Verity Press specialised in the fields of men's bespoke tailoring and bakery, although would tackle any work that was offered. The tailoring work involved a great deal of print retouching, where we would carefully scrape away shadows and paint in highlights to remove all creases and wrinkles in the cloth of the suit the model was wearing. Other work we did was stills for the infant industry of TV advertising. A favourite with agencies at the time was a shot where the product pack zoomed towards the viewer from a distance. This involved me in producing a set of prints of  graded sizes, all of which had to match exactly in density and contrast so that there was no flickering when the shot was filmed cartoon-style. I hated doing those prints, and the result would look very crude compared with the sophisticated images we see on our screens today.

We also worked for the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders, mainly at the annual Motor Show, when we had to provide prints of publicity photographs taken by our photographers very quickly.

Soon after starting work at Verity Press I decided to buy a scooter as a cheaper means of transport to work than the Underground. I went to the Motorcycle Show at Earls Court to see what was available and decided on a BSA Sunbeam. This I purchased from Flack's, on the corner of Station Road and the High Street in Epping. It was green and, unusually for a scooter at that time, had a four-stroke twin cylinder engine, 12 volt electrics and a self-starter. I soon stopped using the self-starter as it was extremely noisy.

I didn't use the scooter to go to work as much as I had imagined. Car drivers were very intolerant and many times they would draw up alongside me and then move in to the left, forcing me to drop back. And it was an unpleasant journey in wet weather, and the scooter's small wheels made it very unstable. After coming off twice in the wet, once when the front wheel hit one of those metal studs that used to outline pedestrian crossings, I decided that it was a fair weather machine. But I got about on it a lot at the weekends, exploring the Essex countryside.

The premises in Wardour Street were rather cramped and scruffy, and after perhaps a couple of years we moved to slightly better premises above the Ivy restaurant in West Street, just off Charing Cross Road. After a while I was given a few press type photographic jobs to do. And I bought another Rollieflex T, secondhand, to do some freelancing. In my lunch hour I would wander around the area of London where I worked, taking photographs and selling them to such magazines as This England and Autocar.

In 1964 my parents decided to take a holiday in Switzerland and offered to pay my expenses while there if I paid the basic cost of the trip. We went in September with the tour operator Wallace Arnold, flying from Southend to Ostend in a Vickers Viscount. From there we took a coach, travelling overnight, with a stop for dinner in the station restaurant in Metz. The coach had two drivers and they took turns driving, swapping seats whilst the coach was on the move.

We arrived at the hotel in Lucerne at 6am, to discover after a sleepless night that our rooms would not be available until the previous week's clients had vacated them. They were travelling back on the coach we had just arrived on, with the same two drivers. But once we had recovered from the journey it was a wonderful holiday in unbelievably beautiful surroundings.

A few weeks later, whilst waiting on the fogbound platform at Debden station for a train home something happened that would change my life forever.