I love travel. I think that my father passed on his wanderlust to me. As a boy growing up in prewar London, my father spent his school holidays in Hamburg, trying to learn German. He was devastated by the wartime bombing of Hamburg. My parents married towards the end of the war, and their first home was in Barnet, London. It was cheap because of being in the bombing zone.
After the war, it took years to save up before people could travel. My parents went first to South Africa, where my father worked as a consulting actuary. Concerned by the first race riots, my father then moved the family to Wellington, New Zealand.
I grew up in Wellington with my parents and two brothers, but never knew any aunts, uncles, or grandparents. I had a burning desire to travel: to meet my relatives, find out where I came from, discover my roots. Every school holiday, I was envious of classmates who went away to stay on family farms. I loved the smell of cows, and always put my head out of the car window if we were driving past any grazing cattle.
When I turned eighteen I wanted to be a herd tester. This involved driving round from one farm to another, testing the cows’ milk for tuberculosis. I thought this would be a fun job. My father said no. He was certain that I would get into trouble with a lonely farmer. Instead I became a respectable computer programmer.
At university I studied languages, still with the intention of travelling. I knew that it would be easier to meet people socially and to understand their culture if I could speak their language. I loved French and German. Russian music has always moved me to tears, so I tried to learn Russian, too. I’ve always believed that it’s impossible to translate poetry. I longed to be able to read the poetry in its original language. I was fascinated by classical Greek also, and it was the Professor of Classics at Victoria University in Wellington who advised me to continue my study of mathematics. He was sure that it would enhance my career prospects.
With a group I travelled on the Trans-Siberian railway from Nakhodka through Siberia to Moscow and Saint Petersburg. I then travelled alone through Poland and Germany, heading west.
After an unplanned emergency appendectomy in Paris, I flew to London to stay with extended family. I stayed there fifteen months and worked on a computer system that dealt with the financial transactions for the North Sea oil rigs for an American oil company.
I loved the art galleries and concerts in London, but I missed seeing the stars. I started to buy the Suddeutsche Zeitung, the Munich newspaper, and to apply for jobs. I’d already made up my mind to accept the first one offered.
That’s how I went to work as an export clerk in a tiny village in the lower Alps of Germany. They wanted someone with English and French, because that was part of Germany that had been zoned French after the war, and nobody in the village had wanted to learn French after that. It was beautiful, with three cross country ski loops. The people were very friendly, and I happened to meet an elderly man who’d kept his copy of Hitler’s “Mein Kampf”. All those books were supposed to have been burnt at the end of the war. This man was convinced that one day his copy would be extremely valuable. That made a big impression on me, and might have sown the seed for the plot of “Goldmine Experience”.