Anything But Ordinary

In the summer of 1942, as flying bombs fell on Kent, David Dowell was born to replace a daughter his parents had lost — and then spent the next eighty years being anything but a replacement. Anything But Ordinary is the warm, funny and unflinchingly honest memoir of a boy from a Kentish police house who was never going to sit still. Raised on bath nights and broken biscuits by an Irish mother who worked miracles and a Yorkshire father who simply provided, David grew up in an austerity Britain of tin baths, trolley buses, doodlebugs and free-range boyhood — one of four brothers under five, with one bicycle between them and a whole world to get into trouble with. From caddying for Ryder Cup golfer Sam King at Knole, to a Merchant Navy voyage that sailed straight into the Cuban Missile Crisis, to building a roofing empire from two pickup trucks, to sixty journeys carrying aid into earthquake-struck, war-torn Armenia — his is a life that flatly refused to be ordinary. And running through all of it, Felicity: the girl at the office window who became fifty-eight years of marriage. Told entirely in David's own voice — dry, opinionated, and quick to laugh at himself — and woven through with the real history of the times he lived in, this is a keepsake of a vanished Britain and a life lived at full tilt. Book One of two. A story for anyone who remembers when children made their own fun — and for anyone who wishes they had.