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I was born in South London in 1944, just 4 days before Hitler's V1 flying bombs began falling down all over our neighbourhood. Our house was lucky and survived.
Dad was a Canadian bomber pilot with the RAF. He was killed while on his 28th mission when I was 6 weeks old. Mum was also did her bit working at top-secret Bletchley Park where the German Enigma code was broken.
My first novel, IN THE LONG RUN, has a backdrop of South Africa's real life Comrades Marathon - 55 miles of torture run over massive hills, most years in big heat and humidity. This was selling really well for a first novel until my publishers went bust almost overnight, so no royalties for George.
I later re-published the title with Create Space. The book has a foreword written by TV broadcaster and Olympic athlete, Steve Cram. Steve, whose world record for the mile stood for over 8 years, was also guest of honour at the original launch party in March 2000. This was held at the London HQ of advertising giants Saatchi & Saatchi, where I was working at the time as a copywriter.
How the heck did I ever manage to get myself such a job in Don Draper land when only three years before I’d been a long-term unemployed bum with no educational qualifications? That's another story, one I've just finished writing in a bio called AIN'T FINISHED YET. Sure I can identify with much of the fabulous TV series Mad Men, although sadly from a personal point of view, with very little of the gratuitous sex and huge salaries involved.
BURIED PASTS, now available in Kindle format, is a tribute to my Dad. It's not by chance that the central character Mike Stafford's surname is so similar, nor that he has the same hometown in Canada. Even the fictional RAF 79 Squadron is as close as possible to real life. In fact, I pictured Stafford as being Dad throughout the writing. I liked to imagine that this was how Dad would have responded to the same difficulties and dangers that Stafford finds himself confronting.
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