Portsmouth - 1958-1962
The second section from the memoir I began to draft a few years ago...
Portsmouth - 1958-1962
In the late 1950s Mombassa would have been a very rudimentary city. Subtracting fifty years’ development from when I went there myself, it’s the only possible conclusion. Working on the guns of a frigate as a trainee fitter and a civilian member of the Merchant Navy, my father had been posted away during those crucial months of 1958. I have no idea whether there would have been any discretion in the matter — or choice, come to that — but Mombassa, on the coast of Kenya, East Africa, was where the message found him when news broke about my imminent arrival.
It probably would have been cheaper for the Merchant Navy had they recognised he would be needed in England at the end of May and thus not sent him away in the first place. As it was, they ended up taking him from his ship, transporting him inland from Mombassa to Nairobi, the Kenyan capital, and then flying him back to London. From there, he travelled to Portsmouth. By the time he returned the drama was over, and Ian Gouge — unaware of both the trauma leading up to his birth and the journey home by his father — was lying in wait. [I thought twice about writing that phrase as it suggests something of menace, of a trap…]