"Just A Boy..."

I was a hideously shy child, as you can probably tell by the uneasy hands-behind-my-back posture I adopted for this snap of me aged about three (*). Again, this was taken at our front door

This would be from about the same time, here with mum and our cat, Tivvy.

I have to admit that I was a bit...well, cruel isn't really the word...with him. I just used to trap him under the upturned plastic washing basket and then sit on it. He was quite laid back about things despite this, and I remember wheeling him up and down the front path in that little yellow and white plastic wheelbarrow you see here.

Me with dad again. We went on our first proper holiday when I had just turned four years of age in 1966. The caravan was on a small site off Sandbank Road in Towyn near Abergele. In order to reach the beach from there, one had to pass through the little fairground and cross the main North Wales coast railway line on foot, there being no footbridge close by.

We actually had a small television set in our caravan, and I remember my uncle Glyn and his family - who were in another holiday camp a little way down the road towards Rhyl - coming over to watch the World Cup on it.

My brother and his first wife came up for a day or so as well, and here I am sitting at the wheel of Brian's first ever car (a 1955 Ford Consul Mk. I, registration number 584 GRE).

I had wheels of my own back home though, and here I am astride my trusty yellow and blue Tri-ang trike. I wasn't often allowed out on to the pavement, but here I am just by our front gate, with the lamp-post which marked the permitted limit of my ramblings visible behind me.

And this is my first school photograph, so it would be sometime between September 1966 and June 1967. I had very fair hair in those days...and my ears stuck out (that's a family trait, I'm afraid).

(*) There's a wonderful Charles Schultz Peanuts cartoon where Charlie Brown is examining a drawing by Linus of a man. Charlie says, "I notice that you've drawn him with his hands behind his back. This means that you yourself have deep feelings of insecurity". To which Linus replies, I drew him like that because I myself can't draw hands!"