Eventually we all got married and got serious with our own careers. Everybody was a totally mad and well known to the local constabulary but a loveable bunch of characters who had evolved from the war and through the wonderful years of the 1950s. Then there were the RAF camp dances at Chessington once a week. We would sometimes spend the whole of a Saturday night in Brighton and arrive back in time for the Tolworth Excel Bowl to open on a Sunday morning. I remember we would cheer on a chap who would often appear revving his engine up on the roundabout in an old grey Ford V8 Pilot. We used to congregate on the bridge over the Hook underpass and hold late night motorcycle races from the Toby Jug in Tolworth to Hook and eat hot dogs sold from a small caravan parked outside Sainsburys. From there the crowd would set forth to places like the West End, Dorking and Box Hill and the coast until 1965 when we finally turned to courting in cars and drifted apart. I became a keen motorcyclist and, like him, a bit of a tear away and one of my main meeting places was the Tip Top Cafe in what I think was Ace Parade. I later attended (unsuccessfully) Ewell Castle School, famous for Oliver Read. Andrews Road Surbiton and made a huge number of friends in the surrounding area. This was a popular up market out of town venue at that time and on one occasion I met Diana Dors who was teaching her husband Dennis Hamilton to swim. At the very young age of 7 or 8 my mother used to send me off on my own on the 65 bus with my rubber flippers and inflateable ring to learn to swim on my own at The Ace of Spades Hotel swimming pool. In 1947 my family moved to Thames Ditton close to the old AC car factory and then in 1949 to Lovelace Gardens in Surbiton.
I was born in Kingston on Thames in 1943.
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