Photographer bitten by travel bug from frequent upheaval

My father was in the Royal Air Force so we were always on the move and I attended 14 different schools. Though my brother was sent to boarding school when he was eight, I was shipped from school to school and sadly, on some occasions, I was in one school for as little as a month but more usually one term.

It got to the point where my mother would say: 'Well dear, I don't think it's really worth buying a school uniform.' Of course I stuck out like a sore thumb standing around in my previous school's uniform.

Some people would have found all that moving too distracting and, at times, I was hardly in one place long enough to make friends. But I was always chatty and quite sociable without being pushy and that helped a bit.

One of my father's postings must have been on a very remote RAF station, I cannot remember where exactly. Because there were no [formal] schools nearby, I had a kind of governess who was so deaf I had to shout down a long tube so she could hear me.

I was not particularly good at maths but I could do mental arithmetic. When I was about 10 years old I was at Norwich High School and there, if you were considered up to scratch, you could go into the headmistress' study and be grilled and end up with a [multiplication] tables championship badge. I can picture it now; it was dark green corduroy with a silver star on it.

In one school we learned a few spellings each day, a skill which I think is important and now find useful in my writing. People today don't bother about [correct spelling] at all and argue, what with texting and spellchecks, that it doesn't matter.

Before my photography career took off I used to mark biology [exam] papers and we were told not to deduct marks for bad spelling. It was at the time the Beatles were very popular, and that's how the students spelt the insect every time.