Singapore - the early days

So this is how we would have arrived in Singapore and provides a snapshot of the type of life my parents would have enjoyed in the 1950s.

Our first residence was a flat at Fife House in Grange Road, which was off Orchard Road, one of the main thoroughfares out of the city.

This is the view from the balcony looking up Grange Road and as you can see below, I really was quite young to have travelled so far at such an early age.

And I have always loved to be in the water!

I was born in..................

Glasgow, Scotland at 1pm on the 4th of April 1953.

Just myself, my mother Amy and the hospital staff in attendance, as my father Jimmy, who was an outstanding amateur golfer, was out on the course apparently.

He was a qualified Chartered Accountant who had married Amy, a Registered Nurse, on the 18th of December 1951 in Glasgow's All Saint's Church.

Dad had spent most of the war in Asia and had decided that there were excellent opportunities for a young accountant and his family there, so, 8 months after my birth,

the three of us boarded a Lockheed Constellation at Heathrow in London for the long flight to the first colony to figure in my life. This was to be the first of many flights that I was to undertake up until I was 18.

Somewhere in the middle of my first 18 years!

"Ahh!" I exclaimed out loud, as in my anguish I had flung my hand against the wall next to my bed and accidentally bent my fingers backwards.

Pain was now added to the sadness and grief, I was already experiencing, having found myself left in a new and unfamiliar world dominated by concrete, steel and crowds of boys and people I did not know.

From the dark, in the direction of the bed crammed up against the bottom of mine drifted,

"It'll get better Robert, you'll see, everybody feels this way at first".

These kind words, that sent me off into a further round of heaving sobs, were offered up by fellow nine year old Christopher Venn.

Kip, as he was known, had been instructed to look out for me, as he was an old hand, having survived in this seemingly alien world since he was 5 years old.

And so the turbulent start of another life in a new colony.