My father, Jim, was from Sheffield in the North of England, his father was Scottish, his mother was of Irish descent and they ran a pub together in the centre of Sheffield. My mother, Britt-Inger, was from Kristianstad in the South of Sweden, they had met in London where my father was an art student/cook/skiffle musician and my mother was an au pair/nurse. They married not long after meeting, and my mother got quite a shock the first time she saw the Industrial North, Sheffield was a maze of terraced houses wreathed in smoke in those days. My father was severely epileptic and lost his driving licence when he crashed his sports-car with my pregnant mother in it - cheers Dad! He often complained that his non-epileptic brother Bobby got all the advantages in life.
I was born on New Year's Day 1960 in Sheffield, I was to remain an only child, apparently due to the clumsy work of the nuns at the private hospital where I was born. At first we were living above my grandparents' pub, until my mum delivered an ultimatum to my dad by taking me to my grandparents' in Sweden until he got us a house. Six months later we were in a small semi-detached house in Sheffield surrounded by other 'young marrieds', my father was working as a hardware salesman in a department store.
Every summer me and my mother would travel to Sweden for several months, my father joining us for a couple of weeks if he could. My Swedish grandfather died when I was about 3, he'd had cataracts which needed some seriously nasty surgery at that time, between one eye operation and the next he drank himself into a heart attack.
I started Infant School at 5 and then Junior School at 7. It was a small, grim, black, stone building, as were most buildings at that time in Sheffield. I don't remember much from that time, I know I was a bit of a geeky kid, bright and awkward, tall, blonde, blue-eyed and probably a target for bullies because of that. I remember long, happy, sunny summers in Sweden, starting to speak a little Swedish, not believing in God, being fascinated by stars, seeing the Rolling Stones doing 'Brown Sugar' on TV, fancying Judy, the girl next door and being glued to the screen during the moon landings.
In 1969, when I was 9, we won £32,000 on the football pools, which was one hell of a lot of money at the time. There was a small photo of us in the local paper, but we made the front page in the south of Sweden - 'Local girl wins half a million!'. The money got us a large bungalow in a 'posh' part of Sheffield, and my father starting running a shop in nearby Chesterfield with a partner. I started at the modern local Junior School, on my first day I was introduced to the class and was sat down next to Miles, a Thalidomide boy with flippers and no arms. I was only there for about 6 months before it was time to start at the big Comprehensive School, I'd hardly had time to settle in at the last school and felt really out of place. The school had been formed from a boy's school, a girl's school, and a large private house. The girl's school (good Domestic Science rooms) had become the Lower School for years one to three, the boy's school (good Metalwork rooms) had become the Upper School for years four and five, whilst the house (complete with croquet lawn) was home to the Sixth Form.
I hated being in uniform and in a big school, so I spent as little time there and as much off as possible. Their idea of P.E. was for you to go cross-country running for an hour and a half in the rain, seems like every time this happened I was off with a cold for a week after, until my over-protective hypochondriac mother started writing me notes. Not suprisingly my schoolwork suffered, I still liked maths, English and the sciences, but I hated school and nothing seemed to be taught with any enthusiasm. I think I was 12 when a Maths teacher at school started the Computer Club, the first lunchtime there must've been 20 or 30 there, after that number was soon down to 3 or 4. Even though the teacher was painfully dull, I was hooked. The only thing I can ever remember wanting to be before that was a pop singer or an astronaut, and this was pretty damned close to one of them anyway! It started off with just some very simple code that was then transferred to Sheffield University's huge computer, resulting in scraps of printout - 'Oooh look! Pi to 5 decimal places!' and lead eventually to being able to play on terminals actually at the University itself.
Meanwhile problems with my dad's shop (which he now ran alone) had lead to him hitting the bottle, he seemed to have changed from a hip young man to a self-pitying scruffy drunk with a cigarette always hanging out of his mouth. One day he rolled home with a broken jaw, it turns out the husband of the woman he was seeing on the side (a friend of my mum's) had finally put two and two together. They had set up a 'love nest' in a place that was supposed to be used as storage for the shop, Things of mine that had 'gone missing' were amongst the items used to decorate it. I can remember my father giving away toys of mine to my cousins when they visited, telling customers that he could get stuff for a certain date when he knew he couldn't, coming up with ridiculous excuses, and then sending the stuff round to them by taxi. I just had so much contempt for the man's self-pitying cowardice and lack of honesty. Apparently, when he was a kid, his aunt and uncle had come into money, my grandparent's had ignored their advice of which shares to buy and missed out on the chance to get quite seriously rich. The aunt and uncle gave them some shares which they cashed in and kept in a safe in the house, whenever they wanted something it was just a case of getting the cash from the safe. This is what my father had grown up with - any problem, just get the cash from the safe. After we won the pools it was the same, it was as if the money had no value, taxis were sent to fetch take-away meals, things like that.