Describe the places youve lived

My home town, the place where I was born and brought up, is Wolverhampton. This is an industrial town in the West Midlands area of England and had a lot of heavy and manufacturing industries when I lived there, everything from steel-making to making tractors,tires and lock and safe making. My father's business was there a tailoring and clothing shop for both men and women.To be honest the town did not have much to recommend it and my mother said she always hated living there.I was born there in 1941 during the Second World War but within a year or so my father, who had joined the army, was selected for officer training and soon after he was warded his commsission we moved to a place called Corsham in Wiltshire where he had been posted.

At that time with the country at war the government had the power to utilize all available empty rooms in your home and make them available for other people to live in. This was called billeting and my parents and I were billeted first on a farm near Corsham with the Mitchell family and then with a Mrs. Harvey who lived in Corsham. We must have lived there until 1946 when my father was demobilized and he returned to the family business in Wolverhampton.

We I had two homes in Wolverhampton as I grew up. We first lived in Hanbury Crescent then we moved in 1948 to a house in Rookery Lane and that was the family home until I took the momentous decision to emigrate to Canada in 1967. That is a story in itself. I ended up in Vancouver where I had a small bed - sitting room in The West End while I hunted for work, My spare time I spent exploring the city or on the beach.

After about three months I got a job but it was in Calgary at the Hudson Bay Company, now known as the Bay. So that meant packing up and moving my few possessions to Calgary and I lived there for about a year then I was transferred back to Vancouver. That was in 1968 and I Ilived there first as a single person then, after I met Rhona and we got married, we set up home first of all in Deep Cove on the North Shore, then in Hyannis Point in North Vancouver.

Both were new properties, Deep Cove was one of the first Strata Title developments in British Columbia and consisted of about 20 units, probably today they would be called patio homes though they were in two long blocks roughly in the shape of an unjoined T. We all had our own front door and carport and a micro back yard. The second house on Hyannis Point was brand new and very fancy and had lots of space and an unlandscaped yard at the front and back.

That kept us busy for a few years, then in 1977 (I think) we moved to West 19th Avenue in Vancouver, This was an old (1913) and smallish house within walking distance of the General Hospital where we both had worked. We lived there with an ever increasing family and an uncertain level of income until 1988 when, out of the blue, I was offered a job ( and predictable income) in Campbell River. The move took place in 1988, just in time for our children to start a new school year, and the rest as they say is history.

We have been here now for 28 years, still in the same house that we bought when we arrived here, and have no plans to move in the foreseeable future. We like the community and feel VERY much the country bumpkin when we visit the big cities of Vancouver, Victoria, Portland and Istanbul!