At first we stayed with family friends, Joan and George Deal, in Bexley, Kent. The Coronation took place soon after our arrival. Few people at that time had television sets, and a crowd of us spent the day watching a tiny black and white, well grey really, screen in a neighbour's house. 

Eventually we moved to an army transit camp near Emsworth, Hampshire. My father was posted to Dorchester, in Dorset, and we moved to another transit camp at the former wartime airfield of Warmwell, a few miles from Dorchester. We were accommodated in an old single storey building which had probably once been offices, buried in woodland. It was here that I was re-united with my bike, which with most of the rest of the family's possesions had been in store while we were abroad, and I roamed the countryside, on and off the road. 

Eventually we moved to a flat in my father's camp in Dorchester, an old Victorian building. My educational chickens came home to roost, now. As well as the poor quality of the service education in Egypt, I had been off school for several months. I was too far behind for the local grammar school to accept me, and since I was15 and over school leaving age there was no other option. 

Or at least, the only option was to find a job. My father wanted me to follow him into engineering, and arranged an interview at Whitehead's, the torpedo manufacturers in Weymouth, with a view to an apprenticeship, but this did not come to anything. It wasn't something I wanted to do, which probably showed, although at that time I had no idea what I wanted to do for a living. So I went to the Youth Employment Office. There was no help or advice, and no questions asked. I was simply handed a couple of cards from a file and left to get on with it. One job was in the printing department at Eldridge Pope's brewery and the other was with the local council. I went to the council offices first, because they were nearer, where I was seen by the Borough Surveyor, Mr Davison, who offered me the job on the spot. I took it. It never occurred to me to try for the other job first. I don't think I would have dared tell Mr Davison I'd think about it, anyway! In retrospect, the other job would probably have been a better bet, but in those days careers, if they were thought about at all, were something for the other side of National Service. 

The job was as Assistant Storekeeper at the council's Highways and Housing depot. This was in Poundbury Road, a couple of minutes walk from the flat, only seconds by bike, starting at 7.30am and finishing at 4. But I usually managed to be late. The building which housed our office and many of the storerooms looked old and must have housed horses at one time as most of the doors were of the stable door variety. There were 2 long buildings at right angles to each other housing, as well as the office and stores, a tall workshop where a fitter maintained the vehicles. The depot has now completely disappeared, absorbed into the Top-o' Town car park.

I worked with Bert Purseglove, who had an ulcerated leg, which gave him a lot of trouble and which seemed to be uncurable. A middle-aged man, Bert spent his entire working day perched on a high stool, writing in ledgers and operating a huge electric adding machine. The window which he faced commanded a view if the gate and most of the rest of the depot. He was responsible for working out the men's wages from their time sheets as well as for the contents of the stores. At this time a labourer's wage was about £6 per week.

My job was to issue tools and materials to the council workmen; shovels, pickaxes, paint, tarmac, screws and nails, bricks and cement. I fuelled the council's lorries using a hand operated petrol pump and kept records of their fuel consumption. And I also ran the football sweepstake. All errands, and there were many, were run using my bike. I remember sometimes Bert told me I shouldn't use my bike, since I wasn't insured, but that meant little to me and I couldn't have walked all the miles I was expected to cover every day anyway.

The foreman was Frank, a north-country man I believe, who had a little office on the site but who was usually out and about in his pick-up truck. The yardman was Reggie Samways, an elderly (to me) slightly stooped man who looked after the general tidiness of the depot and helped me when necessary. A very kind and gentle man, Reggie lived in Trinity Street in the town centre. One of the chores I needed help with was when a delivery of bricks arrived. These were common un-faced bricks which were stored on a platform in one of the buildings. They were delivered on an open lorry, there were no pallets and forklift trucks in those days, and had to be laboriously unloaded by hand.

When I arrived the council dust lorry was of the old-fashioned type with curved sliding doors on top into which the dustmen tipped the contents of the bins. This was later replaced by the high closed in type, similar to those used now, able to compress its contents, although the dustmen still manually tipped the bins into the back of it. Wheelie bins were a long way off yet. Every day the dustmen would bring me a few sticky, ash-covered syrup tins. How they managed to retrieve them from the rubbish I never asked. I had to wash the tins thoroughly and, and they then were used to issue paint to council house tenants, dispensed from gallon containers. Before I left  our suppliers had been persuaded to sell us the paint in 1 pint tins at the same price as the gallon tins, for which I was thankful.

I can't remember being the subject of any of the practical jokes which are often played on young people just starting work, although I did think that I was having my leg pulled when the fitter asked me to go to a shop in the town for a gallon of Gunk. I was very surprised to be handed a container of cleaning fluid.

Another of my duties was to go to the council offices in North Square every morning to deliver and collect the paperwork which any self-respecting local authority generates. At this time I would also visit a baker's shop in South Street to collect cakes for mine and Bert's mid-morning tea break. My choice was almost always a Chelsea Bun.

Dorchester Town Council was, as well as the syrup tins, also recycling paper and card. In the depot there was a covered area where the materials were sorted and compressed into bales. The man who did this work looked out for magazines about films and photography for me. One I remember, a copy of Kinematograph Weekly',  confidently predicted that films would soon be distributed to cinemas over the phone, rather than physically by van, following the invention of the video recorder. Fifty years later it still hasn't happened.

The cinema was my main recreation. I was a fanatical film fan at that time. There were rwo cinemas in Dorchester, the Plaza in Trinity Street and a smaller one down a side street. I can't remember its name. Each with a change of programme three times a week, and I went to every one. The only exception was on Sunday, when old films were shown for one day only, and I had to choose between them. When Cinemascope came to Dorchester the smaller cinema had to show such films on a smaller screen than normal, which wasn't quite the idea, since the building did not have the width to accommodate a wider screen. At the Plaza I attended the first showing of a Cinemascope film there. I sat at the front of the Circle and the film, a wartime submarine drama I think, started on the old shape screen. Then the sides of the screen opened out and it was like falling into the picture.

I also developed an interest in the mechanics of film making at this time, and bought an old 9.5mm projector and a new but decidedly bottom-of-the-range camera from a local chemist, John Tinegate, who had a shop in High West Street. John was a cine enthusiast and my father and I had a demonstration of the projector, John's own property,  at the back of the shop one evening. The camera, a new Pathe Pat, cost £13, about 5 weeks wages for me, an incredible sum for an extremely crude and troublesome piece of equipment. The black and white films, lasting about 90 seconds, cost I think about 11 shillings. Colour was probably about a weeks wages..

After I had bought the projector, but before I bought the camera, John Tinegate lent me his own Pathe H camera to use on a family holiday to Jersey. Somehow I managed to splash out on a colour film for this trip, to be used very sparingly!

I also started to take an interest in still photography, or at least the processing and printing side. I was always more interested in the technical than the artistic side of photography in all its forms.

It was nearing the time when I would be called up for National Service. I decided to join up as a regular, in order that I could choose what job I did in the forces. It also paid better. I opted for the Royal Air Force, and went to the recruitment office in Bournemouth to enquire about photographic training and to set things in motion. I was soon invited to visit Southampton to be for a medical and an aptitude test, which seemed to consist mainly of questions about electricity.

While I was waiting, my father was posted to West Derby, in Liverpool, and it was from there that I finally received my orders to report to RAF Cardington, in Bedfordshire.