It's the dying days of World War Two, and a child is born during a dramatic air raid that badly damages the family home and destroys the midwife's bicycle.
At least, that's what George East's mother told him in later years.
But then she also claimed that the painting-by-numbers picture of a bunch of sunflowers in the passageway could be a preparatory sketch for the real thing by Vincent Van Gogh.
George's beloved but eccentric mother also claimed royal blood and that her ancestor and not Captain Hardy was the sailor Lord Nelson asked for a kiss as he lay dying on board HMS Victory.

In Just a Pompey Boy, best-selling author George East recalls growing up in Portsmouth directly after WWII, when fitted carpets, double glazing, central heating and TV celebrities would be seen as far-fetched science fantasy.
In a memoir that is funny, sad, heart-warming and always immensely readable, the author recalls a very different time to be young and alive in a characterful if war-battered city which was the Nation's premier naval base.
A time when bomb damages were literally adventure playgrounds, food rationing was still in force and post-traumatic stress and even the concept of Health and Safety regulations had yet to be invented.

As George remarks at the start of this first volume of his memoirs, the past has been said to be a foreign country;
to the young people of today, this tale of a distant but golden childhood may seem to be about life on a very distant planet...

After managing to leave school with no qualifications except a swimming certificate, George unintentionally set out on a record-breaking career path that included stints as a welder, plumber, brewer's drayman, baker's roundsman, night club bouncer and pickled onion manufacturer before finding his niche as the boss at one of the country's first commercial radio stations.
An unexpected (and undeserved) windfall meant the Easts could choose between paying off a fraction of their mortgage or buying a newer second-hand car.
Instead they went mad and bought a ruined farmhouse and water mill on ten acres of fields, forest, rivers and mud in Normandy.

George wrote about their adventures in finding, restoring and moving to live in The Mill of the Flea, and Home & Dry in France became the first in a best-selling series.

Nowadays, George and his long-suffering wife Donella are often to be found at their base on the Isle of Wight, which was, as they say, the closest they could get to France while living in the UK.
From there, the couple travel around Europe and write about their encounters with interesting people and places.

George also uses his wanderings as a basis for his series about an eccentric and very quirky private investigator called Jack Mowgley.
As Donella says, the central character can be child-like and even childish, illogical yet good-hearted and even loveable as he blunders around foreign lands while solving murder mysteries in his very unconventional way.
She adds that Jack Mowgley reminds her of someone she knows very well, but can't quite put a finger on...