I met my first wife in the unlikely environs of Marsham Street, London.

Mary's father went to the same school as my father, and her mother went to the same school as my mother.  As if that was not enough coincidence, her name and her three sisters' were Josephine Mary Elizabeth Catherine - and my mother's initials are JMEC.



I married Mary in 1980.  For seventeen years I do not think we ever had a cross word between us.  We had three children (Philip, Michael and Sarah), for whom I wrote the Within Trilogy and Spooky Stories To Read Aloud.