Chapter 2

My time at Milla and Simon's gave me some time to think about my life.

Perhaps I should introduce myself. I'm John Nelson Winters. The Nelson bit is mothers maiden name and, yes, there is some connection to the Hero of the Nile and Trafalgar. At one stage the family had been quite wealthy, but that was before the First World War. My father was in the Army and my sisters and I went to boarding schools.

Home was an old farmhouse owned by my grandparents. We lived there as and when dad's postings allowed, but got to see a fair bit of the world as well. David and Camilla lived nearby. They studied law and I studied engineering. They went into practise from college and I went into the Navy as an engineering officer.

I had intended to make the Navy my career, but then the Berlin Wall came down. The government decided to cut back on the armed forces and asked for volunteers for early release, I.E. redundancies. They were going to do it in tranches. I quickly realised that would mean a lot of guys looking for jobs. I was only twenty-seven, had a degree, and experience. I did not want to be competing with a lot of others for whatever jobs were available and I certainly did not want to be pushed out further on down the line. I wanted some degree of control so I bid for release in the first tranche.

It was definitely my best move. I was offered a number of positions and selected one with a property development company. I was responsible for all the electro-mechanical installations.

I did very well and learnt a lot about the rest of building industry. That's how I met Diane. She was the P.A. to one of the architects we worked with. She definitely knew about presentation. She looked like a model, even on site she made personal safety clothing look glamorous ... She was three years younger than me, great fun to be, with and after about a year of courting I proposed and she accepted.

We married just before my thirtieth birthday and decided to get on with having a family straight away. Just over a year later Henry was born and two years after that Georgina arrived. Diane didn't lose all her curves after the births but you would be hard pushed to call her plump, even so. She was more the classic Marilyn Munroe, (or maybe I should say Sophia Loren, since she is brunette), which I preferred anyway. Diane became a stay at home mum.

As I said earlier, we lived in a property on Mum and Dad's land. It had been a fair sized farm at one time, but over the years bits had been sold off to pay death duties and so on. The cottage stood on the small patch of land which we had retained around the family house. Harry and Georgie, as the kids were known, had plenty of room to roam, and Mum and Dad had ponies for them both in the stables. Diane was an accomplished horsewoman and since I had been brought up with my own pony we would often ride out as a family. With my pay-off from the Navy, my salary, and no need for a mortgage we had a pretty good life style.

Once the kids were big enough, Mum and Dad would take them for a weekend every month or two. Diane and I would take the ferry to France, or book into a small hotel somewhere and make like honeymooners. Once the cheap flights began we would take the odd city break to Paris, Rome, Berlin, Amsterdam, and so on. Then we bought a weekend house in Devon near the coast. When they were bigger and Diane and the children would spend the school holidays by the sea. I would spend the weekends with them and also when we had contracts in the south west.