CHAPTER THREE I had been back from leave at the Army Pay Corps barracks for only a day or so when I went down with severe stomach cramps. The camp doctor depressed the right side of my abdomen, I gasped in pain and by the afternoon I was in a private room at Worthingthorpe Hospital scheduled for an operation to remove my appendix that evening. It was the first time in my life that I had been admitted to hospital. My step-...

CHAPTER TWOCall me a hopeless romantic, but what I really needed was a reason to worship not my step-mother Adalind, but Adalind the woman, a female Viking wearing a horned helmet in the shield-ring. The wind plucking at her skirt, her figure braced against it: her voice heroic, shrill and commanding. There had to be something reborn in her out of the ages, some ancient power of domination which would awaken in me the anc...

CHAPTER ONE Though forty, there was still something very girlish about my step-mother Adalind. It was said that she had married my aged and ailing father during the war, more for the promise of inheriting the bungalow at his death than for any romantic reason. He died when I was eleven. The bungalow passed to my step-mother freehold. She had a widow's pension, and so we got through those difficult years on a somewhat frug...

Rosamund lived in a detached house on a promontory overlooking the sea. That night she made me a simple supper and invited me to stay. If I thought my luck was in I was mistaken. She talked about herself, listened to romantic music on Radio Luxemberg, then she made a couple of telephone calles from the hallway. I slept in the spare bedroom. I had the impression that this was all about something else rather than the seduct...

Our family originated before the last war from the Dutch-German border area where the dialect Low Dietsch is spoken. My parents used it in the home and so I grew up bilingual in English and Low Dietsch. It was 1960 and I left High School at age sixteen, a young man who had done well at sport but little else. The best opportunity open to me in the City was as a filing clerk at a small Dutch bank located in the financial di...

My mother died at the age of eighty in 2002 and now, at the tenth anniversary of her death, I feel free to reveal the details of our weird relationship. It is an example of the strange twists of terrible misfortune and luck which may befall the family member. There is no doubt that Virginie Rosehay was my biological mother, but exactly who she was remains for me an unsolved mystery. I was unable to find her birth certific...

In the early 1970s, as soon as I turned sixteen, I was encouraged by my classmates at school to make an appointment with a call girl to savour the delights of sex. Under no circumstances were my parents to be told. I rang the number provided, went directly to the address with my five-pound note and was received by a grinning maid who considered that I seemed underage and asked to see "the note from your Mummy allowing you...

PART TWO OF THREEAt this point in my narrative I should explain a few details about my mother. The promontory known as Viking Point stands 500 feet high and is almost sheer cliff amongst rugged and broken coast with a boulder-strewn shore. Our house is built into a large niche in the cliff almost three-quarters of the way up. If you draw a line due east from the house across the North Sea, it touches land on the other sid...

PART ONE OF THREE My mother Muriel and I lived at the coast on the outskirts of a small village. Our house with grounds within a ten-foot high wall, and known as Viking Point, was perched on a rugged cliff overlooking the North Sea. To reach it from the village one walked the length of a steep, long winding lane. Since we both had to walk to the village and back at least twice daily, and were forced by circumstances to su...