A Personal Voyage of Discovery.People often ask me what caused me to write the Chronicles of Adam Black and I suppose it goes back to the distressing suicides of Army recruits at the depot at Deepcut a few years ago. In 1987 when I was a Major working in the Ministry of Defence in London I was tasked with producing a report on the number of deaths in the Army for the previous year and the reasons for those deaths. At that time the Cold War was just coming to an end and the Army was not in any conflicts across the world so perhaps it should not have been a surprise to find that the highest number of deaths were due to suicides with road accidents being a close second. It made me think about the trials and tribulations I went through firstly as a schoolboy and then in my Army service from the age of fifteen to nineteen. I felt that it was important for my children to know a little about my early life so I wrote my memoirs, not for publication but simply to pass them on to them when the time was right. Having completed that exercise I realised that the young teenagers of today might well find it interesting to see the contrast between their lives today and what it was like back in the nineteen fifties and sixties. I was very much a loner as a youngster mainly because my mother as a housekeeper was always employed in big houses with no children close at hand for me to play with so I used to create stories that I would act out whether that meant climbing to the top of trees, swimming in the river or climbing onto the rafters of barns. Therefore, I thought that I could create a character that mirrored me in many ways but that had a special gift that made the stories I used to create as a young boy come to life. I have always worked on the principal that there is nothing you cannot do if you put your mind to it . It is as Goethe once said: “Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it.”Specialties: Writing fictional novels and painting landscapes, which it appear are appreciated as I have won a prize for my artwork and recent made some sales of both.
Listed skills include Fcma and Accountancy.
