My biographical bit: Part 1

It is a fact that some readers are more interested in the writer than the writing, so here goes part one of my biographical bit.

I was born in Whitehaven in January 1960 (followed by a sister in November 1961), although we soon moved to the Cumbrian village of Drigg - probably best know for its nuclear waste dump. My mum was a homemaker and my dad worked at the Sellafield site, not in Sector 7G like Homer Simpson, but as part of the maintenance crew. He was a painter and decorator by trade, and died last year at the age of seventy eight.

Back then there were very few children to play with. One was a little girl called Karen, but I didn't like going round there because I was scared of one of her soft toys, and another was a boy called Andrew where he and I ended up throwing coloured wooden building blocks at each other (I think mine were bigger than his and he was jealous). So that was that, really.

After some bad winters, the Cuban missile crisis, and the Kennedy assassination (I remember them) and an episode where the cows in the neighbouring field decided they wanted to consume the contents of our garden, the time loomed when I would have to go to school. That was not practical as it was twenty miles away in Millom! So we moved house - to Leicester, where my dad got another job (with the painting firm TJ Cundy) and we bought my mum parents' house for the princely sum of £2500 (4 bedrooms, detached!). I had never seen so many people in all my life, and it was here that I first met black and Asian people, too.

Then came the school (Evington Valley Infants) - and the dreaded headmistress, the evil white-haired Miss Spanton. Worse still was the experience of being shoved into a classroom with forty-one other kids, all of whom knew each other. I was the instant outsider. Not from there, someone who spoke differently, too. Not a good start.

Jack Orchison, December 15, 2013.