Michael Bowles was born on the 24th of March 1940, which was Easter Sunday that year, at the Bird in Hand pub at Stoulton near Worcester. There was a lot going on in 1940 of which he was totally unaware, the Dunkirk evacuation, the Battle of Britain, the Blitz and the suicide of Virginia Woolf, for starters.
He was educated at Bredicot village primary school and Pershore Secondary Modern School before taking up a mechanical engineering apprenticeship at the Royal Radar Establishment (RRE) and College of Electronics at Malvern. He then embarked on a career as a chartered engineer at RRE Malvern and Pershore, the Royal Aircraft Establishment (RAE) Farnborough and Bedford and the Aircraft and Armament Evaluation Establishment (A&AEE) Boscombe Down, which is described in his first published book, “WORK (and play).”
Having retired in 2002, his main preoccupations now are acting as a carer for his wife, Irene, painting in acrylics and multimedia and writing books. This book was in fact his first book to be written but the second to be published. The first to be published was WORK (and play) and he has a third, Growing Up, completed and ready for publication and a fourth, What we did on our holidays, as a work in progress.
This is a non-fiction love story with a tragic end, played out in the 1960s and 70s in Worcestershire, on the Hampshire-Surrey border, in the old county of Huntingdonshire and in Wiltshire.On the way, the author sheds light on the Worcester of their courtship in the early 1960s with its pubs, coffee...