What do you do when you say good bye to all your family and friends in the UK and retire to a strange country?
You find the local bridge club.
This is a heart warming and sometimes hilarious life story of a bridge addict who started playing at the age of nineteen when in the RAF in Hong Kong. His world travels and retirement to Spain which kicked started a whole new hectic social life.
The battle with bureaucracy, the language misunderstandings and the beautiful Spanish Senoritas. A whole new international mix of friends and the crazy lovely Spanish neighbours and a game of bridge now and then next to a pool under clear azure blue sunny skies.
Excerpt:
It all started in Hong Kong. I got posted to RAF Kai Tak on a hush hush mission to install some hush hush radar equipment on top of Tai Mo Shan, “The Lion Mountain” in Kowloon overlooking the Chinese border.
My first game of bridge coincided with the loss of my virginity at the age of nineteen, a spectacularly forgettable experience. As soon as we got off the aircraft we eventually found our way into the bar area of Kowloon. I was dripping with testosterone as we walked into the first bar and I didn’t get the chance to pick any beauty, I just ended up with the first one to grab me who had all the necessary equipment and I sat there like a lamb to the slaughter. Having blown my weeks wages I sat down in the NAAFI afterwards for a cup of tea when someone asked me and my mate Cyril to join them in a game of bridge.
Cyril, or John Cyril, Cy, Jake Campbelton was my mentor in life when we met having just signed on in the RAF in 1958 as apprentices at the Number One Radio School, RAF Locking, Weston Super Mare at the tender age of 16.
I always wanted to be a Spitfire pilot like my dad. I don’t know if he ever flew Spitfires though. He was a pilot in the RAF. He was also in the Army in the First World War lying about his age and having had the benefit of a public school education at Charterhouse, was commissioned and ended up in Palestine in the Royal Household Artillery. After the war he ended up in the South African mounted police force in Rhodesia. He then joined the Royal Flying Corps and “pranged” an old SE9 biplane made of canvas and string.
This caused a problem with his hip so instead of front line flying he ended up training pilots and by the end of the Second World War was a Wing Commander in charge of Flying Training Canada part of the Empire Training Scheme organisation.
That’s where I made my entrance in 1942 and was christened in Ontario in the Mohawk country by an RAF Chaplain with a sense of humour who gave me the full title of Patrick Gershom Little Mohawk O’Farrell. But the Indian connotation was not entered into the official records. The Gershom bit had biblical connotations, being Moses’ son and mentioned in Genesis and Exodus as “a stranger in a strange land” which pretty much described my life to a tee.
Dad’s full title was Gershom Frederick Parkington O’Farrell but was called Talbot? The family name was previously Farrell but Dad met an old Auntie of his who had a painting of one of our ancestors, a Captain in the Irish Medical Corps in the 17th century named O’Farrell and offered it to him on the understanding that he changed our name back.
Now his Dad John (Joshua)Edward Farrell born in 1868 was a pilot as well but a sea captain sailing out of Shanghai and Hong Kong where my Dad was born. Now his Dad Samuel, was born in 1811 He was born in Guernsey and a confidante of Victor Hugo in the 1860’s, a seafaring man was a font of knowledge to Hugo about all manner of information useful in his writing. Apparently, Farrell drove Hugo and his visitors around the island in his carriage. He was a Channel Island Master Mariner of note having captained the Golden Spur, one of the most famous sailing ships to sail the Channel Islands waters and overseas. Built in a local shipyard in 1864 and the largest vessel of its kind, it was one of the earliest British vessels to be rigged with double topsails.
The Golden Spur made many trading voyages in the Far East and was finally wrecked near Haiphong in 1879 when a tug let go of a tow rope. Samuel Edward Farrell himself died in 1891 when as Master of the British steamship the Florence alongside his son William, a member of the ship’s crew, the vessel was lost at sea.
I capsized a dinghy in the Milton Keynes sailing club pond once.
