NASA’s focus on the Moon provided an inspiring, rolling backdrop to my early youth. And the state schools I went to, although rough by current standards, had enough really good teachers to keep me interested. That we didn’t have much money led me to appreciate possessions, especially things that I could scavenge or make myself. The fact that they could not answer most of my questions was good for me, because I was forced to turn to books (weekly visits from my school’s traveling library saved the day – we had very few books at home). Both my parents were supportive and encouraged my interests where they could. Caption: With my sister Jenny, in about 1967. But I was also interested in trees, writing, machines, history, animals, music, rocks and fossils. The planets looked even better: I could see the rings of Saturn, the polar caps on Mars, I watched Jupiter rotate, and the Moon was simply fabulous. A few years later, my uncle Malcolm built me a 150 mm telescope. Through it I saw the Moon, the stars and the planets, all against the sodium streetlight glare of the big city. Later, my grandparents bought me a 40 mm diameter table-top telescope as a birthday gift. My mother said they were “shooting stars”, which confused me (how can a star “shoot”?) and left me wondering what I had seen. One evening in 1965 I noticed several bright meteors as they flashed overhead within a short interval. Caption: The author in London, his wife Jing Li in Beijing and daughter Suu Suu in Honolulu, all aged two. “Quick! Put another two shillings in the meter!”, was a common shout. We had no car, no phone, and the electricity meter had to be fed a steady supply of coins to keep the lights on. My first memories are of a winter with very heavy snow (lots of fun), of having appendicitis (lots of pain) and of the birth of my sister, Jenny, all in 1962. We lived with my grandmother, upstairs in a council house in Tottenham. My father worked on a factory assembly line producing industrial steel cutters, my mother was a telephone operator.
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