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Publié par | Troubador Publishing Ltd |
Date de parution | 22 avril 2014 |
Nombre de lectures | 0 |
EAN13 | 9781783066568 |
Langue | English |
Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0150€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.
Extrait
A Cumbrian Lad
Barry Coulton
Copyright © 2014 Barry Coulton
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study,
or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents
Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in
any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the
publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with
the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries
concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.
All characters and events and actions are fictional
and no similarities are intended or implied.
All locations are real but addresses are fictional
Matador ®
9 Priory Business Park,
Wistow Road, Kibworth Beauchamp,
Leicestershire. LE8 0RX
Tel: (+44) 116 279 2299
Fax: (+44) 116 279 2277
Email: books@troubador.co.uk
Web: www.troubador.co.uk/matador
ISBN 978 1783066 568
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Matador ® is an imprint of Troubador Publishing Ltd
Converted to eBook by EasyEPUB
Dedicated to the memory of my great granddaughter, Mia Lucy
Contents
Cover
About the Author
Acknowledgements
Prologue
Chapter 1: The Early Years
Chapter 2: A Good Old-fashioned Apprenticeship
Chapter 3: Wear the Queen’s Uniform with Pride
Chapter 4: Reaching for the Sky
Chapter 5: I’m the Gaffer
Chapter 6: Africa Here We Come
Chapter 7: Broken Hill, Zambia
Chapter 8: Living on Half a Loaf of Bread
Chapter 9: A Tough and Dangerous Year
Chapter 10: One of the White Tribe
Chapter 11: Coulton Industrial
Chapter 12: Robert Mark Brett
Chapter 13: Flying My Dream
Chapter 14: Home to Blighty
Chapter 15: European Job English Salary
Chapter 16: Three New Relationships
Chapter 17: Fall of the Russian Empire
Chapter 18: A Russian Misadventure
Chapter 19: Coulton Instrumentation
Chapter 20: White Man’s Grave
Chapter 21: Kenyan Sugar, Not so Sweet
Chapter 22: A New Pair of Hands
Chapter 23: Clipper Round the World Yacht Race
Chapter 24: Looking for Paradise
Chapter 25: New Horizons to Discover
Chapter 26: A Pirate’s Life for Me
Epilogue
About the Author
Barry Coulton was educated in a small village school in West Cumberland. He served a craft apprenticeship at the Sellafield nuclear reprocessing plant and was awarded a flying scholarship while training with the Whitehaven Squadron of the Air Training Corps. At the age of 24, he gave up an aspiring management career with the UK Atomic Energy Authority and ventured into the wilds of Africa.
Barry has worked on copper mines in Central Africa, gas separation plants in Siberia, sugar factories in South America and oil refineries in Malaysia. He has installed and commissioned control systems on more than 160 industrial plants in 46 different countries. He aspired to own engineering companies in Zambia, South Africa, Russia and England.
At the time of writing this book Barry Coulton was working as a Black Pearl Pirate in the Disney film trilogy, Pirates of the Caribbean. He is a pianist, a time-served tradesman, a chartered engineer, a commercial pilot, a blue water sailor, a background film actor and above all else, a world traveller.
Acknowledgements
I wish to acknowledge the tremendous encouragement and support given by teachers and lecturers at Distington Village School, Richmond Secondary Modern School, Workington College of Further Education and Liverpool Regional College of Technology. Each contributed at different levels, and in their own way, helped to change a country bumpkin who failed his 11-plus into a highly skilled professional engineer.
I reserve a very special mention for the excellent training provided by technicians and engineers at the Windscale and Calder Works of the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority, and in particular, I wish to acknowledge the help of Len Pearce, known to hundreds of ex-apprentices as ‘Fruity’. I owe my professional career to the help and dedication of this one person more than any other. Thank you Mr Pearce, your trust in me was well founded.
I wish to thank work colleagues and customers of Honeywell, Rosemount and Fuji Electric around the world with whom I have had pleasure to work alongside on so many exciting projects. Professionally, I would like to mention officers of the Institute of Measurement and Control with whom I served for several years and I ask them to carry on their excellent work in helping young people to develop their full potential.
