Once upon a time, a young gentleman & a young lady arrived in East Anglia with little more to their names than Welsh university educations and a Mk 5 sky blue Ford Cortina 1.6 L…
It was the summer of 1998 when I & my girlfriend of 2 years, Lucy Clifton, arrived for summer work with a plant breeder firm in Thriplow.
A good friend who lived in the village had recommended the firm he worked at every summer & accommodation would be no problem as his girlfriend had a great tent that we could borrow.
It would be a warm summer and the season was just a few weeks…
What we’d do after that was anyone’s guess but when you’re only just 22, who cares?
A carefree summer of tending rapeseed, harvesting rapeseed, cleaning rapeseed, planting rapeseed came & went; lifelong friends were made & shadows lengthened on the lawns.
Summer turned to autumn and then…hang on, it’s winter, Christmas week even!…we’d better get a shift on with something…
The unknown turned out to be Haverhill in Suffolk, of all places. I’m sure it has some redeeming features but our sole joy in our nicely Ikea’ed 2 bed rented terrace was Bob, next door’s incredibly tactile Ginger tomcat.
Living betwixt a sewerage plant and a flavour & fragrance factory, Bob’s ever-eager loving greeted us every day in this New Year & whenever we returned home from being a temp postie (me) or number-crunching for the MRC at Addenbrooke’s Hospital (her).
Lucy had bagged herself her entry into the rat-race but my chemistry just wasn’t being exercised on the doorsteps of Great Shelford.
An application for an analytic lab monkey had been lodged with a firm in Royston, Herts because I valued my mucous membranes & functioning tear ducts more than I suspected the local firm would; after 6 months it paid off…
We were Royston bound…
