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| | | | | | PICTURE GALLERY | | | | | | 
Ian in his childhood
On stage at the Little Theatre, Brighton
Ian's Parents around the time of his birth
Ian as Living History character
(in the kettle-hat)
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Childhood
Born Victoria Hospital, Woking, for three years I was an only child – till my brother and later my sister (Julie) came on the scene (brother would have preferred a rabbit). Earliest memories seem to be of running around with cowboy hat & six-gun outside the caravan in which we lived.
We seemed to have a lot of family back then: all four grandparents, Great-granny and Granddad Bonner; he looking like something out of an Edwardian photo, with big cap and waistcoat on at all times. According to family lore we were "settled" gypsies, and Gran was the first of that side of the family to live in a house.
Days out or holidays meant picking winkles and eating them with a pin at the Witterings or playing in the muddy potholes of the dirt road outside wooden, spider-filled chalets at Hayling Island.
Even once we got into a house of our own we were not well-off (no car, no phone, an outside loo, a tin bath on the wall and no heating - which meant ice on the inside of the windows and getting dressed in bed to keep warm) but as kids we seemed to lack for nothing. I suppose we were working class but as there were no politics in our part of the world "badges" like that were meaningless
Read more here
Work
Since fifteen I had been working Saturdays, holidays & evenings. I had also done odd-jobs for a local land surveying company cleaning curtains & gardening, so when I left school I started there as a Trainee Surveyor.
By my early twenties I had worked all over the country. Work was occasionally odd. (My first day of site work: lunch was three pints of bitter – no food, just beer – then clambering round on tin roofs at an urban farm, where they smashed old car batteries. At RAF Leuchers I was introduced to the use of dowsing rods).
Overseas work was a bit "Boys’ Own." Nigeria, where, at nineteen, on my third day in the country, I was dropped off in the jungle, alone with a team of "cutlass" wielding locals and a compass - and told to cut a line along a bearing.
Other jobs followed and then the offer of two weeks temporary work in a wet November led me to a ten year stretch at our local council running an enforcement/licensing team where I am now. Read more here.
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