When we returned to England Wendy was pregnant, and both boys were born while we were back in England, Mark Andrew on the 14th December 1967 and Alan Grant on the 15th January 1971. I had lots of family back there of course to help us!

This time we bought our own house and I worked at Fawley Refinery doing Cracker jobs. They'd keep us on their books for nine weeks with a couple of weeks on their books before doing the job. A Cracker breaks down the oil at different levels. They have one that's just burnt out, one just going to start, and one going. All the oil is drawn off at different levels. It cost forty-eight million to build a cracker. They would be made up before hand and we had to put them together, and we could make them up in forty-eight hours. It was an interesting job.

We would work up to twelve hours a day. After one of the Cracker jobs I managed to buy a brand new car. It cost only £670 pounds, a little Austin 1100. I brought it to New Zealand when we came back, kept it for a few years, and sold it for virtually what I'd paid for it. In 1964 when we first came we would have needed to have overseas funds to buy a car.

In summertime at weekends we would go out to different beaches and drives through the New Forest and further afield. We had a cat called Donny that loved water and we'd take him with us on a lead on a Sunday morning and find a little stream. He'd paddle up and down the stream trying to catch minnows. We also went on holiday to Clovelly, a lovely little village all cobblestones with just one street down to the village which you either walked or went on a donkey. They had sleighs that they used to use for carrying wheat and the children rode on the donkeys.

We briefly came back to New Zealand in 1971 when Alan was six months old, mainly because my mother-in-law was putting pressure on us, saying if we didn't come back within a certain time we wouldn't be able to get back to stay.

TRAVELLING BY SHIP

All our trips to and from England were made by ship in those days, taking five weeks to get there. I used to pack everything myself in boxes and big trunks made out of compressed cardboard, nothing too big so we could take it all on a trailer to the docks. We'd be packing for weekends beforehand, all the china and photo albums and small pieces of furniture.

In 1964 we left from Southampton on the Greek ship the Ellenis and went through the Suez Canal with hooters going all night because of the fog. At Piraeus we went ashore and saw the sights, including the Acropolis. Wendy was wearing trousers and the women kept coming up to her and pinching her because they disapproved of women wearing men's trousers. She had to go back to the boat and change. There was an Israeli boat and an Egyptian boat in at Suez, and they were firing shots, probably into the air, but we had to run and get to our boat and they pulled the boats away from the docks. It was scary. They closed the Suez Canal not long after that. We called at Aden, had eleven days at sea crossing the Indian Ocean, then visited Perth, Melbourne and Sydney before arriving at Auckland.

Three years later we went round the other way through Panama calling at Acapulco and Trinidad, and the next time we went round South Africa calling at Cape Town, so we have certainly circumnavigated the world! On our more recent trip it only took twenty-six hours to fly the distance, the same length of time it used to take us to get to my sister in New Brighton from Auckland going by train to Wellington and catching the ferry to Lyttleton! We stopped at Dubai on the first flight we took back at the time when there was a lot of highjacking of planes, and soldiers came on board with guns to check the plane.

We have always had pets: dogs, cats, rabbits, mice, budgies and even a marmoset. This monkey was brought back to England by Wendy's brother when he found it being maltreated and we had it for a while. We had to keep the room hot because the English cold was not good for it, and we used to feed it on mealworms. One day we came home from work and couldn't find the marmoset anywhere until finally we saw this tiny face with the big eyes watching us from the bag of mealworms - all covered in bran and mealworms! We had to give it to the vet in the end because it got rickets and needed constant treatment, and we used to go and visit it there.

Our dog Purdy we had for nearly 18 years, and our cat Donny that we used to take for walks in the New Forest we brought to New Zealand with us. It cost nearly as much as bringing the children and had to go into quarantine for six weeks and have a special cage for traveling, but after a few months here it went missing, and though we searched we found no trace, and the police thought she was probably stolen by a group operating at the time killing cats for their fur. She was a beautiful fluffy tortoiseshell.