Portsmouth U.K. was not the best place to be born in 1943. There was a war on. My father was at sea, having survived an earlier torpedo attack on the destroyer, HMS Somali, that killed 82 members of the crew. Somali had just delivered Convoy QP14 safely to Russia, on what was called the Murmansk Run. Naval conflict in the North Atlantic has been described as the longest-running battle of the war. Less than a year later, Mother was killed. I was four months old.

Dug at the end of their garden, my grandparents’ air-raid shelter was as much my first home as their house for about a year. There, firmly underground, my nanny, Kate Bryan, sang Welsh hymns to me, drowning the din of bombs and ack-ack. My nanny? No, we were not wealthy. It was a Royal Navy lorry that collided with my mother on Portsmouth High Street. The Navy supplied our family with Ms. Bryan, a wonderful woman.

Maybe those Welsh hymns gave me a musical start. Aged eight, I won a choral scholarship to the choir of Salisbury Cathedral. Five years there gave me a Taoist/Animist persona and a great, if odd, education.

Next, Canford School in Wimborne, Dorset. Then Geology and Earth Sciences at the University of Bristol.

In 1965, Carol Burtin married me at her home in Stony Point, New York. After that, life in North America. As I write this, we are months away from 60 years of wedded bliss. Much of that time spent in Toronto.

CBC Television in Toronto gave me 15 years of ‘on locations’ across Canada, producing agricultural programs for Country Canada, big stories from tiny Canadian places for This Land, and Cities on the Sea for Current Affairs. Then, in my final decade at CBC-TV, I served as the series producer for its flagship public affairs series, The Fifth Estate.

Later I set up and managed ‘IBM Visions’ magazine on high-performance research computing. Simultaneously, Japanese public broadcaster NHK retained me to re-edit and re-write Japanese science and wildlife films. NHK needed more competitive products to sell in English-language markets.

Medieval influences touch my fiction: Eleanor of Aquitaine dictates her long life’s memoirs in Power of a Woman. On the other hand, studying earth sciences has helped me write copy for clients about science and technology.

I wrote Dark Sovereign in Tudor English, the period in which Shakespeare and contemporaries gave renaissance force to English literature. Dark Sovereign‘s text is true to the English of 1626. It may be the longest Tudor English play.

Forty short stories in two books, Wessex Tales, Vols 1 and 2, cover ‘Eight thousand years in the life of an English village‘.

One hopes that publicising the Thermospot device may have helped reduce the death-rate among newborns in disadvantaged communities. For more data, contact me. For supplies, contact Meg Wirth at info@maternova.net .

LinkedIn tells you more than you want to know about ‘Robert S.P. Fripp’. My Twitter site? @RSPFripp .

Reader, may your Fates be kind to you and yours. / Robert