“I was shy at first about letting Remarkable Lives film my autobiographical life story. But the family said they wanted to give me the unique and most special birthday present of making me a TV star at the age of seventy-five,” said Bob.
“Their special gift turned into a wonderful experience. The interview was fun, the camera guys made it all so easy, and the film has captured my life story, all the way from childhood to this incredibly special celebration birthday. The real special gift was the lifetime of memories that were beautiful, emotional, and moving for me to recollect… and which the whole family now seem to enjoy.”
Robert was born in London in the years immediately after the end of World War II. Despite living in a prefab house – one of the temporary homes built to replace thousands of houses destroyed in the bombings of the wartime blitz – he thinks of his childhood as idyllic, and utterly different from the experience of children today. His grandchildren are astonished that Bob’s early playgrounds were the bombsites, and the tumbledown, ruined carcasses of offices and houses which spread for miles around his home in Balham. With a lack of adult supervision which children now find hard to comprehend, and with that era’s lack of concern for ‘health-and-safety’, Bob and his schoolfriends played happily among the collapsing ceilings and floors of burned-out and battered buildings, before riding their bikes for hours out into the surrounding countryside.
As a self-confessed tearaway teenager, from a deprived part of town. Bob’s life could have taken an entirely different direction had he not chanced one day on a Royal Navy recruitment office. On the spur of the moment, he joined up. If ever there was a strong advertisement for the Royal Navy, then Bob is the perfect candidate. The Navy gave him the education that his schooldays had failed to do, showed him the world, gave him the confidence to meet, woo and marry his young girlfriend, Jackie, and then fight for his country in combat zones in Aden, the Middle East, and finally the Falklands.
His remarkable life story so enthralled our professional interviewer that their chat, scheduled as usual for around 90 minutes, ran on for several hours to finally cover the extent of the Falklands conflict, and Bob’s retirement from the military after becoming one of the service’s most skilled aircraft engineers on board HMS Illustrious. After a lifetime of travel, through which his children could sometimes only keep track of his whereabouts on their school globe of the world, Bob settled down with his loyal wife Jackie to retirement in Norfolk. Amazingly the end of his naval career proved not to be the end of his working career, as he joined the product engineering team creating Linda McCartney’s range of vegetarian foods, and once again became a world traveller sourcing factory equipment from around the globe.
When retirement finally loomed, it was to Jackie that Bob bowed in the decision of where they would then live. After a lifetime as a loyal navy wife, moving home time and again with Bob’s changing military postings, Jackie picked rural Dorset to be near their extended family. “We now live every day to the full,” they explain. We make few plans but go where we like and do whatever takes our fancy.” And the happy couple’s recipe for a long and happy marriage? “Learn the virtues of patience and tolerance. Don’t try to change your partner… that’ll never work… love each other and be caring how you talk. Sometimes, we talk for hours.” Says Jackie. “And sometimes we don’t talk at all,” jokes Bob, as their interview ends in fun… and helpless laughter.
Comments