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calm and their cool and never ever uttered cross words. It was a triumph of tact which I know none of our daughter’s in law could ever have coped under similar circumstances.  Finally  in March  we moved out to a rented house at Sevenoaks and I felt it was a victory for us all, but above all it was a massive achievement for Jill’s patience and maturity, and for this alone she deserves a medal like the Victoria Cross. My thanks and admiration of her for getting over  that first  terrible  winter’s hurdle  can never ever be fully expressed in any words, but it was, after our seven months separation,  the second  major  bond that really sealed our love for one another. In Ceylon with a good job and a nice life, a pretty wife was  a pleasant luxury and  a nice  companionship. Now under these first two harsh  difficulties  I realised what a wonderful woman I had by my side, and what a strong determined character she had. There were to be many more trials and tests  later on which were to reinforce my opinion. 
 But there were some amusing episodes  during  my induction  course. I had to spend two days at Billingsgate Fish Market, then situated by the Monument in the City. I had been warned that if I drove there certain men “ owned” the pavement and one had to pay them to park. I drove down at 5 am on freezing foggy morning and parked near the market. A man approached me and I ignored him and I went about my job. Mother had asked me to bring her back something nice , and my eyes fell on the biggest crab that I had ever seen. The monster still alive and with claws tied was given to me in a string bag to carry. I returned to the car which seemed all right, placed the crab in it and then I walked all around to find neatly placed under my rear tyre was a broken piece from a  wooden crate with two jutting nails, so that as I reversed out it would have given me a puncture. I kicked the object away and drove home with my crab  back to the flat and Mother was in the kitchen looking out of the window and had not heard me come in. I took the crab out of his net and placed it on the kitchen table behind her and then she turned round to see the monster.
Jill came in and I showed it to them and said :
“ Well here you are I brought you all a present as you wanted, now I will have to be off back to the office”.
“What are we going to do with it?”
“Put it in the cupboard under the sink and leave it there till I come home in the evening”
When I came back later, I found out that they could not stand its scratching  and had boiled him in a large stainless steel washing up bowl of Mother’s. He was so big that we 5 of us ate crab for 5 days, as well as giving a whole lot to Jill’s sister Janie who lived nearby!
In the spring we rented for three months a house at the Weald near Sevenoaks. It had been a small cottage that been extended cheaply using asbestos sheets with no insulation, and it was bitterly cold, in what was a late spring. I tried everywhere to buy a house but they were all out of my price range. We nearly bought a bungalow  at Ide Hill but our offer was rejected as “derisory” and then out of the blue we had a letter from a friend of Jill’s from university saying that she heard that we were looking for a place in the country, and had given our name to an estate agent friend of hers to send us properties. A huge bundle of houses came in the post but they were all around Merton, and Carshalton and south London, and I put them to one side as being not what I wanted. But Mother plodded through reading them all and said to me:
“There is one here which I think you should look at in a village called Newdigate near to London”.
Beryl had come to stay with us from Yorkshire and we drove over to see the place on a sunny spring afternoon. I left her and Jill in the car whilst I went in to see if anyone was at home and met the owner General Ewbank and his attractive wife. They had just returned from a seven year overseas stint in the army where he had first been based in Berlin, then later as Military Attache in Washington  and the house had been let by the army to various tennants and latterly for the last six months had been empty. It was in the most appalling state of repair, and he did not want to spend time renovating it again, but wanted to buy a small bungalow on the south coast and concentrate on his interest in Missionary work. The place was in the most dreadful mess, with  peeling wallpaper,  windows broken by vandals, there had been a leak in the roof, and the garden was a wilderness of brambles etc. But there was a bright airy feel to the place, with large windows and  the sitting room faced south west and the sun streamed in. There were five bedrooms, three doubles and two singles which was nice with our large family.  I returned to the car and called for Jill and Beryl to come, and we all agreed that this had the potential for it to be our new English home. We decided   then and there to buy it,  and be able to settle down in our own abode at last. Finally in June 1965  for the sum of £9,500 we took possession of the  one only property that we have ever owned, which in its own way moulded our lives with its spacious grounds and isolated position.  Mother came down a couple of  weeks later to see it and when I told her what I had paid for it she turned and said:
“Mike you are a damn fool, you have paid far too much when you compare it with the £7,500 I got for my  lovely Orchard House in Buxted.which was twice the size”
“But here we are in the commuting belt only just over half an hour for London, hence the difference”, I gently explained.
We had no furniture at all apart from some beds that we had bought from the Ewbanks for £10 which was just as well as the whole place needed cleaning painting and renovating. We got a builder in to mend broken windows, patch up roof leaks and do various  basic repairs. I took two weeks leave to start the decoration and we were helped  by sister Helen who turned up to take control in her own inimitable way. She arrived in her new Ford Cortina Estate car and in spite of all the space in the empty house, she refused to sleep indoors but camped and had her bed in the back of the car. I rigged up a long  lead for her to have a mains light to read in bed by, and she was as happy as a sandboy! She insisted that I went to the builders merchant and buy 28lbs of  pure caustic soda crystals, and then we took off all the doors and stripped the old  paint off outside and hosed it off. In the same way, indoors, all the floors, skirting boards etc were cleaned off layers of old paint from the beginning of the century and again  hosed down. The mess was unimaginable but we were young, were both full of energy, and determined to make a new home in a new environment. The children loved having their own rooms and a huge wild jungle of a garden to play in. About a week after we arrived someone from the village called and told us that down the lane there were kittens, so Janet and the others went down and knocked on the door and in her typical Charnaud direct way said;
“We are the new people from Stoneways and we want one of your kittens.”  The lady could not refuse and so the children had their first pet a little bundle of white with a tabby nose which was their constant companion.  The work was endless, and for the next six months Jill and I never sat down in the sitting room, we worked and worked till late at night , and then just flopped into bed exhausted.

Meanwhile at work I had done a series of projects on fish farming etc when I was asked with another accountant to meet a boat builder in Wroxham, Norfolk  and see about establishing a leisure complex on the southern broads. I instantly took a liking to Leslie Landamore and his wife Pat who both lived life to the full, designing and building yachts, and in their spare time cruising the Baltic. They had an accountant called John Oliver  who was most meticulous about watching their interests down to the smallest details and who our lot found tedious and over finicky. But I thought to myself that should I ever go into business on my own, then he would be the right man to have by my side. The whole idea for this project had come from a retired ex-industrial director who had interests in everything from George Outram in Scottish

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