agreement to the merger of Mercia and Wessex and attended all the Conferences of Malmesbury, held by Aethelstan, grandson of Alfred The Great for that purpose. If Hwyl hadn’t bought into the merger, it would never have happened. Welsh people have both agreed with what Hwyl did, and bitterly criticised it, as Wales was eventually eclipsed by the growth of her newly created neighbour. That’s the strange thing about history; very few parts of the real story make it into the books that people read at school. Hwyl was called Dda meaning ‘the good’ as he encoded the Welsh legal system, which was more human than Saxon law, and gave more rights to women and the poor. The Welsh word for England translates as ‘The lost lands’, as, before the invasions, Welsh was spoken much further East than it is today.

Over the centuries some other illustrious people lived at the house, including Colonel John Jones, who married our ancestor Margaret Edwards. She died and he then married Katharine, Oliver Cromwell’s sister. He commanded the British army in Ireland, took the surrender of Royalist Wales in the Civil War, and afterwards became a regicide. He quickly gave up on politics when he saw that Cromwell had no interest in maintaining any form of real democracy. His luck ran out in the blowback against the execution of the king a few years later, as he was ‘captured’, hung, drawn and quartered.

More recently my grandfather Vice Admiral Sir Alban T.B. Curteis KCB had played a significant role in WW2 in the Atlantic, notably against The Bismarck, and in the Med, where, as second in command of the Home Fleet, he delivered a convoy to Malta suffering appalling losses in the battle of Pantelleria. When he retired from the Navy towards the end of the war, he took up farming and acquired Plas Yolyn from Anne Morrall, his mother-in-law, who was also living with us in her nineties when we were charging around the place as kids.

There had at one time been 800 acres of land, but Anne’s son Cyrus, my great uncle, had sold most of it and gone to Kenya in 1921. The rump of the Plas Yolyn estate had been just 25 acres bought by ‘the admiral’ with the house. My parents eventually managed to increase this up to one hundred acres by buying the neighbouring farm, but this was still nowhere near enough to maintain our lifestyle or have anything spare for major repairs to the house. Our living was fortunately subsidised by a series of timely legacies from relatives who seemed to pass away as our financial needs required. Our parents, however, were naturally worried about the future, as living on legacies could not go on forever.

Grandfather and Dad. Gallons of happiness but not much money from 3 churns of milk a day

The tiny dairy herd hardly produced any income throughout the time my father farmed from 1949 till 1974. The accounts showed between £100 and £200 a year pre-tax profit for a period of twenty years. The roof of the house was leaking in multiple locations, with pots in the attics, and sometimes even pots in the bedrooms below the attics. Dad was up on the roof mending the lead with tape nearly every week. The builder who eventually repaired the lead said there were patches on patches on patches everywhere. One of these had twenty-five layers of patching.

The costs of rebuilding the roof were well beyond Dad’s reach. Although the decline of the building wasn’t very visible to those who moved around the ground floor and most bedrooms, it took a person capable of significant denial to imagine this could all go on much longer. Dad spoke a bit like a politician hoping to keep setbacks at bay with words, with the government unable to allocate any financial resources. When in later years I asked him about the safety of the roof or chimneys, he would say that he always believed Plas Yolyn was ‘basically sound’. He had to believe that, as he had no alternative. He also couldn’t afford to insure the property for anything like its true worth or the amount required for rebuilding. Had a chimney crashed through the roof to the ground, or a roof beam given way, we would have found ourselves living in a much smaller, totally modern building.

When the builder Tony Hampson finally inspected the roof in the 1980s by cutting a hole through the plaster, he found the beams rotted through at the walls with ‘the roof holding the beams up’. The pointing on some of the brickwork on the chimney stacks was so bad that a stack could have crashed to the ground at any moment.

With successive generations unable to properly maintain the house and dilapidation visible almost everywhere, after two hundred years of only minor repair efforts, the responsibility for future substantial repairs was being laid at the door of a small child: me, in fact. I was at once very proud to be so promoted in significance by my mother but also concerned as to how my efforts could do anything to turn back the tide of history, giving new life to a proud family tradition.

It was as much dire need as anything else that persuaded my parents to seek out the best education they could find, which included ‘sending me away’ and spending what money was left on school fees. I was the only avenue of hope remaining and I was well aware of the mission I was being sent on in life, by virtue of being born into an onerous responsibility from an early age.

The easy way for me to fulfil that mission would have been to cooperate with those placed in power over me during my youthful years and comply with all their requests and suggestions. A career in Law was proposed by my mother so forcefully that it seemed like a foregone conclusion that that is what I would have to do with my life.

My nature, however, was not to accept anything at face value, but to form my own understanding and although attracted by the high sounding salaries of judges and QCs, I had a sneaking suspicion that wig and gown were not quite my style. At age 8 I caused a stir by suggesting that I wanted to convert the attics of the house into a business. I drew the rooms out, showing where the desks would be, and told my mother it would be a stamp-collecting business. The rebuff was powerful. I was told that while it was alright for people from lower social backgrounds to go into business, it would not be for us, as we were from the professional classes.

