The four Yorkshiremen did it tougher but not by much. As a kid in post-war Germany I didn't even have my own bed. Mine was one of those folding beds which I unfolded in the living room after the last one had gone to bed, and which I had to fold up as soon as the first one was up again.
I had my own room of sorts after I left those crammed quarters in my mid-teens. They were cheap rented rooms, often the least desirable in other people's houses, as I followed my work, first around Germany and then around the world. There was the six-berth cabin on my six-week voyage to Australia; the migrant hostel at Bonegilla; then a boarding-house in Canberra where I occupied a share-room because a share-room was cheaper; then company housing of various standards in New Guinea, including construction dongas on the huge Bougainville Copper Project; then the AIR NIUGINI mess hall in Moresby and a company house in Lae.
I thought I had reached the top in Honiara where I lived a gracious life in a big house on Lengakiki Ridge overlooking Honiara and the ocean beyond, all the way to Savo Island and Tulagi, but things got even better in Rangoon in Burma where I was the sole occupant of a rambling old colonial house with five domestic servants anticipating my every wish.
Then another company house in Moresby and another one on Thursday Island, followed by living in the TUSITALA Hotel in Apia before moving into the historical Eastern & Oriental Hotel on Penang's waterfront.
In Saudi Arabia it was back to just one room but a very big one in a five-star hotel with its own ensuite, followed by the same in the SAVOY Hotel in Piraeus in Greece, before I grew tired of hotel food and room service and demanded my own apartment overlooking the blue Aegean Sea.
Finally, back in Australia I moved into my own four-bedroom-with-ensuite house in Canberra, and then, in retirement, into this rambling big two-storey mansion at "Riverbend" which is far too big for just the two of us, and far too difficult to heat during the recent cold snaps.
The solution? Move into the smallest bedroom, kept as warm as toast by an electric oil heater, with a light to read my books by, a radio to listen to ABC Radio National, and the internet to keep in touch with the world.
I seem to have come full circle!
