When I was seven, we lived for a short while in Battersea, London. Prince of Wales Drive, facing Battersea Park and past that, the Thames. A dingy flat made all the gloomier by the constant petty sadism of my father. His method of blowing up at any fault I made didn’t help me learn to read and I still couldn’t master it, to his disgust. I went to primary school close by, shoddily put together, one floor, on the lot of what must have been a bombsite. London still hadn’t been rebuilt entirely after the war.

At this time the moon landing happened, and my father bought a small black and white TV to watch it. We woke up in the early morning and I remember the crackling of the talk-back from Neil Armstrong as he hopped on to the dusty surface of our nearest planet, white light flickering all the way back to our grey parlour.

At school I blossomed a little with a sympathetic lady teacher who gave me the encouragement I hadn’t experienced before. I even wrote my first poem after watching my first snow flurry past the large single pane windows of the prefab classroom: “Snow, snow, you come and go…”

I remember reading a word properly for the very first time. In the bathroom at home, taped to the wall, was a brochure for a ship we would be traveling on. “Oriana”. The letters suddenly melted into focus before my eyes, and I mouthed the syllables to myself: O RI A NA… Oriana! I realised I could read, and on my own, with no one standing over my shoulder to make me nervous.  I had cracked the code and was filled with the spirit of independence and achievement.  

Many years later I thought about the incident and realized that the middle of “Oriana” contains my name at the time: Ian.