The world around me seemed so full of certainty about itself and so structured that it needed to be challenged. It wasn’t just that there was clearly a shortage of money, with Mum and Dad putting four children through private school, with scarcely any income. There was also an unwillingness to dirty our hands doing what would be needed to make money. Money had to arrive into our hands invisibly and from sweat poured out of human brows out of our sight, and with no trade allowed. ‘Trade’ was far too low an activity for a family such as ours. Yet to me trade seemed exciting and interesting. It might also give us a future.

I was also annoyed by the role assigned to children. At that time, children were assumed not to know anything and were often made to keep silent. There was no negotiation allowed and families felt they needed to present their offspring as tidy, silent and polite. It continually annoyed and puzzled me that adults didn’t realise that children possessed intelligence and ideas of their own.

My sister Alice realised that showing emotion was not approved of, so she learned how to keep quiet and appear serene as required, and never cry. She says it took decades of her life afterwards to learn how to express herself normally. Dad was traditional and found it not quite natural to show emotion. To my way of thinking, this whole approach was nonsense and needed knocking over. The trouble was that it was so sure of itself and reinforced with the back-up of punishments.

The Admiral once said to me, ‘Did your father belt you last night?’ When I said he hadn’t, he replied, ‘If I’d been your father, I’d have belted you.’ I had been out in the field with three friends and we had seen in the middle distance a character who looked something like an itinerant farm worker, wearing a black broad-rimmed hat strolling across a field. When chased by a bull, he ran for the hedge with his cloak billowing out behind him. We were four years old and decided that what we had seen must have been a witch. We were in a wood and a metal contraption was standing not far from us with a wire emanating from a box at the top, stretching out into the field. The box made a strange clicking sound. We had never seen or heard anything like this before. Thinking that this device (an electric fence terminal) must be something to do with the witch we had just observed, we picked up stones from a handy pile, made from efforts to clear the field, and launched them at the ticking box until its click became less sure of itself, and the box was bent and buckled by the blows.

My father was obviously upset when he found it, and that evening, asked me why we had done what we did. My explanation that we had seen a witch and thought the device was to do with the witch, was enough to deflect the beating that his father had decided was the way to handle me. My father tried to do the discipline thing from time to time, but his kind heart wasn’t really in it.

No doubt he had endured far worse in his day, and there was no possibility of showing resistance at that time. Had it been the 1920s, the same level of punishment would have been imposed on me and I would have been totally suppressed, my cheeky personality sunk without trace. The Admiral had once endured fourteen strokes of a naval cane, which he told people ‘was very good for the memory.’ The victims of naval beatings were made to wear special thin trousers, and couldn’t sit down for days afterwards. My father and his father had endured such appalling treatment through their childhoods. To remain sane, they had to believe it to be right, and my grandfather had explained to Dad that boys had to know that they were beaten. My grandfather had been in command of the naval training establishment at Dartmouth and had no doubt inflicted punishments on boys himself. 

In my view, it wasn’t just the building of Plas Yolyn that needed reconstruction and repair. So too did the culture of the family and especially the way children were treated. It was time for the human spirit to arise and not to conform any longer with the stifling social mores of the day, and the suppression of children, as they were made to function to order or otherwise keep quiet. My character especially was unsuited to such a world.

I was regarded as a very naughty boy by my parents’ friends who would later relate tales of the things I got up to – even years later. I would need a whole book on just that to tell them all. One thing I did that I can remember was that one day, aged four, I was playing in the bedroom known as the night nursery when I was caught short. Seeing a small hole in the wooden floorboard of a suitable size, I decided to make use of that instead of making the walk to the bathroom. It was really most convenient, and as no one said anything about it that became the way I did things.

Every evening when he came home from the farm, Dad would notice a damp patch on the ceiling in the kitchen, and he was worried about the pipes leaking. He had them checked but found nothing untoward. The damp patch persisted, until one day my brother Hugh was sleeping in his pram in the kitchen below and the ceiling, weakened by months or maybe years of wetting, finally gave way. The plasterboard fell all over Hugh, except luckily the hood of the pram was up, and he wasn’t badly hurt. I told Dad twenty years later what had caused all this. He couldn’t believe it.

Another story came to light many years later. Alice was cleaning the china with Elsie in the front hall. There were large Willow pattern dishes which the Admiral had bought in Hong Kong in 1908, and she had dropped one. She and Elsie went to tell Mum. Alice was crying and crying, getting lots of attention in the process. Ever the competitor, I apparently later headed to the Hall, seized another Hong Kong willow-pattern dish and smashed it on the ground. Elsie was horrified, quickly tidied up the pieces, hid them in newspaper and put them in the dustbin. Luckily for me, she went up to the attic as there was another one similar in the china storeroom, and secretly replaced the one I had broken. No one noticed the change and I was saved. Otherwise, for sure, I would have collected one of the Admiral’s threatened punishments from Dad. I was probably aged three at the time.

