Author Terry nearly worked for Observer

It was however an opportunity he was not allowed to take advantage of as his family then moved to Somerset and Terry began work in a hotel.

He never did break into journalism but wrote all his life anyway, for his own amusement, about the adventures and real-life dramas which continued to come his way.

As a result, Terry is now the author of two books - the first is called Jackanapes - The Artful Dodger And The Hero Of The Forlorn Hope, and the second is The Levelling Dust.

Terry’s own memories as a village boy attending Bexhill Down Technical School no doubt provided much material for his novels which are available on YouWriteOn Publishing, a British Arts Council organisation.

He said: “My father, being a farm labourer with very itchy feet, meant that along with my four brothers, I attended many different schools between the years 1946 and 1956; they read like a list of villages out of Cobbets Rural Rides... Wickhambreaux, Hale Street, Eastling, Rotherfield, Jarvis Brook, White Hill, Hartfield, Edenbridge and Crowborough, to name but a few.

“Sometime, late in 1954, I found myself living in a bungalow on the Etchingham Road in the village of Hurst Green, and travelling on the notorious, mixed-sex “school train” that ran unsupervised from Etchingham to Bexhill West, feeding Bexhill’s senior schools.

“I say ‘notorious’ because the naive powers-that-be who devised the scheme must have had a rose-tinted view of the children aged between 12 and 16. Peterkin types out of Ballantyne’s The Coral Island were thin on the ground. The Lord of the Flies bully boys from Robertsbridge and Battle held sway.

“My old school friend, Ron Reeves, with whom I am still in touch, recalls that I would sit in the corner of a railway carriage, scribbling my latest story into an exercise book with chaos breaking out all around...

“I may have saved a boy’s life! One morning, with the train negotiating Mountfield Tunnel, an abused and humiliated boy opened the carriage door and attempted to jump out.

“Sitting in my usual corner seat, I pulled him to the floor, and taking hold of the doorstrap, slammed the door shut. Unfortunately, the thumb of my other hand was in the door jamb - and the resultant damage to it is still faintly visible today! Apart from the school nurse wanting to know what had happened, and receiving the short replay that ‘I slammed a door on it’, the incident went unremarked and unrecorded, as did the groping of schoolgirls and other things beyond the pale on that train.”

Terry’s friends at that time included Barry Dicks, who lived in St James Crescent in Sidley, and he also remembers John Cornish, whose father was a maths teacher at Bexhill Down tech, Neil Holland, for his sporting prowess, and Peter Garland, among others.

“I was in my 15th year when that beacon of hope, my English master, Mr Barnes, arranged a job interview for me with the editor of the Bexhill Observer. After looking at some of my written work, that gentleman agreed to employ me as a trainee reporter when I reached my 16th birthday. Before the auspicious date arrived, however, my father had whisked his family, me included, off to Somerset. Bitterly disappointed, I ran away from home, and, in order to have an income and a roof over my head, took a job as a ‘live-in’ skivvy in a hotel.”

Terry, who these days lives in Rochester, wrote his first book based on the Charles Dickens character Jack Dawkins, after the execution of Fagin.

He claims the book has already won “high praise” from descendant Gerald Dickens as well as from other sources including members of the Dickens Fellowhship.

His second novel is set in the 1950s and tells the tale of two brothers who are thrown apart by tragedy to follow different paths.

Both novels are available through bookshops and Amazon, while those wanting to buy signed copies of either Jackanapes (ISBN 978-1-907986-04-8-90000) or the Levelling Dust (ISBN 978-1-907986-02-4-90000) can contact him directly at [email protected]