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August 1952, I was still cycling and went on holiday to my relatives in Tisbury, near Salisbury, and on a Saturday morning, I cycled the eighty-four miles back to Windsor and ran in the one mile at the Agars Plough Carnival in Slough in the afternoon. A meeting that I was to return to many times and enjoy. I won with a time of 4:29.6, one of the fastest times by a sixteen-year-old in those days.
    Before setting out into my career, I joined the first party of young people from Windsor to go on an exchange trip with Goslar in the Hertz Mountains near Hanover in Germany. This was Windsor’s new twin town, and we all had some brief lessons in the German language before we went on what, for many including myself, was a first-ever trip overseas.
    We travelled by sea from Harwich and then across Germany by train, and as this was only seven years after the war; the devastation was still obvious.
    While in Goslar, we went to a nearby running track where I ran what was to be my first ‘international race’. The best senior athlete from the local club was given the privilege of running against this young sixteen-year-old from Windsor over 3,000 metres. I won this first international challenge in my running career.
    One of our trips was to take us down a mine; my first but not last experience of this activity. I remember some of the tunnels were very low and they were extremely wet.
    Not all went well on this trip though, as we were taken on a sightseeing tour near to the East German border. After returning to our hosts later that day, I realised I had lost my passport. This caused a few sparks, because passports were highly valued in the East of Germany. However after much panic, the passport was recovered and returned to me, although I cannot remember exactly where it was found.
    The daughter of the family I stayed with, really did try to get her hands on me in more ways than one, but I resisted, as there were more attractive girls in our party. She did however get close to the family, when she eventually met my cousin while he was serving in the Educational Corps in Germany, and they eventually got married.

Chapter Three: The Start of Ten Years in Uniform
    I made up my mind, long before leaving school, that I wanted to be a policeman. I think it was the adverts for Hong Kong Police and £1,000 a year that attracted me, but on my return from Germany, I joined the Berkshire Constabulary as a police cadet at Windsor. One of the first three in the county, and an interesting time.
    There were no radio communications at the time, and I remember receiving instruction in 1953 when the first radio was placed in the Windsor Police Station. I received one of the first messages over the airwaves. Not that top brass trusted this new method of communication. Many messages were still transmitted via the teleprinter and the telephone, so that a stolen car or missing person details could be received in triplicate. It took sometime for the powers that be to accept one method of receiving urgent messages.
    The first police dogs were recruited about the same time, and a little later the police frogmen team was formed in the Berkshire Police.
    I was present in uniform for the second royal funeral in a year; that of Queen Mary; and by coincidence I was placed at the foot of the steps of the Parish Church where I had been as a civilian one year earlier.
    I had an interesting two years as a police cadet. Duties were wide and various, and included going over the road to a working men’s cafe to buy meals for prisoners being held in the station cells; also cleaning the cells, running errands for the superintendent and working in both the general office and admin office. My errands used to include getting on my bike and going into the park to collect a brace of pheasants for the ‘Super’; a gift from the royal estate. I also collected occasional bottles of whisky from a local off-licence that had parking restrictions outside its