Travel Biography - Week 1.

Since I started writing for this Blogger page, there have been several readers who have either asked me or suggested that I write a book about my travel experience. However, there are a couple of problems with this idea. First, are there enough experiences in my life to fill a book with, for example, 326 pages, the exact number took up by Simon Reeve's travel biography, Step by Step? Indeed, Reeve had some extraordinary life experiences which were very unique for an individual who never attended a public school, nor ever seen the inside of a university - the normal steps taken by any average journalist, especially one who hosts his own TV documentaries.

Simon Reeve.

The second problem is the extreme difficulty in getting the book published, especially without the aid of an agency. As I said in an earlier blog, most aspiring authors have their manuscripts winging their way back to them after rejection from a publisher. The same goes for journalism, especially on TV and the fame that comes with it. It's a profession nigh impossible to get into. Therefore, having developed a desire to write a biography on my travel experience out of encouragement from others, I hope that I will make an effort here on this Blogger page which will result in an enjoyable read.

It will also be noted that many of these events featured in this series have had a mention, even several times, before now. Therefore, as I intend to highlight more of the background on which these events occurred, I hope to create a more coherent picture - the one showing that my travel experiences are intricately linked with my Christian faith.

The Beginning - Growing up.

I was born at Westminster Hospital in London on September 16th, 1952, to Gaetano and Laura Blasi, both full-blood Italians who met at a post-war Italian community at the Barbican and married a few months later in 1951. As the story goes, when Mum was giving birth to me, two weeks past her delivery date, it was said that an English midwife at the delivery ward cursed us for being "foreigners" settling in England during the food rationing while the country was still recovering from the war. Hence, it came as no surprise when my brother was born six years later at St George Hospital, a different site chosen from where I was born. After my birth, we then settled at an apartment in Lillington Street, off Belgrave Road, until I was two years old. In 1955, we moved to a basement apartment of a swish Victorian townhouse at St Georges Square, Pimlico.

My parents and I shared the one bedroom, we used a tiny kitchen, itself barely larger than a telephone kiosk and featuring a disused coal cellar, and a dining room with the old coal fire blocked and an electric heater standing in front of it. Next to the dining room was a windowless corridor resembling a mine shaft, leading to the basement next door. Beyond that was our inclusive bedroom, followed by a disused chamber, possibly another bedroom, its floor littered with discards from other tenants, including a perfectly-working spring-powered gramophone, and some wax records piled next to it. The corners and the window of this room were covered with huge, black cobwebs, and I wondered how these spiders managed to survive without any apparent bugs crawling everywhere. A straight staircase led one from the servant's quarters, where we lived, to the far more ornate first floor. Past the foot of the stairs, the corridor led to some disused cellars.

In the 1950s, many buildings in London were blackened by soot before the great clean-up instigated by the Clean Air Act of 1963. During Autumn and into the Winter, smog polluted the city air, and I wondered whether this thick and dirty fog had an effect on me during gestation, thus, according to my parents, I was born "mentally deficient" as it was known during those days. Yet, I loved thrills, such as climbing onto the bannister and sliding back down it. Yet, Mum didn't hesitate to send me to a corner shop around the block to buy items she had forgotten to buy earlier or had run out of before time. This was an important turning point which eventually led me to be an independent traveller.

Walks completed on my own included a frequent trip to the adventure playground in Churchhill Gardens, an estate of then newly-built high-rise apartment blocks. Actually, the adventure playground was for the immediate residents of the estate, therefore, living outside the estate, I shouldn't have been there, but there was no apparent by-law banning entry by outsiders. At least, my parents knew of my visits to the playground. What they weren't aware of at that time, I was walking further on to Battersea Park, across the river Thames over Chelsea Bridge, itself overlooked by the four huge smokestacks resembling an upturned table, that was Battersea Power Station. When they eventually found out, they were shocked, but not horrified, and I wasn't even told off.

Being "mentally deficient", I was sent to a special school, Wedgewood Primary at Marinefield Road in Fulham (now known as Ormiston Courtyard Academy.) I was happy there. Contrary to being mentally deficient, I was able to read and write quite well - well enough to be asked by the teacher to show my fellow pupils to read. As for maths, I was taught the Basic Four - addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division - and I received more red ticks than crosses on my finished work. In short, for one whose supposed to be "mentally retarded" I was actually quite bright.

At Wedgewood Primary, I was impressed with the four chimneys which overlooked the playground. Unlike those at Battersea Power Station, these four smokestacks were arranged in a straight row. These, I found rather fascinating. There were actually three power stations straddling the River Thames within my area during the fifties and sixties. Battersea Power Station on the south bank, Lots Road Power Station on the north bank in the western end of Chelsea. Like at Battersea, this building also boasted four chimneys arranged at each corner. Lots Road Power Station supplied electricity specifically to the Metropolitan and Circle Lines on the London Underground. Finally, Fulham Power Station, also on the north bank, had its four chimneys looking into our school playground.

Battersea Power Station as I remember it.