Elsie later told me that each day I would beg her to let me come with her to feed the hens. She would tell me that she wouldn’t take me unless I promised not to throw the corn into the water dispensers where the hens couldn’t eat it, and each day I would solemnly promise not to do so. But, each time I would forget my promises and chuck it in the water. Elsie had to tip out the water to get the corn and refill the dispensers, which took her several minutes. She was very kind to children. Coming from a simple Cheshire family background she had no agenda to improve our characters and just loved us as we were. Later on in life, she would often encourage me to do the things I wanted to do, and would tell me to ignore the restrictive views of my family. We were lucky she was there, as relationships within our own family were not always tranquil.

Elsie was not only kind to children. She was also kind to animals. She would feed any hungry animal and a number of stray cats started to live around the farm. She had one cat which was her own called Monty, a black cat, which was wary of me for some reason I can’t imagine. In addition to Monty, there were several others hanging around the garden, and the Admiral decided to thin down the numbers taking his shotgun to the task. He shot thirteen cats, and Monty appeared in the kitchen with blood on his ears, presumably narrowly missed by the pellets. The family laughed at Elsie incredulously saying ‘Ah poor Monty, have you been in a fight?’ Had she lost him, she would have been devastated but, in the post-war world of the 1950s, being sentimental was thought a weakness.

Elsie also fed the swans on the pond, and they became quite tame. The pen and the cob would bring the cygnets up to her kitchen and sit in a wide arc around the warmth of the Esse while Elsie fed them. Alice and I were not welcome in the room during swan feeding sessions, not by Elsie of course – by the swans. The hisses from the parents terrified us. We kept our distance and ran away as they hissed and raised their wings, all way taller than we were. As I ran, I cried out, 'the swoons, the swoons'!

Elsie would never tell us her age. When we asked her, as children do, she would smile and say, ‘well, my tongue’s a little older than my teeth.’ She later claimed she didn’t really know how old she was. She spoke ‘Cheshire’ with words like cook, hook and book, pronounced as in ‘coo’. So cookbook was a double long syllable.

Her favourite was undoubtedly my younger brother Hugh, although we all loved her for her kindness to us all. In her bedroom, she had one picture of me, none of the girls but ten of Hugh. Hugh was gentler and a sweeter, kinder, more considerate boy than I was, and not prone to naughty acts. He would also unintentionally come up with the most comical sayings.

Our parents were invited one evening to play tennis next door at the Hicksons, and they came up to say goodnight to us all before going out. The conversation started with Mum saying to Hugh, ‘We’re going out tonight but don’t worry. Elsie will be looking after you.’

He naturally enquired where they were going, only to be told, ‘We’re going down to Kilhendre.’

His facial expression dropped, and he became most perturbed. He then asked,

‘Why are you gonna kill him?’

On another occasion, he and Rachel were being taken to The League Of Pity party in Gobowen by car. Mum at the wheel tried to explain to them what League Of Pity meant.

‘It’s part of the National Society for the Prevention Of Cruelty To Children. It’s trying to raise money for children who are very badly treated.’

Hugh, ever one to deny himself in favour of others, came back at her.

‘But Mum, we’re not that badly treated.’

He was about to set off on a walk across the field to the rear of the house to visit the Peakes, the old couple living in the bungalow. Norman was the postman, who had been wounded in the First World War with a machine gun bullet to his hand, which had somewhat curtailed his musical talent. Dad heard Mum dressing Hugh to go out, and shouted,

‘He’d better not go across The Park. I’ve just put some frisky young heifers (young cows) in there.’

Hugh again thought only of the dangers to others, and not to himself.

‘Don’t worry Dad,’ he said. ‘I won’t hurt them.’

Rachel the youngest made up the set of four, but was less structured in her thoughts than the rest of us, already the creative artistic type. Her comments were funny only in their babyishness. She was a great consumer, always asking for biscuits using her word for them which was something like ‘Prrrr’. She often asked Mum if she could wear her ‘fopping coat’. Although a bit tubby at aged four, she grew into a great beauty in later years and was commented upon at my school by the boys. They were most embarrassed when they learned she was at that point aged only eleven.

FAMILY HISTORY

‘And that is not a piano!’

The tone for the household was set by the adults and the dominant male was undoubtedly the Admiral. My father, Roger, would cope with this by agreeing verbally to what Alban demanded, but then he would go and do what he thought best disregarding his orders. As Alban was so fond of his son, always calling him ‘R’, he got away with it every time. That, in turn, gave the rest of us some protection from the impulse to discipline and make orderly.

One time I was playing on the front lawn after recently learning to whistle. The Admiral, known to Alice and I as ‘Grandfather’, flung open his bedroom window and shouted, ‘Do you realise you sound like a clown?’ The comment was not delivered as a joke.

The Admiral had little patience with bossy people, who might try to compete with him, especially women. He would say that farming required ‘women, dogs and children to be kept out of the way’. He also abhorred lateness. After a career in the navy from aged thirteen till his late fifties, discipline and orderliness were imbued into his bones.

