England my England

Our holiday plan for England was to spend most of the time visiting a part of the country we had not been to before - the West Country of Devon and Cornwall. However, during their journey to meet me in London, and while there in the day or so before I arrived, Pat and Garth had discovered a yearning to revisit the village that we lived in the early 1970's and I must admit that I was not averse to seeing what had happened in the place in the intervening 30+ years.

We settled in Long Whatton, Leicestershire in early 1971 on arrival from New Zealand on a 'working holiday' along with the three kids aged 5 and 6. After a few weeks on the unemployment register trying to find a job, I landed a position at Nottingham University as a Research Assistant in the Economics Department. I was attached to an economic forecasting project and my job was to take the formulae given me by the academic members of the project and turn them into Algol programs and then run the collected datasets through them so that they could analyse the results. After doing that for about six months I landed a more permanent and better paid position in the Cripps Computer Centre which is where I was until leaving the Uni in February 1974.

Living in the small village through those few years was a good time of our lives. We didn't have much money but we had a great environment to live and work in and the kids were able to attend the local village school which was about 30 metres from our front door. Anyway, a chance to revisit old memories was all the urging that any of us needed to make a detour via Nottingham on our way to the West Country.

On the Thursday morning we checked out of the Corus Hotel and left Pat guarding the luggage in the foyer while Garth and I walked along Bayswater to Marble Arch to pick up the rental car. Since Garth was going to be with us for a few days we had extra luggage to cart around so we got a larger vehicle than I had booked - a Vauxhall (Opel/Holden) Zafira with 19l diesel engine and 6-speed manual mixer. The old(er) chap who got the car ready for us, gave us lots of advice about how to get back to the hotel, and more importantly the way to head north east out of London on our meandering way to Nottingham. We had decided to head up the A11 via Cambridge and Ely to the Wash and then cut back over through Grantham to Nottingham and end up at Long Eaton for the night. It turns out that Frank had been evacuated to the Ely/Wash area during the war so new the area well. He'd apparently run away a couple of times before being settled with a family that was a bit kinder to him.

So we left the Alomo Rental depot with me at the helm of a strange vehicle in a strange town. Frank's directions included taking a turn around Marble Arch to get onto Bayswater Road which was quite exciting but after that it was reasonably straightforward to get to the hotel - the only problem then being to find a legit parking space. Garth went in to get Pat and I stayed outside making sure we didn't get a parking ticket which wouldn't have been a good way to start off our adventures.

Eventually we were on the road and generally following Frank's navigational directions to get out of London. Next post I'll pick up on our journey northwards.