Grosvenor Road and the Chelsea Embankment (the same road on either side of Chelsea Bridge) linked two of the three stations - Battersea and Lots Road - and the wide sidewalk with its continuous row of Plane Trees provided a lovely stroll along the embankment. From Chelsea Bridge, both Lots Road and Fulham Power stations could be easily seen, and a view from Wandsworth Bridge, facing east towards Central London, provided views of all three power stations, with Battersea a clear 2.21 miles, 3.56 km away as the crow flies.

Walks along the Embankment had always intrigued me when I was a boy. These walks took place mainly at weekends or during school holidays. I loved the area, especially Battersea Park with its miniature railway, boating lake, fun fair, decorative fountains, skywalk, along with ice cream, doughnut, and candyfloss stalls lining the North Carriage Drive. To the south of the park, further away from the riverbank, a swing park kept me occupied as I gleefully swung back and forth - exactly as I did at a swing park whilst backpacking Australia some 34 years later in 1997!

Walks across London progressed further during this stage of childhood. And that includes finding my way to Natural History Museum in South Kensington, more than two miles from home. Another venue I fell in love with, and getting there on foot from St Georges Square was a breeze. And as such, the foundation for independent travel was laid, both by personal experience, beginning from a short shopping errand, and by getting acquainted with the mysteries beyond our shores by looking at coloured political maps housed in an atlas.

Back at home in the basement of old servant's quarters, Dad owned a Collins Atlas of the World. I loved browsing through it myself, and I soon became familiar with world geography. So intrigued was I, that I wanted to memorise the exact shapes of the continents, and I did this by taking a blank sheet of paper and drawing the outline of all the world's continents - maybe a little distorted, after all, I was still only a boy, but what lies beyond the ocean's horizon had raised my curiosity and fascination. My effort paid off. At our primary, each one in our class was given three sheets, each featuring a portion of the world map. The exercise was to stick the three sheets to make a coherent map. I was the only one in the class who got it right, and my work was put on display in the school hall for all to see.

But if you think that my childhood was all peaches and cream, then think again. Who thought that I was retarded? Although my parents suspected, it was the health professionals who confirmed this and recommended a special school for such backwards children.

The situation was compounded by our neighbours who had children slightly older than me. On one side lived a girl a couple of years my senior - and whom I took a special secret liking - acting more like an adult than I did. Two doors away lived two brothers who were making good progress at school, a mainstream school, I might add! Therefore, the worse thing my parents could ever do was to compare me with them. It had put a strain on our relationship, gradually making me feel worthless and undeserving of any praise. Yet, I did think of Jesus Christ, whom I was told, "was a very good man". During this stage of childhood, I wanted to know this Jesus Christ. In fact, I always wanted him as a friend.

However, with reading, writing and arithmetic reaching the levels of a normal child of similar age, one could have looked again at my IQ level, and that is what happened after moving to Bracknell towards the end of 1963, then aged eleven years old, and placed in a normal school. And obliged to dress in a uniform.  In this small town of English whiteness, how I missed the innocent life in a cosmopolitan city!

Like the time we were in our playground at Wedgewood Primary. During my time there, a set of apparatus arrived at our school and it was installed in the playground. It consisted of a set of steps leading up to a boardwalk. The first length of the boardwalk ended at a small disused beer barrel, open at both ends, then, from the barrel, the boardwalk continued on where it ended with a slide. It was loved by all the children and at every playtime break, an orderly queue of children built up at the start of the steps.

One afternoon, while all the other children were heading to their respective classrooms, one group after another in an orderly fashion, our class were the last to return for lessons. Before this daily discipline began, I climbed into the barrel and hid inside, peering through the bunghole to where the supervisor stood. From within the barrel, I watched as the rest of my class had to line up against the wall. Nobody saw me hiding inside the barrel. I made sure that my arms and legs were fully inside. Thus, as the playground emptied, nobody knew that there was a boy hidden inside the beer barrel, watching everything from the bunghole and fearing whether the supervisor would suddenly march angrily straight to the apparatus! Fortunately, I was afterwards able to slip into class unnoticed.

By 1963, for the whole family sleeping in one bedroom was becoming beyond a joke for Mum and Dad. I had turned eleven, and my brother was four. As my father worked for the Post Office as a postman and Mum as a part-time cleaner, Dad was eventually promoted to a counter clerk. But he also informed his employer that he must live somewhere where we can have separate bedrooms. By December 1963, we moved from Pimlico to a two-bedroom semi-detached house in Bracknell in Berkshire, a provincial town some thirty miles west of Trafalgar Square in London.

At Fox Hill Juniors, somehow, I felt different from the rest of the class. Unlike at Wedgewood, all the kids there were white and English. As such, with an Italian background (even if I was legally British) I was relentlessly bullied. Yet, it took a long time before I started to cry, a move which seemed to have tempered the bullying somewhat. How I missed London! How I missed sitting in a classroom shared with a black boy and with another Italian. How I missed the cosmopolitan feel of the city!

At around 2-3 years old.

The next five years of normal schooling proved to be testing, and there was a feeling of rejection by my parents, having been compared unfavourably with the neighbour's children. The fact that I was placed in the slow learner's class, despite my good progress at the London primary, only added to the aggravation.

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NEXT WEEK: A car breaks down in France, a brush with death, and how a Spanish holiday proved my downfall.