McCoy's Guide

Chapter Three – University and finding my destiny

06/04/2019

Now once again a day boy at Sevenoaks, I set about getting into my father’s university college, Christ’s College, Cambridge and I took a scholarship exam to study Natural Sciences there, i.e. Physics and Chemistry. I did not do well enough to get a scholarship or an exhibition, but I was offered a place and naturally I accepted. There was now little point in staying on at Sevenoaks School, so I called it a day there at the end of the autumn term in December 1965 and made enquiries with one of the teachers there, as to whether there might be any coaching I could do of other students at Sevenoaks. Besides coaching one student there, this also led to me being offered work part time teaching at two other schools in the town, St. Thomas’s, a Catholic school for boys, a mile or so from my home and Sevenoaks Preparatory School, a school, located only a short walk from where I lived....123

Chapter Two – Washington D.C. & Boarding back in England

25/07/2018

Having taken and done well enough in my O Levels, I was expecting to move on to the sixth form, but instead my life took an unexpected turn when my father applied for and got a job at the British Embassy in Washington, D.C. Soon after the end of the summer term of 1962, we vacated our house in Sevenoaks, which was rented out on our behalf by local estate agents and then we set off to Southampton to board the Cunard liner “Queen Elizabeth” to cross the Atlantic to New York. The trip gave me my first introduction to Americans en masse, who made up the vast majority of the ship’s passengers and there were plenty of things to do onboard, making for a very enjoyable holiday. Most of the Americans, those from the northern states, a lot from New York itself, were easy enough to understand, but I will always remember being asked if I wanted to play a game of Ping Pong, i.e. table tennis by a young lad from Tennessee, whose Southern drawl was so pronounced, I had to get someone from New York to translate for me. One other thing I did was to learn how to play bridge, my parents being keen players and by the time we docked in New York, I had become familiar with the basics of the game......

Thursday November 23rd

26/11/2017

A day in Birmingham and the Black Country

Friday October 13th

14/10/2017

Not an unlucky day spent in Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire

Tuesday August 29th

30/08/2017

A day in Yorkshire

Wednesday August 23rd

24/08/2017

A day in Derbyshire

Monday August 7th

11/08/2017

A day in Stoke-on-Trent

Thursday July 27th

31/07/2017

A day spent in the Wirral

Thursday June 29th

30/06/2017

A day spent mainly in Bristol

Tuesday June 13th

14/06/2017

A day in Wellingborough, Sandy, Peterborough & Grantham