However, farming was not always compliant with strict time-keeping and animals especially could take their time and would not readily adhere to deadlines. Vets and the like found it hard to keep to tight schedules.

One day he called for the A.I. (artificial insemination) to come to the farm, as he had a cow that was bulling. He spoke brusquely on the phone, ‘Admiral Curteis here. Plas Yolyn. One service, please. PAUSE. Eleven o’clock will be fine. Thank you.’

Eleven o’clock came and went, and there was still no A.I. man. Half-past-eleven. Twelve midday. Only at a quarter past one did the man finally arrive on the front drive where the Admiral was pacing up and down waiting for him. Not being best pleased, he barked, ‘Good afternoon,’ followed by, ‘This way’. Feeling no need for small talk, he promptly marched the A.I. man down to the stable yard where the cow was waiting.

‘In here,’ he said, opening the stable door.

The A.I. man went in carrying his bag, only to come back out a second later looking puzzled.

‘I am the piano tuner!’ he said, ‘And that is not a piano!’

There were endless stories of one kind or another told about the Admiral by neighbouring farmers who had all had dealings with him. He took a bet with the two teenage sons of the neighbour about the result of the Test Match. They bet him that England would win, and he bet them that Australia would. The price if he won was to be a ‘kibbling’. That was a bag of corn to be ground for feed for cattle. As it turned out the Australians won so he went down in his van taking not just one bag of corn to be ground, but a whole van-load. The two boys complained they had only bet a single bag of corn, to which he replied, no doubt in a voice commensurate with his rank,

‘We said a kibbling. And I don’t bet in chicken feed!’

This was a story they told with great enjoyment for the rest of their days.

Vice Admiral Sir Alban Curteis KCB

The cottage at Plas Yolyn was having an outside toilet installed with Roberts the local carpenter hired to carry out the task. The admiral saw him heading home on his bike going down the drive before the job was finished.

‘Roberts,’ he barked, ‘where do you think you’re going?’

Roberts replied, ‘I’m trying to fit the boards, Admiral, and I need a finer saw to get the gaps between the boards closer.’

To which came the reply, ‘For God’s sake, man. You don’t have to make the bloody thing fart proof.’

You could collect half a dozen or more similar stories. It seemed like everyone who knew him had at least one such to pass on.

The war had taken him into a period of illness and he’d been retired in 1944 from a most senior war-fighting post. He lived until 1962 and, for those few years, he was able to become the farmer he wished he had been right from the start. But, in those days for sons, it was Army, Navy, Church and Law. His eldest brother Harold went to the army and was killed in WW1. Alban was sent into the navy at 13. His younger brother, Oswald abandoned Britain as he couldn’t bear the idea of becoming a clergyman since he had a bad stammer. He emigrated to British Columbia in Canada. All the children were named after saints, hence ‘Alban’, which he hated. Their father was the seventh generation of clergymen of St Mary’s Sevenoaks, Kent.

Harold had also emigrated to British Columbia but unlike Oswald, he felt he had to return to Britain when WW1 started, out of duty to the Empire, which ominously he did. There is today a suburb of Vancouver named after him,‘Curteis Point’, where he had built himself a shack on the shore in a beautiful cove before returning to meet his fate in the trenches.

Oswald’s descendants told the story of the Depression in Canada, where he had bought a farm ‘on the bank’ and was in total despair and about to lose his land as he couldn’t pay the interest. Auntie Dot, his daughter, still alive when I visited B.C., said, ’You wouldn’t believe the Depression. You couldn’t sell a hog for a dollar.’

I went to lunch at her house and was treated to a most amazing traditional meal with great quantities of everything plus all the trimmings. Oswald’s daughter in law, Auntie Peggie, was still alive, also well into her 90s. The two nonagenarians were competing to be first to have me round to a meal. Auntie Dot won the contest.

Dot said grace –

‘Thank you, Lord, for bringing our cousin Henry to visit us. He’s such a nice boy.’

By then I was approaching fifty!

Regarding the Depression, Alban had arrived at the critical moment on a British warship as Captain docking at Victoria on Vancouver Island. Dot and Oswald had gone on board his ship as visitors where they told Alban about their financial woes. He immediately handed them the money to pay off the bank, giving them a cheque there and then, and for that act of kindness, which saved their farm and family, I was collecting the gratitude 75 years later. By this time the family had become wealthy through running a demographics computer software business called Baragar and consequently owned properties in the Vancouver area.

My father, who was Oswald’s nephew, also had a stammer. He decided in the late 1940s to abandon engineering in Peterborough where he was testing diesel engines for Perkins. He had before that spent four years during WW2 in India working on degaussing ships. He had fallen ill there with dysentery going down at one point to seven stone in weight before an Indian doctor treated him and fortunately he recovered. He came to help Alban on the farm, deciding he would prefer to get outside the factory building at Perkins and live a life in the fresh air.