Finally I wish to thank Mattie, a very good companion to my father in his later years and Anne, my own very dear companion and very forgiving wife. I thank them both for their perseverance with two very difficult and stubborn members of the Coulton family.
Prologue
Never a Dull Moment
I have been fortunate to know several beautiful and graceful women in the fullness of my life. This book is inspired by one of these women; she was my first and only teenage love; Margie. When I searched through Margie’s effects I found a collection of 25 handwritten pages. These pages were the beginning of her life story, ‘Never a Dull Moment’. Her writing style was simple and to the point, she laid bare her innermost thoughts about those who had influenced her life. Sadly, she was only able to write a very small part of her book and now 25 years on I have decided to use her pages as the opening chapter of my own story.
And now her story……
It was even funny how we met, in a dance hall in the small steel town of Workington, Cumbria. The town had dark grimy buildings from years of billowing furnace smoke, but a short drive outside town brought me to splendid grey slate fells, sparkling lakes and lush green fields. The people in Workington were friendly but life was not very exciting.
When I was a teenager the highlight of the week was dolling up on a Saturday afternoon and getting ready for the dance that night in the Princess Hall; it used to take me three hours to get ready. The Princess band was good; very much the Glenn Miller sound. I thought that I looked splendid in my six-layered petticoat, flared skirt and tight sweater. My waist was clinged-in with a black waspie belt that was so tight that I could hardly breathe. My shoes were very high stilettos with real mink fur bows. Looking back, I must have looked ridiculous.
My best friends were Anne and Jeanie. We each backcombed our hair into huge beehives, stiffened them with lacquer and then clipped little bows in the front. When I was at school I even had a Bill Haley Kiss Curl; I used to train it with soap and water. I cringe when I look at my old photographs.
Barry asked me to dance on that special Saturday night when we first met. I thought him a bit of a square because he wore a suit and owned a scooter; I much preferred Rockers to Mods. Barry gave me a lift home afterwards, but when he asked for a date and mentioned that he was only sixteen, I stood him up. I was eighteen; I knew my friends would hoot with laughter and say that I was cradle snatching.
I remember my first dance. It was the Tanner Hop at Harrington, so called because it cost six pence, or a tanner, to enter. We all wore school uniform, short socks and long glass dangling earrings. We didn’t have anything else. The last dance was always the single record, ‘You are my special the angel’. The girls knew that if they were asked for that one, then they had clicked and would be escorted home.
Everyone fancied Jakey; he was slim, dark haired and dressed in jeans and a leather jacket. He looked the part but didn’t own a motorbike. Strangely he had a yen for me and although he was supposed to be a bit of a tear away, I found him the perfect gentleman and rather gentle and shy. We were talking one night on a bridge when along came my mum and she clattered my ears all the way home. I thought that I would die from the humiliation of being hit in front of my boyfriend.
Mum was scared for us when we were out. She always said, ‘Remember I trust you’, before we left the house and she never slept until my sister and I returned and we were both in bed.
Nana
Nana, my mother’s mum, lived quite close to town in a small flat. She was a wonderful old girl. I loved to watch her brush out her long hair and plait it until it hung in a long rope down her back. She wore flannelette nightdresses and had a soft wrinkled neck. I used to sit on her vast lap and cling to the folds of her neck. She was like a warm security blanket to me. I was such a timid child that I refused to go for bread to the shop unless I had one pound in my pocket because I was so scared that I would not have enough to pay.
Nana had two husbands and she lost both of them when she was very young. The first died of cholera and the second was killed in France while serving in the Highland Light Infantry. He took a direct hit from an enemy shell and his remains were never found. His name was William and he was my grandfather. He was a brave soldier with several medals to prove it and I am very proud of him.
When Nana became a War Widow she found that she could not manage on the meagre pension offered by the government; she had Billy, Maurice and my mother Minnie to support. Times were hard and she was fortunate to find work in Queen Street Mission as a cleaner. She also took washing in and forced my mother to stay at home to help. It was several years before Nana finally relented and allowed my mother to take a job in the Beehive Department Store where she worked her way up from sales assistant to manageress.
Mum eventually married my father Joe Elliot and they continued to live with Nana until I was ten years old. Then th