Andrew Darling

I was born in South Devon in 1948, the son of a peripatetic piano-maker who walked the roads of the West Country, knocking on farmhouse doors, and offering to repair pianos (this was in the days when the only entertainment in most homes was a piano and a wireless).

I was five when my father decided he had exhausted Devonshire. We got on a Royal Blue coach and ended up in Penzance. My father found us rooms in Marazion, and I went to Marazion Primary School. Later we rented the oldest cottage in Rosudgeon. Still without a car, my father walked all over the Penwith peninsula in search of broken pianos, while I caught the bus to Penzance Grammar School for Boys. When he finally earned enough money to buy a car, it was a pre-war Morris 8, through the floor of which you could see the tarmac unfolding at a hair-raising 30mph beneath our feet.. My sister and I used to hide in the back so our friends in Marazion couldn't see us.

On Saturdays and in school holidays I worked (unpaid) in the reporters' room at The Cornishman, learning how to type with two fingers, gathering the results of the Western Hunt gymkhana and the Trengwainton Speed Hill Climb. I went to Cornwall Technical College to find out how to type properly and write shorthand, and then wrote to newspaper editors all over Britain pleading for a job. I was offered, and accepted a place as a trainee reporter in Kent, just as The Cornishman was about to discover (too late, unfortunately, for me) that it could afford to take on a trainee.

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