Roger, however, was living in the Shropshire backwater that was Dudleston in the 1940s and this presented another problem. The area was not so conducive to finding a wife. This was also partly as he too, like Oswald, had a bad stammer which made socialising a major undertaking and possibly put off women who would otherwise have chosen him for his looks and gentle character.

His mother who was called Essex (nee Morrall, the family that had occupied Plas Yolyn for two centuries) sadly died of Hodgkins Lymphoma in 1940 when Dad was 21, no doubt the saddest moment in his life as he was very close to her. The widowed Admiral then married Essex’ sister Freda, who we all called Fave, pronounced Farve, a name from her baby brother Cyrus Morrall’s mouth.

Fave, known after marrying Alban in 1941 as ‘Lady Curteis’, arranged with Mrs Helen Lyon a friend and distant relative, for my mother Elizabeth, then still a Lyon, to go and ‘help Roger with the milking’.

Four children eventually resulted, of which I was the second, born over the border at Chirk in Wales in October 1954, fifteen months after my sister Alice. I don’t know what caused Oswald’s stammer, but my father’s started when aged six, he was hit on the head by a passing car’s wing mirror on Wimbledon Common. The stammer improved throughout his life, but when we were young he found it very hard to even answer the phone or greet someone at the door.

While my father was gentle and inclined to use reason to resolve situations, my mother was formidable and would deploy her amazing strength of will to win her way. She was hugely social and was always organising parties – tennis parties, Scottish reels, dinner parties, games of cricket, birthday parties, Christmas and any other that she could think of. These would fill our days. Of course, all the guests would return our invite, so there was never an evening, especially around Christmas, to have just to ourselves. If we complained about the non-stop partying, mother would just tell us that ‘you’ll enjoy it when you get there’. ‘And she was right. We did – dammit,’ Alice was to say later.

My father instinctively knew that things in this world were not necessarily as they should be, having gone through the war and detesting the formality of the social life in his day. My mother, on the other hand, had no doubt that everything was exactly as it should be; that unquestioning loyalty to things was, therefore, the right approach – the Conservatives, our MP, her former schools and teachers, the WRVS, the NSPCC, the Royal Family, God, the church, the vicar, her children’s schools and teachers and her friends, who were often people who shared these same certainties about life.

It made it hard to be a rebel with her around, or an innovator, as everything about the world in her opinion was already just perfect as it was. She laughed at the snobbery of some of her friends who would use phrases such as ‘O.C.D’, meaning ‘our class, dear’, but inwardly she shared some of these very traditional British middle-class attitudes, or at least felt intimidated by them and complied with their demands. This was a shame as she was inwardly much broader in her attitude to people, very active as a church visitor and very caring about people in the village and people generally.

My grandmother Helen  Lyon  drawn by John Sargent 1915

Her Australian years had inserted some informality into her personality and, as a result, the tendency to snobbery was tempered. In fact, she wavered between the two ways of seeing the world; the formal and the informal. Children in other exclusively formal families were far more restricted than we were, and some, the more intelligent, I believe suffered more as a result. With her coming from a more privileged background she saw it as her duty to help people who struggled at a lower level. She never had a job throughout her married life, except part-time tennis coach and charitable tasks which filled her time. She was busy with a full social life, looking after her family and keeping in touch with her enormous social network through letter writing.

Her mother supported her financially and helped us with things like holidays and school fees. Despite the lack of funds and extremely low productivity of the tiny farm, my mother’s unwavering certainty was that we would carry on being at a higher social level into the future indefinitely. Change in the social and financial order wasn’t something that happened in her life.

Indeed, she carried on living in Plas Yolyn for sixty years, assuming that nothing had actually changed, mostly supported by others. She listened to the news on the radio and TV every day, but I don’t think it ever really penetrated her inner certainty in the status quo of the world she knew. Of course, the reality was very different. Both my father and I had to protect her from the enclosing reality of the modern world by following her preferences and financing everything. It was necessary to do so, for if the order she believed in was disturbed, she was capable of extreme tempers and outbursts.

I often wondered what the source of Mum’s unhappiness was, as it was to have a big effect on my life. One factor was her parents’ divorce. It was bitter. Her father Dar Lyon was not faithful to Helen. She tolerated his dalliances until he took up with the nanny when he was in his forties. Doreen was nineteen. Dar promised Helen he would desist but failed to keep this promise. The nanny and he later were to produce four more children, but as far as my mother was concerned, the main factor of significance from the divorce was that she, her brother and sister lost their father. They were all deeply affected.

The divided Lyon family, just arrived Adelaide 1940
Malcolm, Sue, Helen and Liz (my Mother)

WW2 was just beginning. Mum recalls the last time she saw Dar during her childhood years was when he took her to see the latest Disney production – Pinocchio. She remembers a great big man in military uniform crying and crying beside her. Helen had decided to take her three children out to Australia to get away from the war. Bombing and gas attacks on civilian populations were expected. Dar was later to command the Royal Artillery in Gibraltar. In WW1 he escaped the worst on the Somme with a blighty wound; jumping carelessly onto a nail which went right through his foot. He survived the Second World War too but was to hardly see my mother again, except on just one or two occasions.

