Something about me ....cont
Rebuilding my life
In the following year I struggled on the grim edge of raw survival. My sister and her husband came to look after the kids for a long weekend and give me a break. So I borrowed Richards's (my brother-in-law) XR3 and motored down to Charmouth at speeds rarely below the legal limit. Found a campsite, set up my tent, and found a pub.
Propping up the bar was Peter Langham. After the first couple of drinks we went off in search of Stuart, who by this time was in business with Peter collecting and selling fossils. Found him, and Bob Maurer in another pub, and the evening took its natural, alcoholic course.
The next day, feeling grey and wan, I joined Stuart, Peter and Bob on a trip to Kimmeridge. We found a dinosaur. A good day.
Stuart got married, much to my surprise.
Stuart
Heather, Stuarts mother, phoned me with bad news. Stuart was dead. I went down to Charmouth for the funeral, a tragic affair. Stuart had been worried about his weight, and had gone jogging. Being a bit embarrassed by it all, and not wanting to be recognised, he went out at night, dressed in a dark tracksuit. He was hit by a car and killed. The whole collecting community was shocked to the core. Stuart was liked and respected, and his death, following so soon after his marriage was a devastating blow to many people.
What was he like?
Bob Maurer described him well at his funeral. He called him ' a great bear of a man'.
Stuart and I once borrowed his mothers' mini to drive up to Yorkshire for a few days. On the way up we had a puncture. No jack. So Stuart lifted up the front of the car while I changed the wheel.
My mother always said that he had the face of a Botticelli angel - very Italian, in a blond Renaissance way. The trouble was, he cared nothing for looks. His clothes were usually torn by rocks,. He had the potential of being a fine athlete, but cared little for competition. He loved his fossils, the excitement of discovery, the wonder of being the first to see the relic of a creature that died a hundred million years ago or more.
Kettleness
Time passed, as it tends to do when you don't watch it carefully. I was working as an Architect for a practice in St Albans, and it was the peak of the boom of the 1980's. People though that property prices were going to double every year for ever, and would never fall. I was working on nine projects are the same time. I built office blocks, housing and leisure centres. It was hard work. It was exciting. It was fun.
I remarried.
We had six children between us. The boom was slowing, and I thought that it was going to collapse in the South-East. We decided to move north.
I found a job in Nottingham.
Our daughter was born just before we moved into a huge Victorian house in Radcliffe-on-Trent.
The boom of the 1980's faded into the bust of the 1990's, and I was made redundant. I was out of work for two years.
I was fed up, frustrated, angry and worn out by rejection. So I drove up to Kettleness, and found an ichthyosaur. This time I prepared it myself. Missing the head, but a more or less complete vertebral column. It cheered me up considerably.
Dave Martill
I wanted to use some of the excessive spare time I had. The was an evening class on British Fossils in our local pub. It was run by someone I'd never heard of, Dr David Martill. I was in that in-between stage of development as a palaeontologist , in which I knew more than most people, but had not yet realised the depth of my ignorance. Dave put me right. He has a great ability to communicate his own enthusiasm for the subject, and helped me put a lot of the fragmentary scraps of detailed knowledge I had collected over the years into a wider context. Things made more sense - the dots were being joined up, and a picture was starting to emerge.