Dar Lyon courtesy of Movietone News

We were never allowed to meet him. That was the case even though he lived until I was nine and Alice ten. He spent many years after WW2 in the Seychelles as a colonial judge and later Uganda. He had been in African countries practising as a barrister before the marital split from Helen; notably Tanganyika and Ghana. Tanganyika was a German protectorate pre-WW2 ruled with British law. Mum went to school each day and was taught to walk in, salute and say, ‘Heil Hitler.’ She thought it meant good morning!

Dar’s sporting talents were legendary and when I met people in the Seychelles who knew him as the Chief Justice of the islands, they spoke of watching him play cricket, and what a wonderful sight it was. He was once described as the best batsman Britain ever had who never played for his country. He once completed a century partnership in the morning and a century partnership in the afternoon against the Australian test side in a warm-up game. While his brother Bevs played for England, Dar’s wound from WW1 occasionally troubled him and on the day of his trial for England wicket-keeper, it was one of those days. He also wrote a cheeky telegram to the head of the selectors, making up a rhyme using the selector’s name. In those days people didn’t get away with such things. He was known for his colourful comments throughout the games he played, as once while wicket-keeping for Somerset, a batsman edged one past the slips to the boundary where a flower bed was kept and he quipped, ‘there go four more geraniums.’

He wrote some memoirs, which my mother kept. He mentioned a teacher who had a stammer at Rugby, his public school. He asked him a question mimicking his stammer. He was called out by the teacher and given six of the best in front of his classmates. ‘Very well deserved,’ he wrote. He mentioned his love of horse-riding, which pre-WW1 was still an important means of transport, and how he loved riding across the countryside near his home at Caterham.

Bevs his brother, played cricket for Gloucestershire, and Dar for Somerset. They had opposed each other in the Varsity Match between Oxford & Cambridge and played Men's Doubles at Wimbledon as a pair. His son Jeremy claims they might have won, though I haven’t managed to find the records. Dar also wrote songs for a famous female artist of his day and had been President of the Footlights Club at Cambridge, a contemporary with Noel Coward. He wrote a few books, mostly about cricket, such as ‘A Village Match And After’. He tried standing for Parliament as a Liberal and for a while was hired as a Movietone News sports reporter, interviewing all the top players of his day, people like Donald Bradman. He also commentated on Test Matches, making little quips as the game progressed, a style later extensively copied and improved upon by people like Brian Johnson who admired Dar greatly and sometimes mentioned him in his commentary.

Despite his immense talent, his later life was not entirely to his satisfaction as he spent too many years stuck in colonial outposts doing a job he probably wasn’t entirely suited to, earning less than he thought was his due.

I went and read his law cases and his personal file, which the Seychelles Government permitted me to do. I found his legal understanding on the weak side. All he wanted to do was find amusing things in the cases in front of him and send the stories to his colleagues in Uganda to laugh over.

They used the official postbag to update each other on the characters who came up before them each week. He sentenced some poor soul to death wearing the black cap, but the conviction was overturned on appeal since he hadn’t realised he was applying the incorrect legal code for the Seychelles islands. He was called the ‘singing judge’ as he sometimes sang his judgements rather than speak them. He would frequently wear tennis shorts beneath his robes desperate for the case to be over so he could go and hit some balls with his friends.

Clearly, a person of enormous charm, my conclusion from reading his papers was that his intellect was not as high as it might have been. His handwriting became steadily more illegible as the years slipped by and there were rumours of him driving his car around Victoria in Mahe while under the influence. Reports of this and other alleged misdemeanours began trickling back to Whitehall. He was not favoured by a certain politician called Collet who wanted to introduce land reforms in the Seychelles and remove the privileged position of the land-owners. Dar regarded these as unconstitutional. Jeremy, Dar’s son, told me Collet was a Communist. These political opponents ensured that stories of his colourful lifestyle didn’t go to waste and they filed an official complaint demanding his removal. His behaviour was far from perfect, but probably not untypical for many in privileged positions at that time.

Before long, a scandal erupted in Parliament and he stole the headlines of The Times for a full week as his future was discussed daily before the nation. The disgrace of a drunk British judge was beamed out to the Empire. This kind of story perfectly suited people working behind the scenes who intended to end Britain’s Empire everywhere East of Suez. It placed him in disgrace and everyone but everyone came to know of his failures. It was probably another reason why we were never allowed to meet him. He was accused of racist attitudes, drunkenness and corruption, all of which was faithfully reproduced by The Times newspaper, thus destroying his reputation. Had he been corrupt, where was all the loot hidden? I’d like to know. His drinking was undeniable and there were unconfirmed stories of a relationship with a maid at the house, La Bastille, resulting in the birth of a son.

While I was going through his papers I felt a strong connection to this man I’d never met, yet whose life had had so much bearing on my own. The Seychelles government clearly became worried as to my intentions as I went around asking questions about the former Chief Justice who had played a part in the island’s history. That part of the story is not covered here. The book, ‘To Be A Nation’ by William MacAteer, covers it well enough. MacAteer was not a fan either!

A message arrived for me at The Reef Hotel where I was staying from the Vice President in which he invited me to a meeting in his office the next day. Once he realised I was making no attempt to challenge the status quo or in any way rewrite the history of the islands, and that I was purely on a personal mission of the heart he gave me total access to anything I wanted to see. They gave me a room at the Public Records building to carry out my research. The tears rolled down my cheeks upon seeing Dar’s handwriting deteriorate over his years in the Seychelles. I yearned to meet just once this amazing man who I would never meet; to try to fill the missing gap in my understanding as to who I was; to somehow work out why my own family were so deeply affected by him. Both my mother’s and my grandmother’s views of me and the way I was treated by them were to some extent a result of my being like Dar.

As I went round Victoria I met other people who had known him and they all clearly loved and admired him, just as my mother had done. I write about him now still emotional, the grandfather I would never meet. My mother’s wrench must have been a hundred times worse than any sadness in my heart; aged eleven, she was clearly ripped in half by the divorce. When we were children she would come into the room to ask if we wanted a drink or a snack. If there was a movie playing on the TV which had a little girl and a Dad in the scene, she would immediately weep standing behind us in silence. This well of deep sadness could be summoned in an instant at any moment. That was surely the main reason she became as she did and not as stable as would have been nice.

Her other wrench was leaving Australia where she had so many friends including a boyfriend called Kevin Megary; a tall handsome part-time soldier who had won her heart. Helen, her mother, had persuaded her to separate from him and return to England, but she stayed in contact with her happy life in Australia for the rest of her life on a near daily basis through letter writing and later e-mails and the internet; including with Kevin Megary, who my sister Rachel thought looked very handsome in photographs. The reason she left Australia was not due only to her mother’s persuasiveness, although Helen clearly had a powerful influence including wealth. Mum also had a feeling that she was British and not Australian, well remembering a wonderful childhood in Britain prior to leaving in 1940. Her brother and sister were younger and had less British memories. They were less affected than Mum was by the divorce being younger and less aware as to what was going on.

The decision to leave Australia may have been the right one for her, but it was another huge emotional wrench which she struggled with throughout the rest of her life.

She says she came on her first visit to Plas Yolyn as an adult with her old Australian friend Rote Ingoldby (Mum had once lived at Plas Yolyn as a child while her parents were overseas on a colonial posting in Africa). They were about a mile short of the house in the lanes when their car broke down. Someone went ahead to tell the house they were there. Roger appeared, lifted the bonnet of the car and in seconds fixed the problem. This was the start of her attraction for him she would say as he was ‘very nice looking’. The house itself was no doubt also a bit of a ‘bird puller’. Additionally, he had an Alvis car which made him look quite the sporty type as he sat in the driver’s seat. Helen approved of the idea of such a match and allowed her daughter to come and stay at the house belonging to Admiral (Grandfather) and Lady Curteis (Fave) as described earlier. What could be more respectable?

LIVING THE DREAM

Why can’t you be like your father?

But was Mum going to be happy? That was the problem. If you buy the label, you have to also live with the product. Even today, Dudleston is a backwater. In the 1950s Plas Yolyn must have seemed like the back of beyond. It had a vibrant village community of friendly faces, but not the city life Mum had known in Adelaide, Australia and elsewhere.

Also, her mother had always had money and coming to Plas Yolyn meant learning to live on what little it was possible to make from three churns of milk a day, wheeled by hand on a trolley to the gate and picked up by a lorry. Not surprisingly, she found this life very hard to begin with. Dad found himself removing all the keys from the cars to stop her leaving on at least one occasion as she had packed her things to go. Mum ran her own separate household attending most of the daily chores herself. The staff ran the other side of the house where Gran, the Admiral and Lady Curteis lived.

She told me that it was only when I was born that she was able finally to settle and accept that life in the middle of nowhere was to be her fate. She accepted it, but I suspect she never really felt she was in the right place as her unsettled manner frequently demonstrated. Not until she was very old and losing her mental capacities did her aggression lessen to a point where I could relax a little, though even then with her mind affected by dementia, she could still find a way to attack any female who was close to me.

Before I hit puberty, I remember her as a wonderful loving mother. But, once I turned thirteen, I started to feel uncomfortable with her attitude towards me. It was if she had become an alcoholic and I was the alcohol; she would use any excuse or method to control me. She could be aggressive and I remember ducking down behind a chair as china would smash behind me, piling up on the floor. Looking at the growing pile of pieces, I was frightened. I couldn’t understand where all this anger was coming from. Any flirtation with girls was definitely not going to be permitted and few wanted to make a second visit to the house. From my point of view, it became easier not to bother. This was another reason why I wanted to get out of school early; so I could get away and go and live somewhere where my life could be at peace.

My issue was not just my relationship with Mum which was probably made complicated by her separation from Dar, surely the biggest loss of her life. Helen, her mother, my grandmother who we called ‘Lelen’ decided she didn’t like me and made a point of telling me so. This may have been for the same reason my mother became overly obsessed with me, that in some ways I must have been like Dar; a little bit in looks but also my cheeky boyish character must have reminded them of the man they loved but could not be with. ‘Why can’t you be like your father?’ Lelen would say to me. ‘I don’t like you.’ It was a strange combination, having an over-obsessed mother who loved me too much and a grandmother who detested me all for the same reason.

Aged eight I asked my mother why Lelen didn’t like me. How could any child understand why their grandmother didn’t like them and consistently told them so? Grannies are meant to be cuddly and loving. It seemed Lelen had been traumatised by the divorce. She never met anyone else as far as we know, drank gin and tonics every evening and smoked a few cigarettes while reading endless novels especially Agatha Christie. She had money from investments but was apparently not able to achieve a happy balanced state of mind after the divorce. I can understand why with her struggling to cope, we were not permitted to meet Dar, but I still think it most unfair. A child should be a chance for a fresh start, not be made the person who has to pay the price for past wrongs. Of course, life is rarely like that; I am sure there are others who have met similar circumstances and can relate to what I am saying. The irrational is probably more powerful in human affairs than the rational.

Helen was right, I wasn’t much like Dad in character nor all that much like the Admiral. It seemed possible that my character, which was quite different from that of my brother Hugh and sister Alice, was indeed from elsewhere in the gene pool. Rachel my younger sister was also more Lyon-like. Dad, who was quite a shrewd observer of people said I was like both grandfathers, with the same drive that the Admiral showed when confronted with any form of opposition, combined with the Lyon charm. You might add cheek.

Mum stopped talking about Dar as life went on, but when we were younger she would often come on regretful talking about him with a look of sadness in her eye. No matter how many times she tried to rationalise what had happened with Dar, her mother and Doreen, she couldn’t make the pain of losing him any less.

Given all this, was it any wonder I had a yearning to seek out his past and make a connection with him? I did this partly by befriending his sons from his second marriage. (Mum met and made friends with Jeremy Lyon at Dar’s funeral, although they had met once before). I also felt drawn to visit the Seychelles and seek out people who had known him there. In such a way I was able to finally get to know him a little, even if it was only through the mouths of others who had known and liked him, or with whom he had come into political confrontation.

None of these things were known or understandable to a small boy of four years old, but the emotional environment around me, for whatever reason, even at that age I could tell was not quiet. Children can pick up on a vibe and react to it without necessarily understanding what it is and why it is there.

The threat of punishment loomed from time to time and there were outbursts and rows, but otherwise, at Plas Yolyn, it felt as if we were living in a form of heaven. I would challenge any child living in a place like Plas Yolyn to think otherwise. Even today, some children when leaving after their week’s holiday there, are reported to cry when the moment comes to go through the gate and return to normal life. There is a tranquillity and spirit about the place which goes beyond the physical and cuts through to the soul. It doesn’t matter how much trouble there may be at any given moment as the generations come and go and battle each other; the timelessness and beauty of the place overrides and heals all.

I first attended Bellan House School in Oswestry with my sister Alice, being picked up by a bus which went past our gate. This was terrific fun, after being left behind on my own without her for a year, which I found hard to bear! I was soon recognized as the naughtiest boy in the school and for that reason, the only child in Kindergarten not to be given a prize at the end of the year. I remember whacks of the ruler on the back of the calves delivered by the diminutive Miss Maud Jones, which always brought you up short but apparently had little effect on my behaviour. We learned all the letters and numbers and as I was quick, the following year they bumped me up an extra form to join children who were a bit older.

Even in the higher form I went ahead. Our friend Diana Flint (nee Topham) told me she looked at my maths book and was shocked to find that while she had T and U above her sums work, Tens and Units, I had another column with the letter H. She asked me what it meant. I replied that these were ‘Henrys’.

I did collect one good telling off from the teacher Mrs Trevor Jones. One of the girls, Jenny John, had no brothers at home, being one of three sisters, and appeared keen to see what boys had that girls didn’t. I decided to assist her by filling this gap in her knowledge, showing everything I could underneath the desk at the back of the class. Unfortunately, when her mother arrived to collect her, she recounted in great excitement and detail, in front of the teacher, what a wonderful lesson she had received that day. When the teacher called me over, things were not looking too good. She said to me that she was going to tell my parents what I had done and asked me how I might feel about that. I can remember thinking that they probably wouldn’t be in the least bothered, but realised too that an act of apparent regret and repentance was called for, so laid on as good a one as I could manage, hiding any inclination to laugh. The teacher must have given my performance a pass, as no words were spoken to anyone else as far as I know, and it was all hushed up. I waited for the blowback at home that evening, in case she had carried out her threat, but none came.

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